Danah Henriksen and I recently edited a special issue of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education (Volume 23, Number 3, July 2015) devoted to Creativity, Technology and Teacher Education (see blog post here). This special issue has now been issued as an eBook...
Image credit: tshirtgifter.com The next article in our series (Rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century) for the journal Tech Trends is now available online. This article has an interview with Dr. Shakuntala Banaji, currently Associate Professor and...
Theoretically there should a reciprocal relationship between Theory and Practice - but it is the gap that every academic bemoans. This posting is prompted not by any particular insight into these matters but rather to share a set of visuals (ambigrams, memes,...
My Good-Evil oscillation ambigram design is easily one of my most popular designs - having made it to multiple publications, websites, covers of magazines, on the TV Show Brain Games... and now it has made its way into a medical research journal Frontiers of...
Graduate school can be a grind. Academia can be dull and dreary. But not if poetry and parody are brought into the mix. This is a volume of academic poetry titled Momentary Lapis Lazuli of Reason: Academia for better or verse. The poems in this volume are...
The Engaged Scholar is a magazine published by MSU's Office of University Outreach and Engagement with the goal of celebrating "Michigan State University's ongoing partnership with Michigan, our nation, and our world." I just got the 10th anniversary issue in the...
The Deep-Play research group started as an informal group of faculty and graduate students at Michigan State University, mostly my advisees. It has now grown to include Arizona State University and a couple of people there. Of course my advisees...
Since 2009, our family has been creating videos to welcome the new year. The videos are typically typographical in nature, sometimes including a visual illusion or some kind or the other. So as usual, we have a video for welcome 2016. Shot on our dining...
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I wake up every day just feeling incredibly lucky for what I have - and to have a special day devoted to celebrating that idea... how very cool. So here are two new and unique ambigram designs to celebrate this wonderful day. The...
A design for Friday the 13th (shamelessly building on an original idea from Nikita Prokhorov) Enjoy.
Why do anything at all? This blog post is a collection of videos and images that I have collected over time that speak to the pointlessness of trying to find an answer to this question and how one question, even if answered, leads to many more. This is the kind of...
Over the past two years Gaurav Bhatnagar and I have written five columns for the Math education journal At Right Angles on the topics of mathematics and visual wordplay, specifically Ambigrams. In this five articles we have explored everything from symmetry to...
The summer of 2015, there were 133 students and instructors in the hybrid and overseas components of the MAET program. These people were spread out across three locations: East Lansing, MI (with 2 cohorts, Yr1 and 2 of MAET); Chicago, IL (with 2 cohorts of the...
Over the past couple of years my research team (the Deep-Play Research group) and I have been writing an on-going series of articles about rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century. Published in the journal TechTrends, these articles have been great...
I was recently interviewed by the journal Educational Technology: The magazine for managers of change in education as a part of their series Q & A with Ed Tech Leaders. The interviews are conducted by contributing editors, Susan M. Fulgham and Michael F....
I have always loved paradoxes so it is with great pleasure that the fourth article in our series on Art and Math (co-authored with my friend Gaurav Bhatnagar and published by At Right Angles) focuses on paradoxes and visual wordplay. It was great fun coming up with a...
An amazing presentation by Manjul Bhargava (Fields medal winner in Mathematics) to school children in India. See how he effortlessly combines poetry, nature, music and mathematics. Watch an excerpt on YouTube below or the complete video here....
I am a huge fan of Stateside with Cynthia Canty, a radio show on Michigan Radio. So imagine my excitement when I was interviewed by her about my ongoing exhibition (Deep-Play: Creativity in Math & Art through Visual Wordplay) at the MSU Museum. The interview was...
I have been creating ambigrams for years now... and I feel extremely lucky that what started as a personal interest and passion has led to some wonderful experiences and learning. These include a series of articles on the mathematics behind these visual designs and...
Every winter break (for the past six years) our family creates a video to welcome the new year. This is no ordinary video. It requires days of discussion, planning, construction, shooting, and editing. Our videos never feature us (expect maybe a still-shot of the...
Yesterday was International Coffee Day. In celebration (one day late but hey... ) here is a new ambigram for coffee. Enjoy.
Ten years ago I participated in my first formal race. It was the 2004 Capital City River Run and back then it was a 10 mile run. Today (September 20, 2014), I ran my 11th race, the 2014 Capital City River Run - now a half marathon. It has been a decade of running. In...
I have shared earlier a design for a reflection ambigram for the two words "praise" and "blame" - where one word becomes another when reflected in a mirror. In fact the design has been printed in 3D. As it turns out this was a design that I had made many years ago -...
First it was Lewis Carroll and Jabberwocky and now it is Robert Frost and his poem Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening that receives the EPET treatment. Here is poem #2 in our series of famous poems rewritten from a graduate school perspective. Thanks to Diana...
I love creating ambigrams, words written in such a manner that they can be read from multiple perspective - rotated, reflected and so on. These designs are much easier to "grasp" when printed on paper since you can actually turn the paper around, hold it against a...
The 5th floor of Erickson Hall is a fun place to be. Typically a bunch of graduate students hang out there, working on their readings, talking shop and in general having a good time. For some reason, last week, I promised Josh Rosenberg that I would write a poem for...
September 5 is Teacher's Day in India. It is celebrated on the birthdate of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian philosopher and statesman who was also the first Vice-President and the second President of India. He famously said, "teachers should be the best minds in the...
We dropped off my eldest at the University of Michigan today. He begins the next stage of his life. We couldn't be more excited. Here is a new ambigram design to mark this occasion. Soham whichever way you look at it, with UMich colors! Mouseover the image to rotate...
Picasso famously said, "Art is a lie that tells the truth." This design below is my attempt to represent this quote - at least the first part of the quote. Of course, as most things go, it is not clear whether Picasso ever actually said these specific words. But...
My friend Hartosh Bal (author of A Certain Ambiguity, a mathematical novel) has a piece in Caravan Magazine titled "Why Fields medalists are unlikely to emerge from the Indian educational system." He mentions the fact that of the three winners of the Field's medal...