I was recently invited to conduct a workshop for the Celebration of Teaching Conference at the University of Missouri around Creativity in Teaching and Learning. This was my first time at Columbia, MO and the conference organizers were wonderful. I did two versions of...
The journey of design is complicated, filled with conundrums —some expected, others not so much. There are many possible strategies to address them as we iterate our way to the finish line. The School Design Game seeks to explore some of these complexities...
I have always been intrigued by the nature and role of the aesthetic experience in learning. A few members of the Deep-Play research group have been exploring this issue for a while (for instance we have written on, why science teachers should care about beauty in...
I have written previously about the MSUrbanSTEM project and what it has meant to me. Over the past couple of years we have also published about this line of work (most prominently in a special issue of The Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching)....
The Gary K. Herberger Young Scholars Academy (HYSA) is a school designed for highly gifted students in grades 7-12 affiliated with the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and Arizona State University. Last Friday I had the pleasure and honor of working with all the...
I love collecting quotations—usually related to learning, design, and creativity. Over the past couple of years I started trying to visualize these quotations, playing with type and image, to tease apart their meanings, sometimes to undermine, sometimes to enhance. I...
A design for the word "illusions" inspired by a design by Scott Kim. I have been obsessed with optical illusions for for a long time. This interest has played out in many ways: from the hundreds of ambigrams I have created to the new year’s videos we create as a...
Illustration for Group-Creativity by Punya Mishra The next article in our series Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century just got published by the journal TechTrends. This article features an interview with Dr. Roni...
3.14 looked in a mirror and guess what he saw? Happy Pi(e) day.
Making connections between the movie The Prestige, and the design of 2 activities to build trust and a shared vision in teams... As I have settled down at ASU and the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, my responsibilities have grown as well. I started as...
For the past 17 years (with just two exceptions) my summers have been spent teaching in the MAET program. 2016 was the last time I did that, teaching in Chicago the third cohort of the MSUrbanSTEM project. The MAET program runs somewhat concurrently in three...
I have always been intrigued by the manner in which everyday ideas get "mathematicized" (if that's a word). For instance, the other day, on a bus-stop by my office I noticed an equation written on the wall. I have no idea why it was there, but...
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...
Paris has been on my mind for the last 24 hours (as it has been for many others around the world). I have been lucky to have had the opportunity to spend some time in the city - and Paris is one of my favorite places in the world. Paris, anyway you look at it (a new...
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 around the broad topic of Rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century. Published in the journal TechTrends, these...
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...
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...
I am a huge fan of the show Brain Games on the National Geographic channel. Brain Games focuses on the workings of the brain and the reasons we do what we do. The show is quite creative about how they explain ideas, using a range of techniques games, visual illusions...
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 -...
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...
Vijay Iyer, (http://vijay-iyer.com/) is an Indian-American jazz pianist and composer. He is a MacArthur Genius grant winner and is currently Franklin and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University and is widely regarded as being one of...
Self-similarity in geometry is the idea of repeating a similar shape (often at a different scale) over and over again. In other words, a self-similar image contains copies of itself at smaller and smaller scales, such as the image below of the word "zoom."...
I just read of the sad demise of Nalini Ambady, social psychologist at Stanford. Her research on the accuracy of first impressions connected with me (from the moment I first glimpsed it). As the NYTimes reports (Nalini Ambady, Psychologist of Intuition, Is Dead at 54)...
I just discovered that Learning & Leading with Technology had an article, back in 2010, about the TPACK game. The TPACK game is something Matt, Judi Harris and I had come up with for the National Technology Leadership Summit in Washington DC, back in 2007. Matt...
TCRecord has an interesting essay on the role of games and learning, by Alexander, Eaton & Egan, titled: Cracking the code of electronic games: Some lessons for educators. As they say, "This is an analytic article that provides a description of an array of...
Over the Christmas break my daughter and three of her friends got together to make a music video. The idea was simple, what if there were a version of Guita Hero (Sitar Hero anyone?) for Bollywood songs. Out of this idea emerged a 5+ minute long music video - with a...
To understand the significance of April 2, 2011, I have to go back 28 years, back to the summer of 1983. I had just finished 10th grade, and that summer I took a trip to the hills of North India, as a part of a social work volunteer effort. I remember sleeping on the...
Back in January I was invited to speak at the Drexel Learning Games Network (DGLN) seminar series. As I had written in my original post (TPACK & Games @ Drexel), DLGN is the brainchild of Aroutis Foster, former graduate student, now rising star academic and...
I am headed to Drexel University to give a talk at the Drexel Learning Games Network seminar series. The DLGN is the brainchild of Aroutis Foster, former graduate student, now rising star academic and researcher. As the DLGN website says The Drexel Learning Games...