This past December I was at the epiSTEME 6 conference in Mumbai. It was jointly organized by the Homi Bhaba Center for Science Education, TIFR and the Interdisciplinary Program in Educational Technology, IIT Bombay. I presented two papers there, oneabout...
After I had posted my "Paris, City of Love" design on FB, my friend Pilar Quezzaire posted on my wall the following question: What about Beirut and Nairobi, Punya? Can you make one for them as well? In another posting she linked to the...
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...
Happy Diwali! Reflect on it 🙂
Figure/Ground ambigram for Educational Psychology by Punya Mishra It has been a while coming, but finally the 3rd Edition of the Handbook of Educational Psychology is finally here. We have a chapter in it about the manner in which digital and networking technologies...
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...
Ambigram for the word "Theory" by Punya Mishra My first real research study was one that I conducted back when I was a graduate student under the mentorship of Bill Brewer. It was designed as a classic educational psychology memory study and though I have done little...
Rotate I spent the past seven days in Chile, six days in Santiago and one in Valpariso. It was absolutely wonderful. My trip was sponsored by the Faculty of Education at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC is one of the nation's premier universities), as...
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 -...
The latest in our series Rethinking Technology and Creativity in the 21st Century is now available. The article was co-authored with Danah Henriksen (and the Deep-Play Research Group) and it titled: A NEW approach to defining and measuring creativity. In this article...
Creativity, any which way you look at it. Ambigram for "creativity" - symmetric on rotation by 180-degrees. Creativity has always been a key interest of mine. It is reflected not just in my creative work but also in my scholarship and teaching. Below...
Back when I was a graduate student I got bitten by the bug of palindromic poetry - poems that read the same when read backwards. This is consistent with my love for ambigrams and other kinds of symmetrical wordplay. I had posted them on the web a while ago and there...
Curt Bonk is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology in the School of Education at Indiana University. Curt is one of the most fun academics I know. He is also a good friend. That's us at the COSN conference earlier this year. What I didn't remember was that...
I had posted yesterday a new ambigram for the word "algebra." It was a mirror-reflection design i.e. it reads the same when reflected in a mirror. What I liked about the design was the fact that it actually looks like an algebraic equation with a left-hand-side and a...
Ambigrams are a form of visual wordplay in which words are written/designed such that they can be read in more than one way. I have been creating ambigrams and other such oddities for a while and I feel extremely lucky that what started as a personal interest and...
There are a couple of websites that feature work done by me. I had written earlier about Brad Honeycutt's website An Optical Illusion at (http://www.anopticalillusion.com/). He now features four different ambigrams created by me: You can find them on this page on his...
I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (10/2/1869 - 1/30/1948)...
I recently received this email: Dear Mr. Mishra, I am currently working on a poetry research project for school, and one of the requirements is researching five different poets. While looking for people who wrote palindromic poetry, I found your website and decided to...
The triplet ambigrams keep flying in. This new one came in an email from Chunlei Zhang, a faculty member at East China Normal University, having received his Ph.D. in Curriculum & Teaching from Beijing Normal University. He was inspired after reading my previous...
My friend and colleague Leigh Wolf forwarded me this article on Edward Tufte: The Many Faces (And Sculptures) Of Edward Tufte. I have been a fan of information design guru Edward Tufte's work for years (decades?). I love his emphasis on clarity and simplicity in...
Those who follow this blog know that I love visual wordplay. This is most commonly seen in my ambigram work but another area where I have spent some time is in writing palindromic poetry. I wrote a whole series of poems when I was in graduate school at Illinois and...
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #6, January/February 2010 Welcome to the sixth edition of the TPACK Newsletter, with 642 subscribers (representing a 13% increase during the past 2.5 months), now appearing twice each fall and spring semester. If you are not sure what TPACK is,...
A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge! How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on... I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing...
My daughter, whose creative exploits have been featured here before (for instance see her design for a math-music game), now has a blog, titled Uniquely Mine. It features original writing (poems, stories) by her. Do check it out. You can find regular updates on this...
The Office Faculty and Organizational Development at MSU conducts an annual Spring Institute on College Teaching and Learning every summer. The past week was their 15th such event (details here) and I was asked to conduct a workshop on Creative Teaching. I was...
TPACK Newsletter, Issue #3: Late April 2009 Welcome to the third edition of the TPACK Newsletter, now with 362 subscribers (representing a 30% increase in the last two months!), and appearing bimonthly between August and April. If you are not sure what TPACK is,...
A while back I had written about the idea of "serendipitous connectability;" the idea that the web allows us to "to run across things that are stunning in their ability to connect to us in powerful, emotionally touching ways." I was prompted to do this by clicking on...
The ambigram design I had first presented here is now available through cafe-press in a variety of formats. Click here to buy t-shirts, buttons and more... Just to be clear, the prices for all the items are exactly what cafe-press charges. Matt and I make no money of...
Mishra & Yadav (2006) was a paper based around my dissertation research. It took a while to get published and I am including it here for the record. My dissertation (Mishra, 1998) was maybe the first place where I made a specific mention of the triad of...