Our global society will face previously unseen, complex and global obstacles which will require imaginative solutions that draw on multiple disciplines. While collaboration provides important inspiration, creative ideas actually happen between the synapses in a single brain. While it is important to teach students to work with a variety of people and ideas, we also need to build polymaths who are adept at bringing disparate disciplines together. Our global society needs polymaths to accelerate creative solutions and trans-disciplinary STEAM projects are critical bricks on that path.
What if we did a trans-disciplinary science and engineering project that was labelled as Art? Would it instill the excitement of living on the edge of curiosity? Would it motivate students to explore a variety of disciplines with purpose? Would it help develop polymaths who are adept at making creative connections between disparate ideas that is so needed to solve our complex problems? LEO-the light embodied Odyssey was born. Students learn Engineering to make the tech-art, Art gives the freedom to explore the edge of curiosity and the art communicates Science.
LEO is a multi-year project where students use acrylic diverted from the landfill, LEDs, circuitboards, sensors and RaspberryPis. Students learn engineering by blueprinting, laser cutting, 3D printing and building the light sculptures. Each sculpture represents a different layer of science from String Theory, to microbiology, to celestial bodies in gravitational fields and supernovae. Together they form the constellation LEO, which is particularly fitting because our school mascot is a lion and the constellation forms a backwards question mark, reminding students to remain curious.
While society needs students to experience trans-disciplinary STEAM projects, Individual high school students also need this experience. They are making life-altering decisions without enough experience to make those decisions, which make them pawns to the influences of the media and family. There is security in knowing exactly what they want to do and they tend to focus all their attention on that narrow focus, not taking the time to sample a variety of disciplines. I use the analogy of going to a buffet where they know that they love pizza and chicken nuggets. Despite there being butter chicken and sushi right beside them, they fill their limited plates with pizza and chicken nuggets. They don’t know that they don’t know that they might love sushi even more. They should sample the Sushi so that they can have confidence when making life decisions. Trans-disciplinary projects allow them to sample the sushi.
INSERT ANH’s Video here. And “tried the sushi” and and discovered that he was much more powerful than he thought.
In Anh’s first year, he created Primodial Neo-Cyber Nor which conjures a speculative lifeforms emerging from a primordial soup saturated with plastic and digital influence. The blue copper mixes with the oil has implications for oxygen transport membrane formation in early life. He used a Microbit and sensors to control multiple LEDS with a shift register and introduced exciting technology called Shape Memory Allow to introduce movement.
He learned that the excitement of puzzle solving and the confidence that he could learn new things to overcome unexpected challenges. This gave him the confidence to start from zero and undertake a second year university project to control 64 electrical components with only 16 pins. This project was selected to represent his province at the National Science Fair and more importantly will allow future students to express themselves artistically and economically by learning some computational thinking.
In normal classes, when students solve a problem, they are confined by the content and the skills that are presented in class, so they hammer away at one or two strategies. However, because this is art, there are a plethora of options including changing the finish line. In this case, sometimes it is valuable to take a step back, try something else and allow creative and inspired solutions time to percolate from the subconcious.
The idea that this project is part of a bigger project that will last is wonderfully motivating, which is very different than a typical assignment that is submitted and graded on its way to the garbage bin. Because of his tenacity, we discovered that he was more capable than he once thought.
Using Art as the centre hub from which all other disciplines are learned satiates so many foundational educational philosophies that struggle to survive in modern educational systems.
Dewey preached that effective learning happened when it was directly related to the immediate lives of the students. By doing large tech-art projects, students are presented with unforeseen obstacles that require learning new knowledge and skills. Venya recounts how she was motivated to learn skills that previously were unappealing because of her violin.
Alfred North Whitehead warned against knowledge and skills being taught in silos and the danger of becoming inert. Just because some students are skilled in a number of disciplines, Polymaths have a tendency to be able mix those disciplines. This is the critical step that is required for imaginative solutions and it happens when the synapses of a single mind connect.
Insert : There is nothing inert about Kevin’s knowledge and skill. Kevin often surprised his older peers when he would take an idea from one experience to answer a problem from another. This ability made him a desired teammate from both his classmates and those older than him. This was the start of his social development until finally he was recruited by the Student Government, where he used his technical skills to solve social issues at school. He became a beloved, humble, competent and highly respected grad. Much of his early development happened with LEO.
Using Art to teach science and engineering is a wonderful way to teach both the content and the attitudes of being a scientist or engineer. One day, Andy was a wonderful student who worked very hard in physics class but was reluctant to try different routes through a multistep problem and chose to wait for the answer rather than invest time and energy on an incorrect solution. A few minutes later, I watched Andy in my brother’s Fine Arts class erasing weeks worth of work in order to try something new. Why was he so comfortable living on the edge of creativity in art class but so hesitant in science class? His answer was that in art, we have permission to experiment and change our minds, where as in science class, there is always one right answer for the test or the lab that has been repeated for years. The skills and attitudes that we are reinforcing to be good science students are NOT the same attitudes that are required to be a scientists. Professional scientists and engineers need to be comfortable on the edge of curiosity and enjoy the meandering creative project.
Insert Brennan’s and Web Twin’s video in here somewhere.
Both individuals and society in general, benefit when students are required to simultaneously manipulate ideas from different disciplines to overcome the unforeseen obstacles. This happens in trans-disciplinary projects like the tech art in LEO. While it is impressive when a single individual can master more than one field, truly creative solutions happen when a person can mix the silos together in a unique way. Since AI is based on finding the statistically probable outcome, AI is ill-equipped to connect disparate ideas together. However, it is exactly this improbable creativity that is possessed by polymaths. For 6 years, LEO has been developing nearly 100 students to become polymaths and this summer, we have been asked to extend the project to LEO 2 for another 4 years.
