Kent

As we have concluded the semester-long program, I thought I share some thoughts on the aftermath of the endeavor. My teammate and I still need to finish our video. As with many things, life and work inhibited us from meeting our Pre-Holiday Goal. However, we are committed to producing our finished product.

What I found over the course of the semester was my partner, and I was very passionate about the place from where our ideas came. We a both committed to the upward mobility of the underserved in STEM and STEM-related fields. That being said, we believe the use of STEAM, Science Technology Engineering Arts and Mathematics can be used as a powerful tool to inspire and cultivate aspiring Scientists, mathematicians, etc. I understand many people don’t get STEAM. What is interesting is the very theoretical framework of “perspectives” governing academic achievement suggests that one’s perception is one’s reality. That being said, if one does not see the value in the Arts as it pertains to science, then everything they see will support that expectation. I often say as educators we are more so perception changers. We change not only the perception of students as it pertains to curriculum, but we also change the perceptions of students views of themselves. Well, to be more accurate, we try to either change it for the better or we try to enhance positive perceptions.

As mentioned in some of my previous posts, if a student does not believe they are smart enough to do something, you can throw a billion-dollar curriculum at them, and it will accomplish nothing if it does nothing to positively impact the self-perception and self- efficacy of that student.

That being said, I have enjoyed this program, and I am glad I was a participant. It was challenging at times to get blog posts in regularly when these matters competed with my other responsibilities associated with my profession, however, it was worth the effort. I will be completing my part of the lecture later this month and combining it with my team mate’s video. The goal is to post it to YouTube such that people around the world can share and hopefully be inspired to incorporate some of our perspectives into their educational practice.

I hope these posts have provoked some thought that will inspire others to advance ideas have explored. This journey is far from over. It has only just begun.

Jenny

Participating in this residency has given me the courage to apply for a Maker in Residence term at a makerspace in Burlington. In March and April, I will use the physical resources (3D printers, laser cutters, etc.) available at the space to explore some of the ideas generated by the SciArt residency and through conversation with Kent to explore mineralogy within different contexts and artistic mediums.

Post-residency, I’ve been growing more attuned to interdisciplinary happenings in my scientific and artistic communities. As a result, I’ve had enjoyed surprising conversations with friends and colleagues, formed a personal mini-canon of historical sci-art figures in my head, and developed a little arsenal of tools, papers, and methods to proceed in the future. In my work as a local data scientist, I hope to bring art into the fold in several upcoming events, especially since recent work has supported the power of artistic methods to increase comprehension and engagement when visualizing data.

There are some other exciting developments on the horizon related to science in my life that I can’t talk about right now, but I’m looking forward to sustaining my participation in the SciArt community and collaborating in the future with Kent.

Kent

Happy Holidays Everyone. So here we are. Our last blog posts. So, what do we talk
about today? Well, I wanted to say a few words about how this all developed. I hope
future residents can learn from our experiences.

So how did it all start? Well, with a conversation. I recall in our first video chat we just
took time talking about our backgrounds. That was important. I imagine she needed to
know where I was coming from and I needed to understand Jenn and her background
seeing it was so different from mine. I made it a point to listen because I never want to
devolve into a situation where I am “mansplaining” things to my team member. The
more I listened, the more I was taken by her perspectives of science, art, and education.
It turned out; we were aligned with many perspectives.

We both committed to helping underrepresented populations in the field of STEAM.
This opened a wonderful discussion on our backgrounds and how it led us to where we
are today respectively.

During our discussions, I mentioned my philosophy on physics, education, and
perceptions. Not only of the subject but also of one’s self-concept as participants in the
field of physics. This does not mean students had to have a desire of becoming
physicists. I was more talking about a student’s perception of themselves in a physics
class. Simply put, if a student does not think they are smart enough to solve physics
problems, they will more than likely facilitate their expectations. Through literature
review and personal experience, I have found that I must impact a students perception
of themselves in the physics classroom before I can help them learn how to solve physics
problems. Notice I did not say solve physics problems, but more so learn how to solve
physics problems. I how many times have I heard students say, you’re just smart. They
never considered that physics professors are engaging in a strategy to solve problems.
Let me fast forward to our artifact. As mentioned before, we will produce two lectures.
These lectures will focus on the pointillism theoretical construct. We will give
information that represents dots. Each piece of information might seemingly be
independent of another until you step back as see that all this information makes a total
picture. We will then break down how we did it in the two lectures.

Jenny

This week was a flurry of activity, as Kent and I worked independently on our respective video sections. I’m excited to see how our project comes together. For me, the biggest issue was in determining the scope - since soils are so heterogeneous, it’s easy to go down some rabbit holes (no pun intended). I’m concentrating on a topic I explored during my master’s thesis, which involved studying soils at multiple scales to determine the role of small-scale processes in controlling field-scale behavior.

Meanwhile, I had some significant difficulties come up in my personal life. With that in mind, I put a lot into self-care to get my mind and body in a good place. Although I care very much about this residency, being part of academia has taught me that it’s too easy to sacrifice self for work, and it’s taken a while to find the tools to reverse that pattern.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the ways in which we publicly engage in science and creativity, spurred by a visit to Generator, a local makerspace in Burlington. More than a place where people put things together (while also exactly that), the space is fostering community around ideas and projects that involve close collaboration and skillsharing. Going forward, I’m interested in exploring how ideas evolve within a collaborative partnership, while remaining grounded in the fruition of those ideas.

I look forward to checking in at the official end of the residency to share more about our efforts, and the results of our collaboration.

Kent

As we come to the end of this Fellowship, I thought I would offer some insight on how I am producing my portion of the video explaining out pointillism project. I will be filming a small lecture in my Physics Laboratory most likely. I have asked a colleague in the Art Department to do the recording. Professor Rogers and I have collaborated on many projects. This is the first point I wanted to suggest.

Interdepartmental collaborations can be a rarity outside of the sciences, depending on the campus you are on. What I mean to say is, you may see Physics collaborating with Chemistry or Chemistry collaborating with Biology. However, it is rare to see a collaboration of say Physics with the Art Department. To be honest, it was my collaboration with the Art Department that led me to the SciArt Program.

To start with a substantive collaboration with science and art, you don’t need to have some structured meeting between departments. That seldom works on a department level. Unless all parties have buy-in from the jump, I doubt one would get much mileage out of such an initiative. I feel the best way to go about it is just going to lunch or hanging out after work and engage in casual conversation. Many of my best collaborations with the Art Department came from having lunch with my colleagues. You just start talking, and it turns into a brainstorming session.

In my time knowing Professor Rogers, he has filmed several of my lectures, filmed a
documentary on our Rocket team,

https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Dogs- Limits-Roderic- Putnan/dp/B01MQFN0GS

Filmed a Youtube Science Show,
https://youtu.be/a12jeG_5ndw

Filmed STEM music videos,
https://youtu.be/LHE9rYGTSbc

and Physics tutorials,
https://youtu.be/nokaoTe5jFA

This is only to name a few of our collaborations. That being said, I encourage you to get out of your comfortable spaces if you are scientists and grab lunch with your art colleagues. You never know of the innovative things you might dream up!

Kent
Hello everyone. I struggled with what to write about this week. We are in finals, so that was consuming my time along with a NASA Preliminary Design Review (PDR) that our rocket team had to pull together. That being said, I am excited to be in the final stages of our project. To be more accurate, I am looking forward to having something tangible to share with everyone. My teammate and I have explained how we intend to produce a video utilizing our pointillism perspective as it pertains to education.  

So we have an outline of how this will go. I will present a given physics topic offering bits of information, then at the end, tie them all together to make the “big picture.” My partner will do a video doing the opposite. She will present the big picture and then break it down to the “dots.” While one person offers one way of instruction, the other will break the process down. I think this will be very cool.  

I really am glad I participated in this project. It has been a bright spot to a semester that has had many stressing events going on in the peripheral. Three Hurricanes, Puerto Rico still having major areas without power, California Fires, you name it. I truly hope our submission will inspire a new way of thinking in curriculum and instruction. Maybe it will inspire an even bigger idea. More to come soon. Sorry, I have made this entry short. We have grade submissions today!  Looking forward to a warm and wonderful Holiday Season.

Kent

The collaboration is getting to the point that we have some tangible results. My teammate, Jenn, and I are going to make a video that utilizes our pointillism perspective for instruction. Jenn sent me an outline of how our video should flow. It is amazing that she and I are so like-minded in our perspectives. We come from different disciplines. However, our take on art principles and science overlap and are in lock and step. That has contributed to making this SciArt experience a joy.  

Today I had another experience of affirmation. I was lecturing about fluids and pressure to the students. I paused and asked a question that required that they understood something I talked about in a previous lecture some time ago. One of my students to my surprise answered the question before I even finished stating it. She then expelled, “I get it!” I am finally connecting the dots!” She was referencing my analogy about Physics and Pointillism. I was so excited because this makes the second time one of my students referenced my analogy of understanding concepts presented in class and making connections to them across several chapters from a pointillism perspective.  

That being said, our outline for our video is taking shape. It will be good to have a product that I can see, even in its raw form. I imagine it becomes real at that point. I wanted to get something positive out of this experience. As mentioned before, I think my partner and I are on to something special and unique. More to come soon. Hopefully, we will change some perspectives on instruction. As always, I ask, what do you see?
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Jenny

This week I was inspired by a Twitter thread and a bus interaction to visualize the powerful algorithms that lie at the root of most fiberwork through sound. While commuting home, I noticed the knitter next to me forming a beautiful purple-blue tube out of alternating stockinette and garter spirals. She gave me the pattern: cast on 63 stitches, then knit 8, purl 8, knit 8, purl 8, bind off eventually, and you are left with a beautiful cowl. It’s not very complicated. But vertically, it looks intimidating to the casual knitter - with each row, the 63-stitch pattern shifts over by one, giving a spiraling effect. In combinatorial mathematics, this is known as a circular shift.

I used Python, a code language in which I still identify as a beginner, to create my matrix and apply a circular shift to each row (I started out with 20 rows - I wasn’t sure how long I wanted my mathematical cowl to be). Knowing that I would eventually turn the pattern into sound, I used frequency values as the numbers in the array (“stitches”), with A440 representing knit stitches and B representing purl stitches, and alternated stitches with zero values to allow the sound representation to achieve a texture of repeating notes (otherwise, it would have sounded as a single tone).
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The basic circular shift matrix looked like this - it’s turned on its side, here, for reasons explained below:

Once I created the basic algorithm for shifting each row of the pattern, I needed to turn it on its side. There are many ways to turn numbers into a sound pattern, but my favorite for tabular data has recently been Melosynth, a python module available through Github. Melosynth performs one basic function: given a two-column .csv with time stamps (in seconds) and corresponding frequency values (in Hz), it outputs a simple sine wave. So, I needed to turn rows in my array into individual columns, convert them into audio, and layer them together in post-processing.

First, though, I had to perform a crucial transformation to the data to meet an artistic goal. One way of coding a knitting pattern from its source algorithm would be to construct the basic function and allow the computer to generate the final product. But this method removes the human creator, and eventual listeners, from the act of creating. The craft of hand-knitting represents so much more than the item generated. It evokes time, labor, and love (and for some of us, blood, sweat, tears, and tiny cat hairs). I wanted to bring listeners into this experience. So, I took a generative approach to the data - “knitting” the first row, stitch by stitch, alone, then adding the second row on top, and moving row by row to immerse listeners in the act of knitting a circular shift pattern, like so (visualize this as circular, and iterative, with the first row not repeating but acting as a base for the next):
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To do this, I added null values to the beginning of each matrix row (n+1)*63 (the number of stitches in each row). Then I rotated the matrix, took each column and gave it time increments, and exported them to wav using Melosynth, after which I compiled the rows using Audacity. Have a listen!
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Kent

Hi Everyone,
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          So, this might seem off topic, but I ask you to bear with me.  So, this past weekend, I attended the National Society of Black Physicists Conference.  (Yes, there is enough of us to have a conference) This conference was a convening of professional, graduate students, and undergraduate students in physics.  There were about 210 or so of us in attendance.  That sounds like a good number.  However, one must remember African-American Physicist on makeup roughly 1.3% of all the Physicists in the country.  Hence, one realizes that number is very small.  Most physicists engage in physics from a research perspective.  Students are reared to become researchers.  Few if any are guided towards the high school classroom.  Don’t quote me on this, but I think I heard someone cite that only 30% of the physics teachers in the country actually have degrees in physics.  Now consider how many of them might be are teachers of color.  As one could imagine, that number is small.
 
    So many times, you have heard me speak of “perspectives” in art and science.  I remember when I was a grad student, a woman asked me about a treble clef pin I was wearing on my jacket.  She asked, “Are you a musician?”  I responded, “Not by trade.  I am becoming a physicist.”  She looked amazed.  She responded by saying, “A physicist?  Well good for you!”  However, I could not help but feel like the tone of her voice was patronizing.  I wanted to respond to her, “Gee, thanks.  Could I have a cook now?”  That experience was forever burned in my memory.  As I got older and more into my profession, I could not help but think, should that woman’s response had been that much of a surprise?  I mean, after all, what are the chanced she would have met a black physics teacher much less an up and coming black physics professor.  I imagine she meant well.  However, her perspective made it clear that meeting such an individual was rare, to say the least.  

    Today, I have committed my career to making math intensive curriculum more accessible to underrepresented populations.  I find at the root of that effort is changing people’s perspective.  I try to change people’s perspective of what physics and what it means to be a physicist.  I try to change people’s perspective what math is, and try to stop people from being afraid of it.  I guess you could say I am trying to help people see the face and the vase.  I am trying to change perspectives.  

    I think the STEAM initiative is the way to go to achieve this perspective change.  Music, art, and science all have their roots embedded in math, trigonometry, and math.  The work continues to change perspectives.  And so the work of SciArt continues…………………
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Jenny

Through my work as a data tinkerer, I’ve learned to interpret data as beautiful, or imperfect, or disturbing, applying aesthetic criteria we use in evaluating art to numbers and patterns.
When I expect to see an interpretable visual pattern and instead receives a jumbled mess of pixels or words, my ability to evaluate the meaning of the visual pattern is interrupted. One possible response: “the machine made a mistake.” Another response: “did the computer just create art for me?”
With the Internet of Things seeping into our public and private lives, the unexpected banality of machine failure serves as a jarring critique of technological elitism while mocking the idea that Wifi-enabled toasters represent an improvement over their predecessors (then again, there are real consequences to this hyper-connectivity). In a way, the transformation of a sleek, phone-synced gadget into an inert brick creates a kind of public art:


With the rise of glitch art and symbiotic artistic relationships between people and machines, space has been created to allow for visual or audio expression that is ruled by algorithms as much as by aesthetics. I have been fascinated by the colorful block-art of my hapless printer, who apparently designed an audio

Kent
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So, to practice what I preach I utilized my “perspectives” philosophy with parents and students at the McKissack Middles School STEAM science night.  The school had a whole series of activities and demonstrations to kick off their new Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) initiative in their school.  The event was to inform parents and get them on board with the new initiative.  I had the honor of being asked to kick off the night with an opening presentation to parents, students, and faculty.

The interesting thing about STEAM is not everybody gets it.  I am not sure who is more resistant.  I’ve met scientists that feel STEAM is not very substantive and do not have a clue of what activity they could come up with that utilized STEAM in a serious and provocative way.  I have met those from the humanities that feel scientists look down on their discipline and hence have a resentment and/or fear of many things science related.  I have also met those who simply don’t have a full grasp of the arts nor the sciences.  They might have a desire to understand, but may have been so far removed from such dealings, they are reluctant or apprehensive in embracing the concepts.  

As mentioned in my previous posts, I find educators to be perception changers.  Every time a person learns something new about the world they live in; it modifies their perception in some way.  It might reinforce their views or cause them to modify their beliefs in some way.  That said, my goal was to change some perceptions that evening.  Maybe the change would be about science, about the arts, or maybe even a change in someone’s perception about themselves.  
I utilized several pictures of double images.  I would simply ask, “what do you see?”  Some would see both images, but man could not.  If they could not see both images, I would provide them with a bit more information.  Many, but not all would eventually see both images.  I also pointed out how, once you could see both images, you could not unsee them.  I related that to my youth.  I told them about when I was younger I thought I was not smart enough to do math.  I explained how that was a learned response to math.  I had to see they I was intelligent.  I had to see that I could do math.  Once, I saw it; I could never unsee it.  I then went on to explain TEAM and its benefits in education.  

After my talk, the principal closed and cited a few points from my talk.  I took that as a huge compliment.  I am glad I was able to set the occasion.  So in closing, I will ask, what do you see?
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Jenny

Kent and I started planning a video synthesis of some of the topics we have discussed to date. We’re looking at the metaphor of pointillism as it relates to our own work in the sciences. With the direction we’re going, I figure it’s a good week to talk about #scicomm. I can think of a couple powerful reasons to champion the benefits of effective scientific communication right off the bat.

1. Evaluating information is hard if you’re not an expert. Food labels often contain information that forwards a consumer to a website that lists the concentrations of heavy metals or the presence of compounds in a specific product, but the typical consumer has no base threshold for evaluating the numbers or substances. Different standards exist in the EU and California than the rest of the U.S., compounding the difficulty. 
2. Assumptions are hard to crack. Arsenic and radionuclides are present within certain in Vermont due to arsenic in shale and uranium within granite. However, public perception that well water is cleaner than city water, combined with the erroneous assumption that contaminants like arsenic, lead, and uranium have identifiable taste, smell, or visual characteristics (or can be filtered out by Brita filters) leads residents to forgo water testing.
   

How do we broaden the reach of scientific literacy to empower people with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions and learn about local scientific developments? Music, art and storytelling can be powerful communication tools, bringing people into the fold and erasing barriers to scientific literacy. If you’re lucky enough to have a wide platform or some serious #scicomm skills, blogging or writing for national publications is an incredible way to engage a broader audience. Within my current field, I love story maps for their visual impact and narrative style. Regardless of your method, science communication can deepen interest in your field, expose important interdisciplinary connections, and generate conversations that reach way beyond the scientific community.

Let’s not forget the importance of social media! There’s always a lot happening on rocur accounts (rocur stands for rotation curation, and represents a twitter account that tweets from a rotating cast of twitter users) such as @iamscicomm and @geoscitweeps. I’ve learned so much by following experts in other fields, including snake biologists and physicists.

Kent

Just today I thought I would discuss what I’ve been thinking about regarding our project. As mentioned before, my partner and I were discussing using the perspective of pointillism on certain science subjects.  So I thought I would give an example. Let’s say I was going to talk about how start works. It would not be unheard of to talk about stars from the view of the entire picture. Meaning, that you would talk about the star itself. However, I’m going to make this discussion starting from the inside out. In other words, I’m going to talk about the dots.  

The most abundant material in the Universe is Hydrogen.  It is from this hydrogen that stars are born.  Newton’s laws suggest all matter is attracted to one another.  So, imagine two hydrogen atoms sticking together.  Well, their mass would be greater than a single atom, so the cluster of two collects another nearby hydrogen atom.  Now you have three hydrogen atoms which can attract a 4th, and so on and so on.  Now you have a collection of hydrogen atoms attracting more hydrogen through gravitation.   

As this process continues, the hydrogen gets hot.  The gravity pulling all the hydrogen to the center of the mass of gas causes the gas to get hotter.  The more hydrogen that is collected, the hotter it gets at the center because of the pressure pushing in by the gas being pull towards its center.  At some point, there is so much pressure that the hydrogen fuses with another hydrogen to make helium.  This process causes the release of a great deal of energy in the form of heat.  

Notice, in this discussion I did not talk about the “Star” so much as I talked about its primary component, hydrogen.  Another “dot” I discussed was gravity.  The next “dot” was how gravity pulls the hydrogen together, and so on, and so on, and so on.  All of these dots build until you get the larger picture, a Star.  
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This was just a bit of a working example of how a lesson could be put together from the perspective of starting with the details, then linking them together to form the larger picture.  Just as in pointillism.  A person might no know what these “dots” make up until they take a step back and see the larger picture.  ​