RUI: Giving the Maestro a Human Heart. Fostering Creativity in a Multi-Disciplinary Undergraduate Environment

The College Of New Jersey, Ewing NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The PI and her team will create, evaluate, revise and repeat a two-semester multi-disciplinary undergraduate research seminar at The College of New Jersey for students from the Schools of Science, Engineering, and Arts & Communication, that fosters creativity, scientific methods, and computational thinking, by encouraging novel problem-solving approaches. Participants in the seminar will collaboratively design and build artificial systems that can not only conduct an orchestra, but that also react and respond to the musicians. Project outcomes will consist of systems that combine the physical arm movements of a robotic conductor with animated visual displays that provide feedback similar to the facial expression of a human conductor, thus giving the robotic conductor "a human heart." To achieve this goal the PI team will employ a new model for collaborative learning that stems directly from the research interests and expertise of the members of the PI team, unlike traditional approaches that concentrate mainly on pedagogical issues. Students will learn two behaviors that have been previously tied to increased creativity: collaboration and computational thinking. The course setting will also be used to analyze the creative, collaborative and cognitive processes. The course will be specifically geared toward rewarding creativity, and will compare final products through the consensual assessment technique. Broader Impacts: The project will change the teaching culture in the PI team's respective fields by integrating research and teaching, and will serve as a model for cross-disciplinary collaboration in an academic environment. It will bring together faculty and students for meaningful collaborative work within an innovative structure for undergraduate education that features novel applications of computer science and engineering, and which will therefore contribute to an increase in enrollment, retention and general interest in these areas. It will foster and reward creativity, by encouraging students to reach beyond the well-defined boundaries of their individual disciplines and take risks for the promise of larger rewards; at the same time, the analytical assessments will improve our understanding of creative processes within an undergraduate collaborative problem-solving environment. Last but not least, this research holds out the promise of rejuvenating arts organizations, by affording them a new role as motivators for science and engineering.