Artbotics: Challenges and Opportunities for Multi-Disciplinary, Community-Based Learning in Computer Science, Robotics, and Art

Artbotics is a collaboration between faculty in computer science, the arts, and the social sciences. It is a complex project that involves the following elements: • High school and university students with diverse backgrounds coming together to create interactive, microprocessor-enabled installation art. • A collaboration among faculty from different departments and intersecting interests who are facilitating a learning experience for their students. • A collaboration between a university, a metropolitan art gallery, and a public high school. • Students who are participating in different roles— learners, mentors, collaborators, and research assistants. This paper explores issues in interdisciplinary teaching and learning, as well as community-based collaborations and service learning, which are major themes in the Artbotics project. In past publications, we have described results from the summer pilot and first after-school session with high school students, and the planned design for our university course [4]. We described initial results from the university course, including a discussion and photographs of several student artworks [2]. In [3], we focused on the challenge of forming partnerships across academic departments and external institutions. In this paper, we extend this earlier work in several ways. The full challenge of operating a multi-faculty, multi-disciplinary, project-oriented, community-based university course, over a 15-week period, is now apparent to us and there are some areas for improvement. These observations are likely to be independent of subject matter and therefore may be of value to educators with courses with similar structure or themes regardless of content. This paper also includes samples software code written by students as part of their exhibits, and an analysis of the ideas that are represented in this code. One of the persistent challenges of project-based work is achieving a good balance between theoretically interesting student work and timeconsuming production work. Student-created software code is one place where we can find evidence of learning of ideas that are important in computer science. We also describe benefits of this work from the standpoint of the faculty who are involved. Operating the undergraduate course entailed a weekly planning meeting in addition to contact hours with students in lecture/discussion and laboratory sessions. We co-taught the course, with all faculty members present whenever possible. The workload was significant, but the benefits were real, including meaningful, contextualized exposure to each other’s fields.