Love to Illuminate Art

Love mashing skills and creating hybrid curriculum for elevated learning opportunities.

We experienced some of the cooler things that can happen in our art studio in a while within the last few days.

It has always been my purpose to reach my students the best way I can and to find new ways to inspire them to reach further than before.  So when I went to ISTE last year, I discovered a brilliant MIT doctoral student, who was creating paper circuits.

I participated in her workshop because I have a mini obsession with illuminating things all over my home and whenever possible my art.  I have been know to influence my student’s projects from time to time to include lights.  So when I realized I could teach my students how to use paper circuits with a coin battery to illuminate art ….I was transfixed.

I love the packaging, the ease of understanding how to create circuits, and the application of Chibitronics materials.  I immediately set my mind to try to get the inventor Jie Qi to come to my school for a workshop with my students.  Well, it happened this week….for three super packed days we had the pleasure of working with paper circuits with Dr. Jie.  Our students learning ranged from simple circuits to parallel circuits.  The more advanced students created their own circuits for specific works of art and a few had the chance to work with a prototype microcontroller and do some coding.

I was impressed with how quickly the school community lit up with excitement to learn all about paper circuits.  We had workshops with 6-12 graders but this did not hold back elementary parents from purchasing the toolkits for their younger children to explore.  I even had teachers from all different courses stop by and purchase toolkits.  I am hoping this will be a new trick everyone can add to the class curriculum for projects they may create in the future.

If you want to learn more about paper circuits I highly recommend you check out the website: https://chibitronics.com/learn/  Dr. Jie is great at presenting the content and methods to apply for the simplest circuit to more difficult programming of microcontrollers.

Additional links to explore:

http://papercuriosities.media.mit.edu/

https://www.adafruit.com/

To view videos go to my Twitter or Instagram

@joycschultz          Schultz_Life

If you are attending the National Art Convention in NYC, you are in luck.  Dr. Jie is planning on joining us to see what art educators are doing.  The convention is across the street from the MOMA and her toolkit is on sale in the museum store.  PS Dr. Jie also has work in the MOMA exhibit.  If you see us wandering around don’t be afraid to ask us all about paper circuits.