We distilled a set of core practices within “morphing matter” research, derived a set of underlying skills and values, and developed these into a weekend workshop for high-school students. Participants in our workshop sampled a variety of research processes, including materials science and contextual design, incorporating curriculum-appropriate learning goals, toward an integrated pneumatic fashion project. We describe our approach, activity plan, and assessment as well as opportunities for research as an educational template to push beyond current “STEAM”-based educational practices for cross-disciplinary engagement.

Morphing Matter (MM) is a multidisciplinary field that combines material science and digital fabrication to create shape-changing and dynamic interfaces.In this workshop, participants will investigate ways in which MM tools can effectively support building STEM learning toolkits for novice learners from diverse backgrounds.Participants will engage in hands-on activities designing and simulating water-triggered morphing artifacts using a software design tool and fabricating them with low-cost materials.This workshop aims to collectively explore creative opportunities and barriers o introducing emerging STEM concepts and skills to novice learners.We hope to ideate frameworks for designing educational toolkits which leverage the accessible nature of morphing beads, democratizing a process that would typically require advanced material synthesis and specialized lab settings.Designers, educators, learning scientists, and researchers are welcome to join us in brainstorming ways to develop toolkits to support creative exploration in education with MM.

Morphing Matter (MM) is an emerging multidisciplinary field that combines material science and digital fabrication. It empowers people to engineer materials that respond to a specific energy or stimuli and transform its shape or other characteristics such as stiffness, opacity, and phase. This poster introduces creative pathways with MM to engage girls in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, sparking interest in the field. We share our experience designing a set of learning tools that introduce novices to MM by fabricating morphing artifacts triggered by water. Further, we present a pilot MM workshop highlighting our reflections on designing learning experiences to foster high-school-aged girls' curiosity and interest in STEM.

The field of Morphing Matter (MM) is often associated with high-tech equipment or inaccessible lab environments. In this work, we explore morphing matter applications within the context of DIY craft, showcasing different actuation methods for morphing artifacts created using compact, inexpensive, and easily replicable toolkits. This demo presents three morphing matter toolsets that enable novice learners to design shape-changing food, artistic figurines that transform underwater and inflatable wearables. We aim to thoroughly demonstrate each step in the design process for morphing arts and crafts projects triggered by various stimuli such as heat, moisture, and air pressure. Through open-source simulation tools, readily available materials, and easy-to-follow tutorials, morphing matter toolkits can empower users to express their creativity in new ways while learning science and engineering concepts, skills, and techniques.

Hydrogels are versatile morphing materials that have recently been adopted for creating shape-changing interfaces. However, most shape-changing interfaces require advanced material synthesis, specialized lab settings for fabrication, and technical knowledge is needed to simulate their morphing behavior. To replicate such structures, these factors become a barrier for makers. Therefore, to democratize the creation of hydrogel-based morphing artifacts and to extend their design space in HCI, we propose a water-triggered morphing mechanism that utilizes the distance between adjacent hydrogel beads adhered on a thin substrate to control their bending angle. This paper describes the bending angle quantification experiments for creating a simulator, the process of developing a computational tool along with its user-friendly workflow and demonstrates kirigami and branch-based artifacts built with the tool. Using our method, anyone can easily design and fabricate custom morphing structures.