Code to Cope is a STEAM curriculum for young adults designed to teach, develop, and encourage coping mechanisms while learning programming with JavaScript. COVID-19 restrictions, such as social distancing and remote learning, disrupted social development and identity formation in young adults, exacerbating mental health issues that remain unaddressed in existing STEAM curriculum. Young adults are vulnerable to psychological distress that adversely affects educational experiences and career path choices. The Code to Cope curriculum was adopted by the creative coding course at Louisiana State University from 2021 to 2022. We conducted interviews with four students in 2021 and empirical studies with 34 students in 2022 to evaluate the effects of the curriculum in terms of code, coping, and creativity. The results of the study show that the Code to Cope curriculum effectively teaches computational thinking, develops self-care practices, and engages and motivates students.

While nature can benefit people both mentally and physically, contemporary society has become increasingly disconnected from nature. To rebuild a stronger connection with nature in our everyday life, we introduce FloraWear, a do-it-yourself, wearable living interface, that enables people to easily and closely connect with plants. This pictorial introduces how knowledge is built and shared with others using hybrid craft and fabrication, illustrates the material experiments and design development for FloraWear, and discusses how it affects wearers. Then we summarize how FloraWear can help catalyze a shift in people's perspectives towards nature. By developing emotional ties to their wearable plants, FloraWear wearers begin to understand that both they and their plants are part of an ecosystem.

Robots are usually considered tools, devoid of agency and thus creativity. This robotic art performance – Contingent Dreams – explores the generative role of the human artist, algorithm, machine, medium, and environment in art making. In this performance a robot, programmed and assisted by the artist, draws an algorithmic composition in ink. The drawings – derived from recordings of everyday sounds – represent the noise of cities in Louisiana, rendering an ephemeral aspect of the city in unruly mechanical brushstrokes. The drawings come to life as the precise paths of the algorithm are translated into bold, enigmatic brush strokes and anomalous drops of ink. The drawings emerge not just from the imagination of the artist, but also from the sounds of the city, the code of the algorithm, the mechanical motion of the robot, the physics of the brush bristles and ink, and the texture and absorbency of the paper. Each aspect of the performance adds meaningful contingency to the process, resulting in drawings that evoke, as accidents accumulate into meaning, the multiplicity of urban experience.

Shifting Datum is an installation that critically examines the relationship between New Orleans – a city much of which is at or below current sea level – and changes in relative sea level. With the increasing interest among the artists and designers on how to integrate research into their practice, we present Shifting Datum as a critical inquiry speculating on environmental issues such as rising sea levels. This paper introduces the recent movement of speculative design, frames Shifting Datum as a critical lens for inquiry into the near future, and describes the process of developing and fabricating the installation.

This paper presents novel and effective methods for teaching about topography--or shape of terrain--and assessing 3-dimensional spatial learning using tangibles. We used Tangible Landscape--a tangible interface for geospatial modeling--to teach multiple hands-on tangible lessons on the concepts of grading (i.e., earthwork), geomorphology, and hydrology. We examined students' ratings of the system's usability and user experience and tested students' acquisition and transfer of knowledge. Our results suggest the physicality of the objects enabled the participants to effectively interact with the system and each other, positively impacting ratings of usability and task-specific knowledge building. These findings can potentially advance the design and implementation of tangible teaching methods for the topics of geography, design, architecture, and engineering.

Tangible Landscape is a tangible interface for geographic information systems (GIS). It interactively couples physical and digital models of a landscape so that users can intuitively explore, model, and analyze geospatial data in a collaborative environment. Conceptually Tangible Landscape lets users hold a GIS in their hands so that they can feel the shape of the topography, naturally sculpt new landforms, and interact with simulations like water flow. Since it only affords a bird's-eye view of the landscape, we coupled it with an immersive virtual environment so that users can virtually walk around the modeled landscape and visualize it at a human-scale. Now as users shape topography, draw trees, define viewpoints, or route a walkthrough, they can see the results on the projection-augmented model, rendered on a display, or rendered on a head-mounted display. In this paper we present the Tangible Landscape Immersive Extension, describe its physical setup and software architecture, and demonstrate its features with a case study.

Tangible user interfaces are based on the premise that embodied cognition in computing can enhance cognitive processes. However, the ways in which embodied cognition in computing transform spatial thinking have not yet been rigorously studied. I have co-designed Tangible Landscape -- a continuous shape display powered by a geographic information system -- and used it to explore how technology mediates spatial cognition in a rigorous experiment.

We present TanGeoMS, a tangible geospatial modeling visualization system that couples a laser scanner, projector, and a flexible physical three-dimensional model with a standard geospatial information system (GIS) to create a tangible user interface for terrain data. TanGeoMS projects an image of real-world data onto a physical terrain model. Users can alter the topography of the model by modifying the clay surface or placing additional objects on the surface. The modified model is captured by an overhead laser scanner then imported into a GIS for analysis and simulation of real-world processes. The results are projected back onto the surface of the model providing feedback on the impact of the modifications on terrain parameters and simulated processes. Interaction with a physical model is highly intuitive, allowing users to base initial design decisions on geospatial data, test the impact of these decisions in GIS simulations, and use the feedback to improve their design. We demonstrate the system on three applications: investigating runoff management within a watershed, assessing the impact of storm surge on barrier islands, and exploring landscape rehabilitation in military training areas.