Children and young adults are immersed in digital culture, but most are not familiar with the computational thinking behind the latest tools and technologies. There are few opportunities in secondary school curricula for students to learn such practices, but we believe that skills such as computational thinking, creative coding, collaboration, innovation, and information literacy can be taught in a highly effective manner by using aesthetic challenges as a motivation. In other words, by engaging students in creative digital arts projects they are naturally driven to acquire the many new skills to effectively use and understand the computational tools and techniques involved in creating digital and interactive projects. In this paper, we outline a project-based digital arts curriculum through which novice middle/high school students are intrinsically motivated to learn and apply science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills and computational thinking.

This paper describes the Digital Culture BA degree: an engineering-arts undergraduate curriculum that combines competency-based education (CBE) and knowledge-oriented education (KOE) structures and related Pull-Push approaches. The degree has been offered for three years at Arizona State University, has 200 enrolled students and is continuing to grow. The degree embeds nine knowledge-oriented concentrations, each offered by a relevant participating department, within an interdisciplinary CBE context. The CBE part of the degree provides customized access to 40 interdisciplinary digital culture courses from 12 different academic units by connecting these courses through a set of core competencies. Access to courses is not determined by fixed prerequisites but rather by having one of several possible combinations of lower level competencies. This flexible curriculum is attractive to students, promotes integrative collaborative learning that inspires innovation, and prepares the type of engineering-arts experts and complex problem solvers that are currently needed in creative industries. This type of degree also presents several important challenges for educators and administrators. To address these challenges we developed project based assessment approaches, custom web-based software for advising a very diverse student body, as well as online tools for facilitating peer critique and feedback in large creative classrooms.

Thrii is a multimodal interactive installation that explores levels of movement similarity among its participants. Each of the three participants manipulates a large spherical object whose movement is tracked via an embedded accelerometer. An analysis engine computes the similarity of movement for each possible pair of objects, as well as self-similarity (e.g., repetition of movement over time) for each object. The extent of similarity among the movements of each object is communicated by a visualization projected on a three-sided pyramid, a non-directional audio environment, and lighting produced by the spherical objects. The installation's focus is intended to examine notions of collaboration between participants. We have found that participants engage with Thrii through exploration of collaborative gestures.

In this video presentation, we introduce the Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab [SMALLab], a mixed-reality learning environment that supports interactive engagement through full body 3D movements and gestures within a collaborative, computationally mediated space. The video begins by describing the holistic approach to embodied and mediated learning developed by our transdisciplinary research team, grounded in understandings derived from research in the learning sciences, digital media and human computer interaction. We then outline the three core tenets of effective learning exemplified by our research -- embodiment, multimodality and collaboration. The video next demonstrates the design and functionality of the physical and digital components of SMALLab. We conclude by illustrating our partner collaborations with K12 teachers and students with four scenarios depicting Geography, Physics, Language Arts and Chemistry learning modules.

This paper presents a novel real-time, multi-modal biofeedback system for stroke patient therapy. The problem is important as traditional mechanisms of rehabilitation are monotonous, and do not incorporate detailed quantitative assessment of recovery in addition to traditional clinical schemes. We have been working on developing an experiential media system that integrates task dependent physical therapy and cognitive stimuli within an interactive, multimodal environment. The environment provides a purposeful, engaging, visual and auditory scene in which patients can practice functional therapeutic reaching tasks, while receiving different types of simultaneous feedback indicating measures of both performance and results. There are three contributions of this paper - (a) identification of features and goals for the functional task (b) The development of sophisticated feedback (auditory and visual) mechanisms that match the semantics of action of the task. We additionally develop novel action-feedback coupling mechanisms. (c) New metrics to validate the ability of the system to promote learnability, stylization and engagement. We have validated the system for nine subjects with excellent results.

This paper presents a novel real-time, multi-modal biofeedback system for stoke patient therapy. The problem is important as traditional mechanisms of rehabilitation are monotonous, and do not incorporate detailed quantitative assessment of recovery in addition to traditional clinical schemes. We have been working on developing an experiential media system that integrates task dependent physical therapy and cognitive stimuli within an interactive, multimodal environment. The environment provides a purposeful, engaging, visual and auditory scene in which patients can practice functional therapeutic reaching tasks, while receiving different types of simultaneous feedback indicating measures of both performance and results. There are two contributions of this paper - (a) identification of features and goals for the functional task, (b) the development of sophisticated feedback (auditory and visual) mechanisms that match the semantics of action of the task.

Movement-based interactive dance has recently attracted great interest in the performing arts. While utilizing motion capture technology, the goal of this project was to design the necessary real-time motion analysis engine, staging, and communication systems for the completion of a movement-based interactive multimedia dance performance. The movement analysis engine measured the correlation of dance movement between three people wearing similar sets of retro-reflective markers in a motion capture volume. This analysis provided the framework for the creation of an interactive dance piece, Lucidity, which will be described in detail. Staging such a work also presented additional challenges. These challenges and our proposed solutions will be discussed. We conclude with a description of the final work and a summary of our future research objectives.

In this paper, we report a real-time gesture driven interactive system with multimodal feedback for performing arts, especially dance. The system consists of two major parts., a gesture recognition engine and a multimodal feedback engine. The gesture recognition engine provides real-time recognition of the performer's gesture based on the 3D marker coordinates from a marker-based motion capture system. According to the recognition results, the multimodal feedback engine produces associated visual and audio feedback to the performer. This interactive system is simple to implement and robust to errors in 3D marker data. Satisfactory interactive dance performances have been successfully created and presented using the reported system