AME’s SMALLab featured in Education Week article

The Arts, Media and Engineering (AME) program is featured in the April 8, 2009 print edition of Education Week. The “High-Tech simulations linked to learning,” article includes insight from David Birchfield, assistant AME professor and driving force behind the SMALLab (Situated Multimedia Art Learning Lab) project, which helps K-12 students learn in an immersive way in an interactive environment. The article also includes comments from students and teachers at Coronado High School in Scottsdale, Ariz., where a SMALLab permanently is installed in one of its classrooms. 

SMALLab’s physical interaction space is a cube that is 12-feet tall and 15-feet wide on all four sides. Groups of students learn together through complex problem solving. A computer tracks students’ movements and gestures as they interact with digital graphics projected beneath their feet, while dynamic surround sound envelops the space – their bodies become part of the computer interface.

AME is a collaborative initiative between the Herberger College of the Arts and the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, which provides transdisciplinary graduate degrees and conducts research in experiential media. AME incorporates the combined expertise of 14 departments and 49 faculty members from across the university to offer a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences, as well as 15 concentrations in degrees of collaborating units spanning arts, sciences and engineering. AME faculty and students develop and apply rapidly changing technology to enhance education, health and everyday living. For more information about AME, visit http://ame.asu.edu.

Note: Watch a KAET ASU Research Review segment that features SMALLab here:  http://herbergercollege.asu.edu/innovation/smallab2008.php. Read more about SMALLab in the “STEM picks up speed” article in the Jan. 2009 edition of the T.H.E. Journal: http://www.thejournal.com/articles/23776.

Read a Herberger College of the Arts press release about SMALLab’s nearly $600,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation: http://herbergercollege.asu.edu/news/press_release.php?id=664.