RUI: Giving the Maestro a Human Heart. Fostering Creativity in a Multi-Disciplinary Undergraduate Environment

PI和她的团队将在新泽西学院为科学学院、工程学院和艺术与传播学院的学生创建、评估、修改和重复一个为期两学期的多学科本科研究研讨会，通过鼓励创新的解决问题的方法来培养创造力、科学方法和计算思维。研讨会的参与者将合作设计和构建人工系统，这些系统不仅可以指挥管弦乐队，还可以对音乐家做出反应和回应。项目成果将包括将机器人指挥家的物理手臂运动与动画视觉显示相结合的系统，该系统提供类似于人类指挥家面部表情的反馈，从而赋予机器人指挥家“一颗人类的心脏”。为了实现这一目标，PI团队将采用一种新的协作学习模式，这种模式直接源于PI团队成员的研究兴趣和专业知识，而不是主要集中在教学问题上的传统方法。学生们将学到两种以前与提高创造力有关的行为：协作和计算思维。课程设置还将用于分析创造性、协作性和认知过程。该课程将专门针对奖励创造力，并将通过共识评估技术比较最终产品。广泛影响：该项目将通过整合研究和教学改变PI团队各自领域的教学文化，并将成为学术环境中跨学科合作的典范。它将把教职员工和学生聚集在一起，在本科教育的创新结构内进行有意义的合作，该结构以计算机科学和工程的新颖应用为特色，因此将有助于增加招生、留住学生和对这些领域的普遍兴趣。它将培养和奖励创造力，鼓励学生超越各自学科的明确界限，为获得更大回报而冒险；同时，分析性评估将在本科生协作解决问题的环境中提高我们对创造性过程的理解。最后但并非最不重要的一点是，这项研究通过赋予艺术组织一个新的角色，使其成为科学和工程的推动者，从而展示了振兴艺术组织的希望。

The PI and her team will create, evaluate, revise and repeat a two-semester multi-disciplinary undergraduate research seminar at The College of New Jersey for students from the Schools of Science, Engineering, and Arts & Communication, that fosters creativity, scientific methods, and computational thinking, by encouraging novel problem-solving approaches. Participants in the seminar will collaboratively design and build artificial systems that can not only conduct an orchestra, but that also react and respond to the musicians. Project outcomes will consist of systems that combine the physical arm movements of a robotic conductor with animated visual displays that provide feedback similar to the facial expression of a human conductor, thus giving the robotic conductor "a human heart." To achieve this goal the PI team will employ a new model for collaborative learning that stems directly from the research interests and expertise of the members of the PI team, unlike traditional approaches that concentrate mainly on pedagogical issues. Students will learn two behaviors that have been previously tied to increased creativity: collaboration and computational thinking. The course setting will also be used to analyze the creative, collaborative and cognitive processes. The course will be specifically geared toward rewarding creativity, and will compare final products through the consensual assessment technique.Broader Impacts: The project will change the teaching culture in the PI team's respective fields by integrating research and teaching, and will serve as a model for cross-disciplinary collaboration in an academic environment. It will bring together faculty and students for meaningful collaborative work within an innovative structure for undergraduate education that features novel applications of computer science and engineering, and which will therefore contribute to an increase in enrollment, retention and general interest in these areas. It will foster and reward creativity, by encouraging students to reach beyond the well-defined boundaries of their individual disciplines and take risks for the promise of larger rewards; at the same time, the analytical assessments will improve our understanding of creative processes within an undergraduate collaborative problem-solving environment. Last but not least, this research holds out the promise of rejuvenating arts organizations, by affording them a new role as motivators for science and engineering.