Artbotics participants are busy working on their art and technology projects.

Twenty educators, mainly from state community colleges and universities across Massachusetts, recently gathered for a two-day Artbotics summer workshop hosted by UMass Lowell in collaboration with the Revolving Museum in Lowell.

“The attendees included representatives from Bard College in New York, Hampshire College in Amherst, a 5th-grade teacher from Silver Hill Horace Mann Charter School in Haverhill and an educator from the Adler Planetarium in Chicago,” says Artbotics Project Manager Phyllis Procter.

The Artbotics program, funded by the National Science Foundation, is designed to allow students to explore the intersection between Art and Computer Science, especially robotics, through project-based learning, public exhibitions and service-learning experience. Students learn founding principles in both the fields of art and computer science, and put them into practice by creating interactive, tangible exhibits that are displayed in public settings.

The summer workshop for educators was offered to members of the Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education (CAITE) to show how they can adapt and use Artbotics materials for their own school, university, museum or community group.

Computer Science Assoc. Profs. Holly Yanco and Fred Martin, together with Diana Coluntino, the Revolving Museum’s youth arts program coordinator, and Adam Norton, a UMass Lowell student and instructor at the museum, gave participants two days of intensive hands-on instruction. Each participant used a take-away robotics kit to construct interesting art/technology projects.

The workshop was sponsored by UMass Lowell and CAITE. UMass Lowell is a lead school for the Central Massachusetts Region for CAITE. Other members of the alliance include Bristol Community College, Bunker Hill Community College, Cape Cod Community College, Greenfield Community College, Holyoke Community College, Middlesex Community College, Northern Essex Community College, Springfield Technical Community College, Roxbury Community College, Bridgewater State College, Worcester State College, UMass Amherst, UMass Boston and UMass Dartmouth.

For more information about Artbotics, visit http://artbotics.cs.uml.edu.

- Edwin Aguirre

Educators learn how to program and use low-cost Super Cricket robotics technology for embedded control of their projects.