Loyal Heights Elementary

This year I have been doing an artist-in-residency at Loyal Heights Elementary in Ballard. We're creating troll masks and giant puppets for the Syttende Mai (or Norwegian Heritage) parade in May. The theme is Norse Mythology and I've been doing the masks with K - 2nd and giant puppets with the 3rd - 5th graders. Some of the characters the students are making are Jorgamund the Midgard Serpent, the Fenris Wolf, Odin, Idun, Hel, and several others. It's been quite the mix of art, engineering, group problem solving, and most importantly, working together. Parent and teacher support has been phenomenal, and the students have been producing some phenomenal work. These photos give some examples of the progress that the kids have been making over the past several weeks. The school also benefits from a well organized Artist-in-Residence program. Our project was recently featured in an article in the Ballard News Tribune. Additional pictures can be seen at my Photobucket site.

3D Shadow Dancing in Bellevue

Another recent gig was an assembly program at Tyee Middle School. A couple of months ago I was asked to present a 90 minute assembly program for nearly 300 6th graders. I was contacted because of programs I had done for the King County Library System, and the teachers were looking for some sort of science content. I was a bit stumped for a bit, as I don't generally do assembly programs, but then I decided that a 3D shadow dance performance followed by hands-on activities would be the way to go. A couple of the 6th graders even volunteered to do the dancing!

The dance performance was a bit hit, I'm having trouble posting it here, but you can see it on youtube, http://www.youtube.com/my_videos?pi=0&ps=20&sf=added&sa=0&sq=&dm=1

After the dance portion, I did some activities with the whole group on blind spots and stereovision, using handouts I had prepared. One of these is a version of a RDS (random dot stereogram) that I made using the letters on a computer keyboard. After that, the students split up into smaller groups, and we did some cooperative activities for the rest of the time.

Here's my stereogram. To try it out, click on the image to enlarge, and cross your eyes just enough so that the repeating characters line up. If you can do this successfully, you should get the depth effect.

How this works is that the image is made up of mostly repeating characters. Along certain points, some characters have been removed; and in other places, added. When you cross your eyes and look at the image, in most places your eyes are seeing the same things in the same place. But here and there, different images line up. This confuses your brain temporarily. But your brain doesn't like confusion, it likes order; so it creates an explanation, that there is a difference in depth to explain the difference in what is seen. Whether the perceived depth of the image seems to come in or go out depends on whether the characters have been added or deleted. The easiest place to see this is in the row of numbers, where I have removed the "0", then replaced it with an "X". This is where the line of depth occurs. If you are able to diverge your eyes, you can get the depth effect in the opposite direction.