Periodic Reporting for period 2 - iMuSciCA (Interactive Music Science Collaborative Activities)
Reporting period: 2018-07-01 to 2019-06-30
- Develop and explore original and innovative enabling technologies to facilitate open co-creation tools incorporated in music activities to support STEM learning, thus providing indications of the positive impact of art and science interaction on creativity and innovation.
- Develop a set of practical activities to give learners the opportunity to discover about different phenomena/laws of physics, geometry, mathematics and technology through creative music activities, to examine them from various viewpoints and increase integration among various subjects of the curriculum contributing to innovative cross-disciplinary educational approaches.
- Encourage students to engage in innovative interactive music activities with advanced multimodal interfaces that enable them to discover new ways to look at science with the support of creative and artistic interventions, raising their interest in science and technology.
- Enable teachers to design meaningful and engaging project-based, problem-based STEAM learning activities; to reinforce them in producing rewarding and self-fulfilling teaching work by acquiring and integrating innovative and stimulating educational technologies in their teaching practice.
- Provide teachers with a coherent and rigorous set of lesson plans that can inspire them to bring STEAM learning to their classes.
The main outputs of iMuSciCA include:
- A workbench of music activities containing methodological and advocacy tools of advanced enabling technologies to assist learners in developing co-creative processes for STEAM learning.
- Cross-disciplinary lesson plans for secondary education to teach physics, geometry, mathematics and technology combined with creative music activities.
- Professional development material for teachers and educators for adopting innovative STEAM teaching methodology.
With music being one the emerging tools for stimulating learning awareness, the iMuSciCA project develops learning skills associated with both the science of acoustics and the art of music creation. iMuSciCA offers a workbench that allows sonification of audio parameters within a virtual sound-simulation environment for designing virtual music instruments. The sounding-body of an instrument, as the fundamental element of both the nature of sound and that of the art of music making, is placed in the heart of inquiry-based teaching practices concerning sound waves. The workbench explore the direct link between a virtual object and its detailed profile of scientific data that govern its sounding behaviour. An advanced virtual 3D modelling environment connected to real physics and signal processing modules supports teacher’s intention to create an immersive experience of sound production and analysis for the students. Bridging the gap between the typology of physics and the reproduction of its parameters in real life, the lesson plans of iMuSciCA follow the needs of an inquiry-based approach upon this particular curriculum.
Although knowledge and skills of people are important and even necessary, they are not sufficient to create a prosperous society where people are satisfied with their lives. It becomes more and more clear that a key factor to prosperous societies is the room they give to human creativity and expression. This is precisely what iMuSciCA projects provides: it combines the knowledge about STEM with the creativity of building musical instruments that will make musical expression possible. Moreover, by bringing contemporary technologies into the classroom (like gesture recognition and the like) musical expression will become possible also for the ones not so gifted in music. This opening to co-creation is just made possible by modern technology, a typical STEM subject. So a double intertwining is incorporated in iMuSciCA as it connects creativity and art to STEM precisely by means of STEM. Art and STEM resonate to each other and show how the creativity of art is fostered into creativity of STEAM. The pedagogy of iMuSciCA and the implementation in pilot testing in real classroom setting reflects the co-creative interplay between art and science in society.