This course explores the reciprocal relationships among design, science, and technology by covering a wide range of topics including industrial design, architecture, visualization and perception, design computation, material ecology, and environmental design and sustainability. Students will examine how transformations in science and technology have influenced design thinking and vice versa, as well as develop methodologies for design research and collaborate on design solutions to interdisciplinary problems.

This course is built around practical instruction in the design and analysis of non-­digital games. It provides students the texts, tools, references, and historical context to analyze and compare game designs across a variety of genres. In teams, students design, develop, and thoroughly test their original games to better understand the interaction and evolution of game rules. Covers various genres and types of games, including sports, game shows, games of chance, card games, schoolyard games, board games, and role-­playing games.

 Create  100 icons variations that fit a central theme for a Gameboy-style icon set, such foods, hero portraits, spells, enemies, or robots. 

This document provides a template for students to design and execute a three phase project as an alternative to a default 3 phase project. Its original usage was in art, design, and game classes that devided a class quarter into 4 projects, each taking roughly two to three weeks and broken into three default phases (preproduction, revisions, and final.)  Students should start by creating a copy of the example three phase project template and replacing sections with their own project-specific content. This framework pursued educational concepts such as choice-based arts education, teaching for artistic behavior, project-based learning, differentiated instruction and constructivism as natural complements to the process of open pedagogy and non-disposable assignments. 

Students apply their knowledge of constructing and programming LEGO MINDSTORMS (TM)NXT robots to create sumobots - strong robots capable of pushing other robots out of a ring. To meet the challenge, groups follow the steps of the engineering design process and consider robot structure, weight and gear ratios in their designs to make their robots push as hard as possible to force robot opponents out of the ring. A class competition serves as the final test to determine the best designed robot, illustrating the interrelationships between designing, building and programming. This activity gives students the opportunity to be creative as well as have fun applying and combining what they have learned through the previous activities and lessons in this and prior units in the series. A PowerPoint (tm) presentation, pre/post quizzes and a worksheet are provided.