NYC High Schoolers Create Tech-Based Art in STEAM Workshops with Steinhardt

Over the course of eight sessions, students learned programming, art, and storytelling skills via games and exercises that explored the past and future of play.

This year, students were asked to explore the theme of play, sharing memories and past trends while imagining how emerging technologies might affect the evolution of games going forward. Each student worked on two different teams to create installations that depicted play in the past on one side and play in the future on the other.

Ninth-grader Shakira said she drew upon her own early childhood memories for her first team’s installation, which showed outside play in the early 2000s alongside technology from that time period. “We would play outside and then we would come back inside to play a board game on my cousins' tablet,” she recalls.

When looking ahead to the future, her second team created a scene showing how technology affects nature.

“We basically destroyed a park…it went from having monkey bars to a swing set, to a little basketball hoop, to having lights everywhere, a street, a Tesla, and a robo-bunny…It was kind of sad,” Shakira recalled in a CWP workshop reflection assignment.

The program was created in 2018 by Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interactions Kayla DesPortes with Steinhardt research scientist Francis Castro and Michele Kotler, CWP’s founder and executive director. DesPortes was interested in furthering her research on supporting learners’ experiences with technology and Kotler, alongside former CWP Program Director David King, aimed to counter the narrative that young people’s relationship with tech is defined solely by anxiety, depression, and isolation.

About 90 students have gone through the CWP workshop since it started. It’s part STEAM exploration and part research study, with Steinhardt researchers collecting qualitative data on the students’ experiences, what they learned, how they’re expressing themselves, and the kinds of objects they’re creating. Ali led the workshop last year with doctoral student Cass Sheirer and teaching artists Elizabeth Leonard and Mayele Alognon.

“CWP 2.0 gives young people the opportunity to activate their creativity using emerging tools in a university setting,” says Kotler. “On day one, students were new to each other, the campus environment, and machine learning. By the end of the intensive, they were creative partners presenting collaborative, physical-computing projects that celebrated their new skills and relationships. This year, their exploration around AI, play, and imagination offered everyone—educators and artists included—an eye-opening view into how this generation experiences a pivotal time and how they want to reimagine their future.”

Over the course of eight sessions, 16 students participated in a mix of arts and science activities at the NYU Makerspace at Tandon. Ali and her colleagues started the sessions with games, such as Pictionary, to encourage socialization and inspire creativity, and then transitioned into skill-building exercises for their final projects. Students learned to create electrical components that move or light up using circuit boards, and how to use a circular device called a radial menu for additional programming commands.

While Steinhardt led the tech lessons, Community-Word Project led the creative assignments in which students responded to writing prompts, made collages, and ran relays—rushing to a piece of paper, for example, to jot down an A-to-Z list of words for games and play spaces.

“Knowing that students were coming from various backgrounds and had strengths amongst different disciplines, my goal was to make art-making fun and accessible,” says Mayele Alognon, a teaching artist at CWP. “Being grounded on the theme of play, games and friendly competition were integrated into the art-making, encouraging students to make use of strange and unfamiliar found objects like cassette tapes, ceramic tiles, and metal scraps, along with more traditional art supplies.”

“They'd been making a lot of little art pieces, doing some laser cuttings and 3D printing, putting it together,” says Ali. “They programmed their boards, which is the thing that controls the inputs and outputs, and there was a lot of debugging because things would go wrong. Mentors worked with them both on the art pieces as well as the tech pieces.”

At the end of the program, students showed off their work to an audience of parents and additional members of the CWP.

“I feel like this program really allowed me to think outside the box because usually I’m not that creative a person and I'm more like a tech guy,” shared 11th-grader Nabil. “I feel like I'm modeling and designing, and especially, I like the way we cover both the past and the future because I feel like for me, the future is kind of scary because you never know what AI and technology could really do. So, I feel like it's better to start thinking about it now than before it's too late.”