Dr. Kylie Peppler of UC Irvine joins the podcast to discuss the deep connections between art, technology, and learning. She explores how playful learning—from toys to AI—can foster creativity and student agency. Dr. Peppler also offers educators a framework for embracing AI as a creative tool rather than something to fear.

• Connected Arts Learning: Peppler, K., Dahn, M., & Ito, M. (2023). The Connected Arts Learning Framework: An expanded view of the purposes and possibilities for arts 99learning. The Wallace Foundation.
• Recrafting Computer Science: Speer, S., Huang, J., Yankova, N., Rose, C., Peppler, K., Orta-Martinez, M. (2023) RoboLoom: An Open-Source Loom Kit for Interdisciplinary Engagement in Math, Engineering, and Textiles. The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) 2023. San Francisco, CA.
• StoryAI: Han, A., Zhou, X., Cai, Z., Han, S., Ko, R., Corrigan, S., & Peppler, K. 2024. Teachers, Parents, and Students’ Perspectives on Integrating Generative AI into Elementary Literacy Education.
• STEAM: Peppler, K., & Thompson, N. (2024). Tools and materials as non-neutral actors in STEAM education. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 1-38
• E-textiles: Peppler, K. & Bender, S. (2013). Maker movement spreads innovation one project at a time. Phi Delta Kappan, 95(3), pp. 22-27.
• Scratch (scratch.mit.edu): Peppler, K. (2010). Media arts: Arts education for a digital age. Teachers College Record, 112(8), 2118–2153.
• Connected Learning Lab - UC Irvine, research institute bringing together researchers across social, cultural, and technical fields, currently focused on: Digital Wellbeing, Research-Practice Partnerships, Neurodiversity and Learning, and Growing Up with AI.
• Build Lab, program at St Christopher’s School combining the best of STEM/STEAM approaches with a broad, skills-based, project-centered focus
• ATLIS AI resources
• Christina’s husband Richard’s grandfather, Verne Lewellen, Green Bay Packer | Photo of Richard with cousins

Dan, welcome to Talking technology with ATLIS,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now please welcome your host. Christina Lewellen,

Hello everyone, and welcome back to

talking technology with ATLIS. I'm Christina Lewellen. I'm the

president and CEO of the Association of technology

leaders in independent

schools. And I am Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey,

and I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of

Information Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher

school in Richmond, Virginia. Hello.

Good afternoon. Welcome back, guys.

How are you today? Doing well. Doing better today. Good. I'm so

glad we are recording on a Monday afternoon. I know many

people listen to this in the morning when we drop so if

you're listening in the morning, good morning, but it's a Monday,

and you guys certainly look a little more smiley than the last

time I saw you. Did you have a good weekend?

Yes, I had my youngest. Craig. Just turned 21

happy birthday, Craig. Happy birthday. Craig, and we brought

him home and celebrate it in appropriate Stites fashion. So

it went quite well, which meant whiskey. Well, maybe, maybe not.

You know, he is 21 so I can probably say definitively, yes,

there was some whiskey involved. There was some time at the Irish

Pub, and there were three days of celebrating, because no

birthday should be celebrated on just one day. It should be

celebrated across multiple days. The other thing that's got me

smiling is this is weekend two of the smoked meat Palooza that

has been going on at my house, I've been throwing down ribs and

pork butts and making all sorts of pulled pork and other things

where my oldest doesn't let it kind of leave any portion of the

house. I can't bring any to anyone, because he devours it

all within the course of a day or two. And that's a lot of pork

to be ingested by any one human. But he seems to be doing okay.

That's hard to top.

I mean, that sounds really exciting. What do

you got, Hiram, we

actually spent a pleasant weekend at Parents

Weekend up at Virginia Tech, where you got to visit our

daughter, who is in the architecture school up there.

And while she is not an avid football fan, we did this, got

had a chance to spend a good deal of time in her studio, to

see a lot of the work that she's doing. And it's true to form,

engineers and architects students are working all the

time, regardless if there's a game going on. That studio was

packed with students. We were thrilled to see her, and it was

nice to get out of Richard for a few days.

That's awesome. Well, I also just want

to quickly mention kind of a highlight of my weekend. I don't

know if I've mentioned it on this podcast before, but did you

guys know that Richard's grandfather played for the Green

Bay Packers. Have I told you all that? Yes. Okay, so what was

kind of cool is that a couple of his cousins were rolling through

the area on the way back toward Green Bay, and so three of Vern

lewellen's grandchildren were together this weekend, my

husband and two of his cousins. There was a lot of talk about

Green Bay Packers and how the team is doing real hard loss

this weekend, tough weekend, tough weekend, to be a Green Bay

fan, but it was really exciting to get them together and to

think about that legacy. They have not seen each other. In

particular, Richard has not seen one of his cousins for about 50

years. And so they got together and had a blast like it was

nothing. My god, yeah, it was really cool. They look a lot

alike, too. I'm wondering if we should drop a pic on the show

notes, because

definitely, especially if you got a picture

of your grandfather in his uniform.

Ooh, that's a good idea, too. I'll have to

dig one out. Okay, cool guys. So hey, look, it is time for us to

dig into our episode today. I'm really excited we have another

really cool guest. This was a neat one you guys, because over

the summer, we did ATLIS AI workshop. And I know we talk a

lot about that, but this is kind of an interesting angle to think

about things from the technology vantage point, also some arts

vantage points, which I know is something bill, that you have a

background in. So today we welcome to the pod. Dr Kylie

pepler, she is a professor of informatics and education at the

University of California Irvine. Dr pepler, thank you for joining

us today. Thank you, Christina, it's so awesome to have you

here. You direct the creativity labs. You're the co director of

the connected learning lab. You research in the space of the

intersection of arts, as I mentioned, and new technology

learning ecosystems. You have this focus on creative aspects

of maker center practices, and so our members. Touch a lot of

that stuff. So can you start by just telling us a little bit

about what your area of focus and research is? I'm also

curious about what the connected learning lab is.

Ah, well, my area of research really brings

together my interest in the arts and new technologies together.

And so we we actually have a black box theater, that when you

walk in, you actually get to see a lot of our projects in action.

And so you'll see Jaccard looms that many of our undergraduates

have put together, and then they're printing textiles as

part of their undergraduate coursework and engineering and

computer science and learning about color theory of textiles

and so forth. In another quarter, you're going to see a

lot of the electronic textiles work that we do where you're

embedded wearable computers and where dancers can actually

control the composition of the music. Other collaborations that

we've had with industry partners, like Merlin mind,

where we've helped them to develop an AI assistive device

that's in classrooms and so forth. And so we really sort of

bring creativity, and I think a need in today's classrooms that

we try to solve to make learning more fun but also higher quality

throughout

that's really cool. So how did you walk

this path? We can definitely come back to the creativity labs

and the connected learning lab. I'm curious about like, where

did this come from in you?

Well, one of my earliest memories, I knew I

wanted to be a toy designer. I just loved the way, you know,

toys operated, you know. And, you know, I think the inner

educator in me was like, wait, you can learn a lot from these

toys, you know, you can learn a lot from all of these things

that are sitting in your toy cabinet. And so my friends would

always remember that I'd have this, like, Museum of Toys when

they came over. And a lot of that I was just really

interested in creating and making things that led me into

the arts, and particularly in sculpture. And so my undergrad

degree is in fine arts. And so how do I think about designing

the world around us? And how do we think about designing

educational experience? So a lot of my work was installation

based, at our performative as a way and, you know, an invitation

to play and to learn. And so when I was applying to graduate

school, I was kind of thinking about, how can I take that

passion around the arts? You know, unlike a lot of my peers,

I wasn't drawn to like producing art for museums, but really

these experiences. And so how can I think about an applied

version of that. And so I sort of brought my interest in

education and the learning together with the arts. And I

was at UCLA, studying with Dr James Catterall for folks that

are in the arts education landscape. And it just really

fell in love with the work that we were doing. But throughout

all of that, I kept trying to invent the tools, materials that

I would have loved to have had at my fingertips, you know. So

as an educator, you're always looking for that new thing that

would help you devise the thing you always wanted to create. And

so now I get to do exactly that.

That is really cool. What an interesting

kind of a unique approach to art and being involved in fine arts.

Okay, so now let's go back to the connected learning lab, tell

us a little bit about that. The connected learning lab

is a larger group of about 40 faculty here at the

University of California Irvine. We're called an organizational

Research Unit, and so it's like a research institute here on the

campus, and it's meant to sort of bring cross sector

collaborations amongst faculty, but also cross sector outside of

the university together as well. And so we have several strands

of work. The creativity Labs is one of those 40 labs within

that. And we start to work. How can we get schools working with

out of school sectors, with museums, with industry partners,

with future workforce, with artists, you know, all of those

things. There's a lot of barriers from the way we've set

things up traditionally to that type of collaboration. And so a

while back, the MacArthur Foundation did a $250 million

investment in this new area of digital media learning, and

connected learning was both the theory and the practice that

grew out of that portfolio over time, and many of us that have

been part of that connected learning research network, it's

an international network. Have actually relocated here to UCI,

to really be in residence and to work together towards a sort of

global mission of change.

That's really cool. I know Bill has a

background in art, and he is also a teacher and then later

became a technology director. And so I can imagine that

there's some connections there. But can you help draw a line for

me between work in stem the a of steam, I guess, as some schools

are approaching it. So in other words, what does art have to do

with technology?

It's always been really entwined with technology.

I think any true inventor is really an artist, in a sense. I

think about Leonardo da Vinnie. You think about all of these

folks that have been artists, but see things in a new light.

And so, you know, almost all of the new technology has presented

us with sort of an artful engagement of. Of how we

interact with the world, right? And so, you know, the pieces

that I think Captivate us the most. I mean, I remember the

iPhone came out and just being able to use touch on that

screen, you know, it was just so exciting, and this new way of

interacting. But I think almost all of our technologies are kind

of that way, right? They're sort of born of an artist envisioning

a new way, a new relationship between us and the screen. You

know, sometimes you see artists playing around instead of having

the cursor follow your viewpoint, maybe the whole

screen follows. So there's lots of different ways of rethinking

our everyday experiences in artful ways. I think, for us, as

we look at Steam, it's not just an extra. It's not just like the

cherry on top of why we engage in STEM work. It's actually what

pushes the deeper engagement in all of the technology, but

science and engineering and mathematics as well. And I can

give you a lot of examples of that.

I've always appreciated just the creativity

aspect of it, when you bring that into your work, having that

mindset, that artist mindset, that creative mindset, bringing

that into work in technology, I think, helps in the

arts, but also in sciences, we learn a lot about

the creative mindset, right? And so like in engineering classes,

we'll push for these divergent moments of creativity, right?

Where you're just brainstorming as many possibilities, and, you

know, in design thinking or these other places, we want to

withhold judgment, but that's because we're encouraging wide

creative solutions, and so often, I mean, when you look at

our creative process, we jump in and we snag the first thing. And

you can notice this in your everyday you can notice this in

the classroom, but oftentimes we try to be expedient with our

time, so it seems like we're going to lead to a better

solution if we just get started right away. Started right away,

and kind of ignoring that impulse, letting ourselves kind

of brainstorm and go through that divergent process is really

important. And then I think the arts also teaches us to really

look at and evaluate those things, and not just come in

with our preconceptions, but really see how the worst idea

out there could actually be really good. And so this moment

of like critique or exploration, where you stay with this

divergence and you explore that this idea could be really good.

And that's one of the things I learned in my background in the

arts and in visual arts, we call this critique, right, you know?

And so this moments of crit at the end of the course is that

the projects I thought were completely unsuccessful, but the

more we unpack them and we talked about the possibility

space, the more I saw, Oh, actually, I just missed that. I

didn't see how this could become really amazing, because think

about the culture of that is really great, then we have to

converge. We've got to pick something and dive into it. We

can't stay with the million possibilities we need to

actually start to build so that convergent process can be

really, really important too.

What's interesting here at St Christopher is we

have a program that's not called steam or stem. It's actually

called build, and it's boys using innovation to learn and

design. It's essentially branded that way, because we are an old

boy school. And what's been really nice about this

particular course, which has a strand that goes across all

three of our divisions, the lower middle and the Upper

School. Its home is in the arts, and it's designed that way

intentionally because we have found that that particular

course and that strand allows our boys to experience a lack of

fear of failure, because they are trying all these different

ways as they go through the design thinking process in

particular, and you may fail several times, but it's joyful

to see that they're not so much worried about the grade at that

point, Because that's not where the emphasis is, and that

creative process is so invaluable in other areas that

they don't see it until a little bit later, as they mature and

they realize how important the arts are.

Yeah, I see that all the time, even in higher

education, you know, because we get the students that have just

been stressed out trying to get the right answer, you know, all

of the standardized tests and the other portion, and you know,

the pressures that the kids have right now to get into college

and all of these things right, the grades and the other

portions are just so important. But just learning how to fail

and how to recover, you know, to be that boomerang that kind of

comes back is so important because we we all will fail, you

know, and we want to fail quickly, actually, so we can

stand up and get to the right answer. But the amount of tears

I even see in my undergraduate courses is just really hard. But

part of that emotional development is just actually

it's okay, let's try it again, you know? And part of what we've

been doing in grading in my courses is just really doing

competency based education. And so if you get it right the first

time, great, but if it takes you 100 times, that's great. 100

times, that's great. And can both get an A right and so

really allotting those points in a way that pushes towards that

solution space and extra credit comes from thinking outside the

box and coming up with something that nobody else has ever come

up with.

So ever since you observed the Learn.

Playing that comes from toys, which is interesting, because

obviously that is very apparent when kids are little, but maybe

we get away from that as we get a little older.

Who are you kidding? Who are you kidding on

that? Oh, are you still

playing with toys? I love my toys. Okay, I

got a whole shelf. Okay.

Hiram is a big fan of you and your work, then here we go. So

you're blending arts computation and this idea of informal

learning in your research, and it obviously is an interest of

yours. But then can you help us understand how that shows up in

practice?

You mean how learning shows up in just

playful learning?

Yeah, I think so. I think it's one thing

to research it. But then where do we actually see that? And

where would you like to see more of that? Yeah, so we see it

all the time, and actually, early childhood

research is really great, you know? So when you look at kids

at play shoots the ladders, for example, have a lot better sense

of number sense and timeline development. Kids that play with

toy cars, for example, have a better sense of physics because

they're rolling down, and they have a sense that, you know, the

heavier weighted car is going to go further down the ramp, and

kind of all of the aerodynamics that are involved and so forth,

right? So almost all of our toys teach something, and that's

where I think, as a learning scientist, I think about

anything we do teaches us something. Everything we

interact teaches us something, but it may not be well aligned

with what we hope the kids will learn. And so there could be a

lot of distractions out there. There could be things that we

don't want to see happen. So I want to give you an example of

like, we were playing with squishy circuits, and we were in

an early childhood classroom. And so, you know, there were

some kids that were there, and they would come over to the

table and they would play with these squishy circuits. And for

folks that don't know squishy circuits, this is a circuitry,

you know, so it's basically like a nine volt battery, kind of

it's all enclosed, so the kids can't hurt themselves regular

Play Doh, because you can make your Play Doh, or you could find

it off the shelf, and then there's wires, but there's a

motor and other kinds of things as well. But you know, most of

you probably had an experience with a nine volt battery, and

like, a little like, and like a little light bulb that would

light up, and then you put your alligator clips in between. But

instead of having alligator clips, you actually use the salt

based dough to conduct electricity down to turn on the

light bulbs of this case, little LEDs. And then you can do all

sorts of really creative things with this. And you know, it was

really fun seeing this in early childhood class, because it's

the kids that come to the table first. So let me set up a system

kids that are like, Yes, I'll be there, right? And then, you

know, as we added more colors of dough and other things, we got

the arts kids that just wanted to squeeze the dough and to make

different things and play with different things. And then we

added little figurines, so like from Dora, or other types of

narratives. And then it was almost everybody came to the

table, and it was because we added narrative, and then the

motor became a helicopter for Dora and Boots to escape, right?

So all of these ways of playing, as we added Dora, they were

learning about how to construct a narrative and how to tell a

story, right? As the arts kids were playing with the dough,

they were learning about color theory and what that meant to

interchange right. As the kids were playing with circuits, they

started understanding the big ideas of circuits that actually

evade college students and adults alike, you know. So if I

asked you what the big ideas of circuitry were, almost everybody

would draw a blank, right, unless you're an electrical

engineer by trade. But these kids, in three to five years

old, were able to nail it and really give the college students

a run for their money.

That's really neat.

As we're moving into this era. You know, the guys jokingly say

to me, sometimes, Christina, if we've got to talk about AI one

more time, because they just live it. They're swimming in

this pool all day, every day at their schools, as are many of

our technology leaders. So that you understand Kylie, I think

part of where our technology leaders are struggling is that

they're not just coming to the table being asked to define AI

from a safety and technological standpoint, but a lot of times,

whether they have the experience and background or not, our tech

directors are also being asked to guide some pedagogy decisions

and some academic integrity decisions and things like that.

And so from your vantage point in the work that you do, can you

tell me about what you're observing when it comes to this

advanced acceleration of AI in the classroom and for teachers,

but in particular for the classroom,

yeah, it's tricky, and I think we're all in

this together in terms of that landscape is quickly changing.

So there's not a stagnancy where we can say AI is plateaued. And

this is what you can expect. You know, take creative music

writing software. You know, I'm married to composer, and

probably a month ago, we would have said, AI is not very good

at composing music, you know. Can kind of pick out different

melodies and put things together and so forth. And then a new

platform was released, and it was really frighteningly good

songs with, like, really terrible prompt programming can,

like, you know, we just put in just the worst prompt and see

what kind of music could actually come out of. Something

about, you know, a dog on the beach and Afro beats, you know,

for example, and it was a completely coherent song that

has even a catchy refrain. So this is going to be a challenge

for all of us, right? So my philosophy is really, instead of

hiding from it, right? Is really trying to embrace it as an

educator and trying to make it part of the creative process, so

exploring those tools. So for the first time this year, I do a

ubiquitous computing course, and so the students create about 40

different IoT devices, and they have to design their own

Internet of Things device at the end. But this year, we actually

worked with AI to produce different things, or to imagine

or envision different projects, the same with some of the other

courses on Digital Media and Learning with kids, right? And

so just using it as an opportunity to explore the

platform. What can you create with this music software? What

can you create with the other platforms? And again, ATLIS, you

guys have been doing a great job of just encouraging that. And so

I encourage all of your educators to say yes to this,

because it can be really scary, but this is like a really safe

community to just try one of the challenges out, right that come

across your inbox, and even if you hate it. You know, my son is

a writer, and he's in theater, he just is rejecting AI, but to

kind of know what it does and when you have a deep knowledge

of your craft, right? And this is where, as educators, you're

teaching students a very deep knowledge of the craft. It

becomes another tool that they're going to be able to use

and to refine. But my son, being a good writer, he can tell when

a text is created with AI, right? Like, he could just tell

that that's not the voice. Like, even if I create something in AI

and I send it to him like a template for something or

something else, he'll like you created that AI, and he's always

right. He can just see right through it. So as you're working

with students, know that you're preparing them to enter into

this world and to make those decisions. But I think it's

important to stay present to the extent that you know what it's

capable of and you're able to shepherd the kids through this

because it is yet another large stressor for them in that high

school experience, especially

hearing you talk about this, jumping in, giving

the shot, playing with it, just experimenting with it. We're in

a position where we're fortunate enough to be able to do that.

There's not a lot of risk. I'm not standing in front of a

classroom of students on a day to day basis doing this. And I

think about those teachers. My wife is a teacher. Hiram's wife

is a teacher. My wife teaches Spanish, and she is a very good

Spanish teacher, and she knows her content, and she spent years

studying that content to be confident enough to go in there.

How do you talk to educators about finding the time, finding

the wellness, finding the courage to take on AI? Because,

you know, I think about the things I'm trying to be mindful

of, and trying to figure out here in terms of, like, what are

our guidelines for use? What are we allowing? What are we not

allowing? Because teachers are looking for some guardrails

because they don't have that confidence to go into it in an

open ended sense. So how do you talk to those that you're

working with, those educators that you get a chance to speak

to? How are you talking about this with them and just opening

themselves up to it? And

it's not just AI, right? It's almost any new

technology we've seen the same. You know, it was not too long

ago we were talking about coding for all, or we're talking about

engineering practices. I think anything that we haven't

experienced as a learner can be really, really difficult. So one

of the things that I like to do, I try to target teachers that

during like professional development, just to create a

safe space and so forth, so that we're exploring. Sometimes I

don't even have enough time to explore something, so I assign

it as an assignment to my students, and then we sit and

debrief it and what happened. So for example, like, why not have

the students work on, like, an AI policy, right? Like they can

look at policies that exist, policies that they'd like to see

what should happen. There could be students exploring AI for

music and composition, or AI for writing stories or for creating

comic strips or things like that. And so part of the safety

is setting it up. Like, I just make it really clear what I know

and what I don't know. As an educator, like, I don't know

anything about this. I haven't even tried these platforms,

guys, but I think it's really important we do this and why,

and just sending them out there and then kind of coming back

with this result. Or, if you're in charge of the technology

training at the school, you know, kind of setting that up,

but with all adults, you know, if you're really worried about

what the kids might come up with on some of these platforms, you

know, sitting in the room and just kind of having the grace

that we're just going to treat ourselves like a child, right,

that we're just going to see and sometimes, if you make it the

worst thing right, like, who can come up with the worst plot, or

who can come up with the worst possible, you know, rather than

always the best, right, we always kind of have this

pressure to come up with something good. Small groups can

also be helpful. So I think there's a lot of ways to take.

Take that pressure. I think the solution depends on your group.

You know, if you've got a very social group, the collaboration

can be really good. I've done like aI script writing in small

groups, you know, just adults. And these were just adults from

the community that had no idea what AI was and were really

scared. They barely use Google search, you know. But they were

interested. They wanted to know what this thing was about. And

then, kind of, the safety of having a group of three or four

or five people working together towards an end could be really

useful. You know, the folks that are just limited on time finding

a block where you're going to have them anyway to explore,

it'll depend. There's never one size solution for all. But I

think, think about what's the chief barrier and what would be

the chief motivator, and going after those two things,

I'm so glad you brought up creating the worst

possible whatever it happens to be. It reminds me of an activity

we did called the lousy PowerPoint and talk about

behavior modification. After watching 10 lousy PowerPoint

presentations, our boys knew exactly what to avoid, with all

sorts of things bouncing around all over the place, contrasting

colors and whatnot that were inappropriate, etc. But in terms

of many of these creative approaches and Creative

Technologies, can you talk a little bit more about how this

has the capacity to foster youth, Agency for our students,

Agency for me, always comes when somebody has

an opportunity to create something, you know, back in the

early days, I was on the early design and study of the scratch

platform, before it was a thing. This is, you know, back in the

early 2000s and so that was my part of my dissertation work.

And so I knew we had something with Scratch when they said it

was like the kids were describing it like paper, and

they could make whatever they wanted, right, you know? And it

definitely exceeded all of our expectations. But it was

exciting in that scratch work, my postdoctoral work was

actually the first time we brought it into the classroom. I

brought it into a classroom. We were noticing the scratch was

working really well, particularly with kids that were

below grade level in their reading and so forth. And some

of the teachers I was working with, they had a large number of

kids that were labeled as special needs. And so it seems

almost antithetical to sort of bring in one of the first

computer science applications and have kids that are

struggling in reading and writing. But what we had them do

was create projects with their name, for example. So they just

imported a, you know, for those folks that don't know, scratch

it just the characters of their name. And then they had to make

each one of those characters do something different. So it would

be k, y, l, I, E, and my k might turn 90 degrees when the space

key is pressed and change color by 10 and and kind of go through

a rainbow, and, you know, each one of the letters would do

something new, and the kids, they all had a great time with

it. But the thing that really struck me is when we got to the

parent teacher meetings, we sat down, and it was in a math class

and a creative writing course, and the parents just went into

tears because it was the first time that they had seen

something that actually reflected the child that they

knew at home, right? And it just, you know, the kids are in

second grade, so we're still not out of that early childhood

experience. It just struck me that so often we worry about

getting it right, that we forget about the agency of the kids,

about expressing who they are, about that deeper knowing that a

parent has of a child, and creating those creative

opportunities to showcase that. And so for me, my epistemology

about learning is really deeply rooted in constructionist

theory. And so for listeners that know about Seymour Papert

and sort of the MIT Media Lab tradition, everything is just

about creating and making something. And you think about

the things that really mean a lot to us, you know, the things

you hold on to that you keep in your child's portfolio, a lot of

times it's the art, it's the pot that they made, and the things

that you end up disposing of are the Math Worksheets or the other

kinds of pieces, right? And so as your stem technology

coordinators, the maker spaces, these are things that will hold

deep value in families, right? Because they represent that

agency, that directionality, that only that child could

actually take and act on the world. And I think they could

see it too. If what I make really reflects me and what I

like and what I know about the world, I'm more attached to this

piece even just the IKEA challenge. If I made it, I

didn't even design the Ikea furniture, but I put it

together, I feel it has more value. And so in creativity

research, we talk about kind of small c creativity versus large

C creativity, right? So small c meaning it's kind of new to me

and maybe new to our family, and maybe something I haven't done

before, but the big C creativity kind of being like maybe the

world hasn't seen before. But the small See, creativity is not

to be ignored, right? It's the thing that gives you that

agency, that makes you feel like you could change the world, that

you end up with the portfolio that reflects you.

So to that end, AI is impacting so many different

areas, and it's impacting the arts in a lot of different ways.

And I would think about, you know, talking to people. About

art, and they're like, I can't draw. I'm not a good artist, or

I can't do this. And what you said struck me, because if you

can make something, if you can make something, you make it

through AI and a prompt. How does that make you feel as an

artist at that point? Are you an artist at that point and asking

those types of questions? So what do you think the arts? How

does that look moving forward in the age of AI at this point?

Right?

Well, this could be a complicated question, and

the artists are going to help us answer this. Next could be a one

size fits all, because some artists are going to take very

low hanging fruit and create something really beautiful out

of it. It's going to be probably the worst AI are the most basic

AI, and they're going to find some way to subvert that and

make it meaningful and create an expressive use of it. And then,

I think, right now, somebody just told me about Spotify is

about 40% AI produce music already. We'll have to double

check that fact, but it's an absurd amount, right? So is that

art, or is it not? I think in general, we've always found, you

know, this is like thinking about every movement in art,

whether you're talking about Impressionists giving up on

drawing with any type of realism, or thinking about the

abstract expressionists that have simplified the world into

shapes and volumes and so forth. So with all of those movements,

we've always kind of said, Is this art, or is it not? So it is

going to be art. It is going to have an artistic portion, but

not everything produced with AI is art. So how we answer that,

and how we look at the world is going to be important, and how

the kids talk about it as well. I think the one thing that can't

be done and you're going to start, I think seeing a renewed

emphasis on this is the performance, right? So you can

produce a song with AI, and then you could sing that song on

stage, right? But there's something to the actual

performance, and I think that's what's going to draw us back to

the theater, what's going to draw us back to these live

installations and to seeing kids produce something, right?

Because there's going to be, I think, a renewed emphasis on the

performance, on the in person portion, that I think we've been

lacking, I think probably since the times of the pandemic, and

probably before that, you know, everything's been very

touchscreen. So when I give people textures and feels like

with puppetry work and other things that, you know, there's

just a renewed joy that comes from that that I think will be

great for the Arts. I think it's going to put another emphasis on

conversation, on discourse in the classroom, on debates and so

forth, so that live portion, so that you can discern what

happens. In many ways, it's going to take us back to sort of

the Greco Roman roots of our educational system that so much

used to be in that moment. And how do we start to renew that?

Because things done outside the classroom, whether that's

writing or whether that's creating a piece of music, will

be increasingly likely to be informed by AI. It's

really interesting. I feel like you're

truly in this intersectionality of your interests, because you

have this background with fine arts and artistic endeavors. You

have an interest in computer science and technology, and here

we sit in this world where all these things are coming

together. When you popped into ATLIS AI workshop over the

summer, what were some of the high level points that you

wanted to get across to our community, or, I guess, state it

another way, like, what do tech directors and leaders in K 12

education need to be thinking about right now?

Yeah, I think in that talk, we really focused in

on creative opportunities within technology and just different

ways to sort of leverage AI for creative outcomes. It was really

about thinking about AI as a solution space. I mean, there is

a real tension between AI and creativity and how we're going

to navigate that space. And so we really focused on, well, what

is creativity, the definition of it, but then how can we start to

embody that? And just creative exercises or ways that we can

kind of bring that into our educational practice in the

schools. So that whole lecture sort of focused in on that. The

main thing, I think, is, are you making and do you feel that

agency? So if you made something and you're like, I have no

attachment to it. If I could throw it away tomorrow, that's

probably not a creative piece of work. If it's something like,

you're like, No, I can't help but listen to it and like, I

want to add that to my portfolio. And maybe there's

even a little bit of a guilty pleasure about how easy it was,

right? Art isn't necessarily hard, right? Creativity isn't

necessarily hard, but there might be an elegance to the

solution, right? That could be interesting. Humans are really

adaptable, so the more we get exposed to these kinds of

things, the more you're going to see the patterns. You're like,

Oh, that was aI produced, or this other thing. Just think

about like the old like computer graphics, they probably felt new

and fresh. And now we know we associate those with, like, the

early entry of the computer and the 1980s I think part of the

thing is overwhelming is a it's moving so quickly, but we're in

the moment. That's right. So yeah, Christina, I do feel like

a kid in the candy shop, like, that's really fun seeing so many

of these intersections at the same time. We do have to be eyes

wide open about many of these things. I mean, there are a lot

of dangers. Folks saw the recent news story around deception and

AI. So it is trying to, you know, the current llms are

trying to please us, but it does seem to also be able to subvert

that, and trying to deceive us in many ways, or trying to

undermine that, and so I think that's much earlier than we

would have ever imagined AI being capable of deception, for

example, as the researchers would say. So I think part of

being an artist is not celebrating everything right? Is

really kind of starting to emphasize what are some of these

limitations really seeing that subversive side of AI on our

culture, of our classroom, of our educational practice, and

then as educators, I think we have to be really flexible. We

used to design for these learning objectives, and now we

need to design for these. Sorry to pick on the math educators

that love the math curriculum with the advent of the

calculator, there are people that have conceived of math. All

of math being taught with a calculator. So tools that are

available, right? So now, as we start to think about what does

the world look like with AI? So here in higher ed, you're going

to see lots of rethinking, you know, Carnegie Mellon leading

technology innovation school, they're doing a whole revamp of

the entire higher ed curriculum now because of AI, and that

they're just going to rethink it, and we just have another

million dollar investment to rethink all of our teaching

practices across campus, especially for any of the large

scale classrooms with AI. So it means we can work differently,

like I have hope too, that it's not going to be as hard to do

some of the work. You know, there's some things that have

just been hard as an educator that I don't think contributed

to learning, right? Sometimes it's the grading and not being

able to catch things in real time, the latency around that,

you know, that formative feedback we know is so much

better for learning. But if I've got a grade 20 page essays that

I know are good for kids to write, but I can't get that

formative feedback back, you know? So can we start to think

about our assessment practices? Can we rethink even the

assignments, you know? So I know a lot of folks here at the

University don't want to change their multiple choice tests, but

it's really not a good idea in the age of AI, right? Or they're

flipping the classroom. So instead of writing outside of

class, you're writing inside of class, or you're writing in

small groups, or, you know, so really kind of thinking about,

what's the truism, what's the real thing that you want people

to learn, and how do you redesign your curriculum that

way? And I think, I think there'd be a lot of joy in that

practice. It can be scary, but thinking about the things that

will persist and the things that really ground us and our

humanity as well.

So as a follow up, we started talking about toys

very early on. I'm curious, what are you playing with right now

that most folks don't even have an idea that it's even out there

just yet. From a research perspective, what is exciting

you and what's on the horizon that K 12 schools can look

forward to in the next six months to a year.

Oh, goodness. Well, I get to work with a lot

of companies. You know, some of the most exciting things I'm not

going to be able to disclose, because they're under

development, but some of the technologies that are out there

are going to help you do your lesson planning and your

standards alignment, all of these kinds of things, which I

think is really exciting, and it's going to allow you to

individualize your curriculum at scale, and be able to say,

here's my core what I want the kids to learn. And with these

Lexile levels, with these three languages, that this child

knows, this interest, in this background, that this assignment

or this curriculum can be readily adapted. So this is kind

of cool, so that we can take interest and adapt it to the

child learning. And so technologies like that, I think

are really exciting. You know, I get really excited when I see,

like, kind of a new creative or expressive technology. So when

you go into the make your space, you know, you see a lot of these

things that are kind of emerging. And so Dale Doherty is

starting maker Ed 2.0 relaunching all of the maker

fairs for the folks that are in those maker spaces. So I would

encourage you to go, because all of those technologies are

changing really, really fast. So you get to see really cool

things, where you can paint circuits, or we can start to

look at, you know, even some of these tool kits are just so new.

So some of the educators at this forefront, you know, haptic

technologies, for example. So how can you feel? So you can

have AR and VR, but how do you feel? You know, like, if you put

your hand under a pretend body of water in a waterfall, does it

feel like water? And if I touch this air that's in front of me,

how I make it feel like clay, right? And so you've got all of

these researchers now that just were funded on a large NSF

center grant called hand. And so it's like, as you would imagine

hand, but it's a new haptic device creation, and they

actually have a new haptic toolkit that will be hitting the

market in a couple of years. You'd have to be able to teach

and learn about haptic technologies. And this is like,

think about all your technologies, visuals we've got.

Ways of doing AR, XR, VR, kinds of things. We've got sound,

we've got all these other things, but we don't have

texture and feel. And so you're going to see a lot of new ways

to do that. This is going to be a lot of investment, in part

because it overlaps with robotics and different ways of

medicine and all sorts of things that you're going to see there.

But I get really excited. I think we can pull back our

physical reality, and we're gonna be able to add another

sense to our experiences. You know, the holodeck will come to

fruition with that.

Well played. Well played.

Yeah, so there's a lot, a lot of things that I

think are gonna be really fun. And it felt like we plateaued

for a few years, you know, like there was a lot of technologies.

It felt like we had just kind of spun out. But there's gonna be a

lot of new things that'll be really fun.

So before we wrap up and let you go, I would

love to ask the guys to share a little bit. How do your schools

think about arts through the lens of or including technology,

because then we could have Dr peppler Just give us some

feedback. Hiram, I know you've talked about how you guys have

switched away from like a steam acronym to build, and it kind of

captures the same thing, but I'm wondering if you guys could just

share a little bit about how your schools combine the arts

with technology, then we'll give Dr pepler a second to react to

that before we let her go.

What's interesting for us is that our build program

is also very active in stage craft with our theater group,

and so they work in tandem, and oftentimes these projects will

go directly into the bill class, whether it's creating costumes,

helping create sets. And so you get the creative process from

the producer and the director of the play, working with the

students in tandem with the bill teacher, and they end up

creating all the elements that are used, perhaps one of the

best costume sets that I saw was the Finding Nemo set that we did

a little over a year ago. And this particular program was done

in the Lower School. So you've got all these little people

dressed up in these costumes that were made by middle

schoolers and high schoolers. So it was a fabulous way to

incorporate the arts and essentially the vision of what

the director has, but then you've got the artistic license

that can also be taken by the students at the same time.

Similarly, I think about where we've seen a lot of

technology take off or ground its roots have been in the arts.

I think also where we saw like the major use of our 3d

printers, or our laser cutters, or some of those things. And as

Hiram was saying, it's in support of the work that's going

on in the arts. Our 3d printers were in our Upper School

sculpture lab before they were in any maker space area, in

terms of where they were being used most same thing with regard

to the laser cutter and stage craft pieces. I know that the

woman here, Diana Jean Greco, who works with our students at

our middle school level in theater and stage, she's one of

our strongest users of technology. So it's always, at

least for us here, been rooted in arts through no particular

push to do so. It's always been for what their needs were, in

the way in which they were able to creatively problem solve,

that they were able to see the value of what they were going to

be able to do with the technology to get them where

they needed to be.

I love both of those examples. Some of the

major principles of why steam really works, I think are

illustrated there. So Bill, let's start with theorems.

Because I think about, you know, we were talked a little bit

about that divergence at the start of this and coming up with

those multiple solutions. But in that divergence, it really

contrasts with what we normally do in STEM courses, particularly

in the US. So our math problems are designed to have one

solution, not 10, because that is challenging, but in Japan

actually, they a good math problem actually has 10 or 20

solutions, and then the teacher will put them in the on the

chalkboards in range of like, kind of a level one through a

level 20 solution. So that kids get exposed to all of them, and

you can see how these things would work, or you could answer

them in different ways. And so that diversity of that response

becomes really, really important, but we see it all the

time because, you know, just like that example we were

talking about earlier, with that nine volt battery and that light

bulb, there was no real way to get that wrong. It kind of tells

you the materials almost tell you the solution. But you've got

to clip this, you know, and you've seen a clip before, and

there's only one little place to actually clip that well, right?

And it's a little thing that kind of sticks out from the

battery and sticks out from the light bulb. And you make all for

those connections, and the light bulb turns on, right? Because

the teacher is not going to give you a dead battery. The light

bulb doesn't have any polarity, so you can't get it back

backwards, maybe on the off chain. As you connect it and you

attach it to the plastic part of the holder, but that's even

facing the table, so it'd be kind of hard to do, you know, so

most kids wouldn't do that. And so there's only one solution,

and there's not a lot of ways to remix them. Oftentimes, don't

even get more light bulbs. You don't get different colors of

light bulbs. You know, all of those wires have been insulated,

so now all of a sudden, when we go back to the squishy circle,

back to the squishy circuits example, or the textiles

example, we're going to give you wires that are uninsulated. So

now, if you have your wires at touch, you can short that

circuit. We're going to give you a lot of LEDs that are different

colors, and so that means you can think about mixing those

colors so warm and cool colors can't be lit from the same

portion now, because you have a lot of them, you can put them in

parallel or in series and so forth, and then the solutions

you can come up with are just much more creative, right? And

there's many more that solution space is just much bigger. And

so creativity and the arts and stem really go well together,

right? Because it pushes us to have lots of different

solutions. Different solutions and things that people wouldn't

even come up with. So for example, I've worked for a long

time with Dr Leah bukele, who's now at the University of New

Mexico, but was at the MIT Media Lab for a while, and she's one

of the first commercial designers of the E textile

product called Lily Patrick. Lily Patrick, she was an

engineer. She created this thing like myself. She wanted to

create the tools. She didn't have an engineering school, and

it was amazing. As we started working together, I gave this

assignment to create this puppet, this interactive puppet,

to all three of my students. And so one was the former president

of the robotics club. One was a PhD in physics, and then a

grandmother who just returned back to get her master's in

education, but had a lot of sewing experience. So I gave

them all the same task, and I told them, here's a lily pad,

here's these LEDs. And I, you know, I want these three LEDs to

tell me how much NES in the flower, and I want these three

LEDs to tell me how much to do things. And they didn't have to

program it. They just needed to figure out how all these six

were going to be each one. The two men came back to the table

and they said, Kylie, that was an impossible task. There's no

way to do it. There's no way. Okay, we're gonna have to think

about this. We're gonna have to solder these things together.

We're gonna have to do this. And the woman who had no experience

with technology at all, but had an idea of sewing. What she had

done was she'd insulated. She's like, Well, you told me they

can't touch. So what I did is I insulated them. I thought the

beads, you know, she basically put glass beads, because she

thought that would be insulating. Had enough material

science knowledge so that they wouldn't touch, and then she had

it all figured out, right? So the boys, they ripped up their

designs, threw them away, and we ended up going with her design

and design solution as a result. But Leah Buckley, the designer

of those materials, came back and said, I never thought about

taking the textiles designs off two dimensions and in the space,

and using these glass beads in this way. Right? So there's

always, when we bring in the arts, we bring in these kinds of

crafts, is it allows for solution space that's just much

wider than what we could as STEM professionals ever envision. The

solution space just gets there. And that's the big C and the

little c creativity all the time, Hiram, and in your

example, what really stood out to me is the opportunity to a

have real life end users so often in our design work or STEM

work, it's very hard to find an audience, right? So we make

these little things are precious, get a 3d print, but we

don't have an end user, you know? So sometimes people try to

do this by partnering with like senior citizens or creating

different kinds of things. You know, there's a lot of different

ways to solve this, but I love that, like, the end user is

actually the child who's gonna wear the costume, right? Like,

does it fit? Is it fun to wear? Is it scratchy? You know, all of

the things that the kids gonna care about. And then the

showcase, the performance. You know, in the visual arts, we

talked about critique before, but in the performing arts, you

get the thing that's on stage, and you get the audience, not

just the kids that are performing, but the parents, the

grandparents are coming in and somebody coming in to see the

costume design or the set design or the performances on the

stage. I think it's just really rich to kind of do that. And I

think that brings us back to those themes of performance and

how enduring that that's going to be, you know, so really kind

of centering ourselves around the truly human tasks of being

there and seeing things in person and live in real time.

Dr pepler, this has been really incredibly

interesting, and I love that you have brought the 3d glass beads

to our thinking today and our way of having conversations

around these issues. So thank you so much for giving us your

time and for joining us today on the pod. This was really

fantastic, and we really appreciate your perspective.

Thank you for having me. This has been great.

This has been talking technology with ATLIS, produced

by the Association of technology leaders in. Independent Schools.

For more information about Atlas and Atlas membership, please

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