New article: Math meets art

My article on aesthetic computing, "Drawing Art Into the Equation," is out in the July issue of Edutopia. As a young student, I often excelled at math, but as a creative person, I never much cared for it. So I was excited to learn about this new technique in teaching which blends art and math. Here's a snip from the intro:

Paul Fishwick, the University of Florida computer science professor who developed the aesthetic-computing method, says his inspiration came from popular culture. He wanted to do for math what the 1982 Disney film Tron did for computer science. With its then-cutting edge graphics and its action-heavy plot about a hacker overriding a malevolent operating system, it made a previously dry and impenetrable field of study visual and exciting. "If we have the capability of doing some of these fantastic things with technology, such as the immersive environments and 3-D graphics for entertainment purposes, why are we still programming and doing math by scratching with pencil on paper, much the same way we did 2,000 years ago?" Fishwick asks.

Surprisingly, aesthetic computing requires no expensive software or even a computer. It's so flexible, in fact, that it can be used just as effectively for learning basic middle school prealgebra as university-level programming courses.
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