Constructionism 2010 CONSTRUCTIONIST APPROACHES TO CREATIVE LEARNING, THINKING AND EDUCATION: LESSONS FOR THE 21st CENTURY

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e-Painting like Mondrian
Maria Skiadelli
National Technical University of Athens, Greek Public School
skiadelli@gmail.com
The basic idea
The idea behind this work is to give children the opportunity to
create their own authentic e-paintings according to Piet
Mondrian’s unique style, by constructing their personal e-painting
tool. Helping children create pieces of art by imitating an actor’s
style is a well established technique in art education especially
for younger children [ref], that helps them decode the actor’s
method’s and painting characteristics.
Children are asked to build a microworld by programming in
Logo* that will allow someone, let’s call him/her e-painter, to
produce electronic works of art, let’s call them e-paintings, that
resemble Mondian’s real paintings. Mondrian ‘s style is based on
grid-based paintings filled in mostly with primary colors.
Before starting to build their microworld, children have to make a
computational interpretation of Mondrian’s painting style. They have
to analyze his paintings’ geometrical structure: are they composed
by vertical and horizontal lines that intersect one another, or are
they composed by well-adjusting rectangle areas. No matter which
interpretation they give, children have to start thinking about how to
programmatically implement it. And it should be clear to them that
their purpose is not to reproduce just one specific painting but to be
able to reproduce the actor’s unique style.
While constructing their e-painting tool children have to take critical
decisions about:
•The degrees of freedom that they will give to the end user
•The degrees of randomness that will be controlled by the machine
•And the constant factors that will remain unchanged for all the
produced e-paintings
It’s upon these decisions that they will build their own personal e-
painting tool that will be able to reproduce Mondrian’s style and on
the same time reflect a child’s personal taste and feeling.
*The Logo implementation that was used in the certain paradigm
presented here is Microworlds Pro.
An ePainting tool screen caption
For the ICT teacher
For the Math teacher
The most important part of the Math teacher’s role is to help kids
parameterize some basic features of their e-paintings using
mathematical rules and functions, to restrict arbitrariness and
impose some logic.
A typical example is the distance between the lines. How the
distances between the lines relate with each other? How can
they by parameterized so that the e-painter can keep control over
the these distances be changing some parameters?
Another example is trying to define mathematically the path that
the turtle follows in order to color the painting. Is there a
mathematical function that will help the turtle choose which areas
to color and how this function influences the aesthetic balance of
the final composition.
Parameterization
A few words about Piet Mondrian and his style
Randomness
Interdisciplinarity
Control to the user
The construction of the e-painting tool itself can foster
interdisciplinary dialogue. Like most of the real life projects, needs
to incorporate skills and knowledge from various disciplines in order
to be realized. The hypothesis that traverses the whole
educational scenario is that teachers from at least three different
disciplines have to work with children for the construction of the
same tool focusing on different knowledge areas.
The tool cannot be implemented if the teachers do not cooperate,
respect and try to understand each other’s view. Moreover
teachers are obliged to cross the strict barriers of their
disciplines, which means that the ICT and math teacher has to
understand about art features, while the art teacher needs to be
involved with some technicalities and mathematical formalism.
And this crossing of barriers stands as a great paradigm for
children, that start to understand the interdependencies between
disciplines in general, as well as of art and science in particular
and that the one cannot exist without the other.
e-painters like real painters should have a significant degree of
control on the final creation, as this is the essence of art:
expressing oneself.
This can be achieved either by letting them change the values of
the predefined parameters (see parameterization above) or by
simply letting them do some free and ad-hoc drawing: draw their
own lines, choose their own colors and colored areas, etc.
However this last feature should be offered with care and under
certain limitations, so as not to let one escape the initial purpose
which is to recreate Mondrian’s painting style.
Increased control to the user should be offered to children of
younger ages (6-10 years old) if they act as e-painters. In that
case the constructor of the tool has to decrease the degree of
randomness while increasing the degree of parameterization and
ad-hoc drawing.
For younger children it might be useful and joyful to use a tool
that allows almost free drawing with the help of the Logo turtles
and a limited set of parameters, than a completely randomized
tool that would easily puzzle them. The added value of using the
tool instead of classical pen and paper methods is that the tool
offers them the advantage of accuracy and precision in drawing
that they cannot yet master at this age.
OPTIONAL
LOGO HERE
OPTIONAL
LOGO HERE
Getting started
In order to build their e-painting tool children have to program their
microworld. But before they start programming they realize that
there are a series of sub-problems to be solved like:
•How to define the drawing area i.e. the size and position of the
canvas
•How many lines or rectangles to place on the canvas
•How many turtles they need to draw these lines
•What parameters they need in order to control the distance
between the lines
•The range of the color pallets that will be used in their e-paintings
•How the rectangular forms that will be painted will be chosen
And while trying to answer these questions, they easily see there
are many answers and many options that one can give or follow.
And that the tool that they build is going to be unique for it depends
on their personal choices. But no matter what choices they make,
there are three basic features every such tool must afford and these
are: parameterization, control by the user and randomness.
Before staring building their e-painting tool, children have to work
with their art teacher to study Mondrian’s paintings and try to
explore the characteristics of his style.
After they building their tool they have to work again with their art
teacher to explore its drawing capabilities and find out if their
hypothesis about how to create Mondian’s style has been correct.
It’s also a good opportunity to evaluate the aesthetics value of the
produced e-paintings and make some changes to their tool to
improve their quality. It is also very interesting for children to
exchange and start using each other’s tool, becoming real e-
painters. That will also give them the chance to make some fruitful
comparisons.
The produced paintings depend on the values of certain
parameters like the distance between the lines, the size of
canvas, etc.
Parameterization is essential to the tool, since it’s purpose as
earlier said, is to reproduce style and not specific paintings. So
parameterization expresses in fact the idea of variation.
Some parameters will be controlled by the e-painter, while some
others are predefined at the construction phase and some
others are randomly chosen by the machine. This means that
the final painting is a co-creation of the final user (e-painter), the
creator of the microworld and the machine itself. And here there
is a lot of discussion to be raised on what extent can art be
automatised and if what produced is still art, and which in fact is
the owner of this piece art.
The idea of randomness is essential to the creation of the tool, for it
computationally expresses the notion of the unexpected, which is
an indispensable part of art creation.
This practically means that each time one uses the tool, a different
painting should be created even if he/she follows exactly the same
steps and defines the same set of parameters. Although real
painters may find hard to cope with the feature of unexpectedness,
the children seem to love it: the fact that the final creation is
somehow beyond their control and takes them each time by
surprise, adds to the tool playfulness and joy. So children start to
realize that this is a tool not only to draw with but also to play with
and enjoy. Things that can be randomly chosen: the colors of the
painting, the number of lines on the horizontal and vertical axis, the
path that the turtle follows in order to paint the canvas, etc.
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Jr., (March 7, 1872-February 1, 1944)
was a Dutch painter born in Amersfoort (he is usually referred to as
Piet Mondrian). He evolved a non-representational style which he
termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of white ground, upon which
was painted a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines with blocks
of primary colors. Despite being well-known, often-parodied, and
even trivialized, Mondrian's paintings exhibit a complexity that belie
their apparent simplicity. They are actually the result of a stylistic
evolution that occurred over the course of nearly thirty years, and
which continued beyond that point to the end of his life.
He used to say about his work: “I believe it is possible that, through
horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not
with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and
rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by
other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as
it is true.”
References
During the programming phase, children have to take decisions and
make assumptions, based on realistic limitations (technical and
non-technical) that sometimes compromise their initial idea of how
to produce Mondian’s paintings. What is most important for the ICT
teacher to communicate to the children is that what they do at the
level of programming, has a direct implication on the artistic output
of their tool and strongly influences the aesthetics of the produced
e-paintings. The more they realize the correspondence between
technical implementation and artistic behavior of their tool, the more
control they acquire over the construction of their own tool.
For the Art teacher
1. The children’s machine
2. Wikipedia piet mondians’ biography
3. Art education
4. Constructionism
5. Paper’s work
6. Microworlds pro
7. ICT teaching
8. Taching math