Art Pathway B: Explore Art Through Computational Thinking (Overview)

As students begin understanding art and creating their own art, one of the questions an educator might first encounter is how to provide opportunities for them to grasp complex processes used to create artistic works.

In this building block, you will consider how might computational thinking practices and tools help students explore, appreciate, and analyze artistic processes as well as artistic products. While the artworks themselves can be complex, it is helpful to break down the processes that led artists to create them and provide opportunities for students to understand the processes as well as appreciate the artistic work. While the aim of this integration pathway is not for students to follow step-by-step procedures when they create art, using computational thinking practices to analyze existing work, can simplify complex artistic processes in order to deepen students’ understanding of art.

This building block highlights three practices to integrate computational thinking in the Arts classroom.

B1. Understand Artistic Processes

B2. Appreciate Computational Art

B3. Analyze Art

As you complete this project, and others in this building block, consider the following questions for your own classroom instruction:

• What does it look like to apply computational thinking to understand, appreciate, and analyze artistic works?
• Does computational thinking support student exploration of art? How?

Practice B1 focuses on:

1. Explore artistic works by highlighting the constraints of the chosen process used by the artist.
2. Breaking down artistic processes and elements of individual pieces.

B1.1 An activity using this practice could ask students to examine various henna patterns to identify inspirations from nature that Henna artists use to motivate their designs. For example, the image on this step from CSDT.org examines how an artist might use mango as an inspiration for this henna pattern.

B1.2 An activity using this design principle could have students parse out and identify different components of artistic work, such as what scales make up a melody by decomposing the melody and identifying the scales.

Practice B2 focuses on:

1. Examining and exploring computational art (such as video games, algorithmically generated art, and interactive art) to appreciate the potential of computation for artistic expression

*B2.1 also appears in pathway A (Create Computational and Computationally Enhanced Art) as practice A1.1.

One example of how this practice might work in the classroom is having students use a computational tool like Scratch to explore games or geometric art on the platform. Another example could begin by asking students to examine work by new media artists that incorporate computing to add interactivity into work that draws on user input (like Sean Montgomery’s ‘Emergence’).

Practice B3 highlights how to:

1. Create and utilize categories to analyze similarities and differences in artistic works
2. Examine biases that may be introduced through processes of art curation. Analyze patterns in social, historical, political, and economic events to explore how they influence artistic works
3. Analyze artistic works using data

B3.1 An activity using this practice could ask students to compare and contrast iconography used in Native American art. Within this activity, students identify key images and symbols within artistic works and then categorize them into different categories based on these properties

B3.2 An activity that highlights this practice could have students explore how Spotify, Pandora, and Apple music make recommendations around different genres and based on user listening history.

B3.3 An activity could ask students to plot the facts versus the events in artistic works based on a true story (e.g., Based on a true story)