IfArt EducationThenCritical Digital Making: Computational Thinking and Creative Code

Imagine teeth, eyes, and tongues are digitally added to a shadow puppet as a child's arms move in front of a light projection. The enhanced shadow puppet squeaks and growls, growing shapes that react as child moves around (see Figure 1) Imagine students' charcoal drawings are scanned and run through a computer program to create an animated virtual fungus growing around light and dark passages of drawing (see Figure 2) How is this possible? How can software interact with shadow puppets and charcoal drawings? These are examples of creative code (Maeda, 2004; Peppler how light and chemical reactions work in darkroom photography; or how mixing of pigments affects hue, value, and chromatic intensity of paint All of these forms of knowledge develop technical skills of artists However, these are not only forms of knowledge a 21st-century artist might need Recent art education scholarship includes critique, analysis, and making with digital as part of field research in visual culture and digital literacy (Buffington, 2008; Castro, 2012; Darts, 2010; Keifer-Boyd, 2005; McClure, 2013; Sweeny, 2010; Taylor & Carpenter, 2002) However, few art educators have demonstrated expertise in computer programming, so field has largely stayed away from critically investigating how programmable objects function and developing technical skills like computer programming as a creative practice for art contexts Digital theorists-critically looking at programmable objects like video game Civilization® (Galloway, 2004) and image editing software like Adobe® Photoshop® (Manovich, 2013)-examine how cultural biases and limitations impact software's functionality in culture and contemporary society To fill in gap between theory and practice, we argue that art education can play a role in developing critical thinking skills of 21st-century students by augmenting K-12 art curriculum to include computational thinking as a practice of critical digital making-a creative process using programmable objects to engage with sociocultural contexts to make art(Re)Thinking Art Education Programming (sic): Computational Thinking & ConstructionismWhile computational thinking is discussed extensively in fields of learning sciences and instructional technology, there has yet to be a consistent definition (Brennen & Resnick, 2012) Coined by scientist and educational theorist Seymour Papert (1996), computational thinking has been defined as an algorithmic problem solving method, represented in a form that can be effectively carried out by an informationprocessing agent (Wing, 2010, p 1) By this definition, computational thinking has been implicitly connected to programmable objects and their design, whether software or hardware Like many fields of art and design, dispositions essential to computational thinking include confidence in dealing with complexity, persistence, tolerance for ambiguity, and ability to deal with open-ended problems (CSTA Standards Task Force, 2011) Computer scientist Jeannette Wing (2006) argued that computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just computer scientists, citing importance of integrating computational ideas into other disciplinesArt programs like ones described in Studio Thinking (Hetland, Winner, Veenema, Sheridan, & Perkins, 2007) push students to work in ways aligning with computational thinking such as persistence in working with difficult and open-ended problems Yet, art examples in Studio Thinking stay within traditional mediums of ceramics, painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture-leaving out computation and digital Although recent research explores how principles of Studio Thinking can be applied to digital making (Sheridan, 2011), we, authors of this article, believe computational thinking through critical digital making should be embedded in art curriculum to equip students with coding skills important to digital literacy, to expose computational world surrounding all of us (Gardiner, 2014), and to explore materiality of digital forms of art connecting to people's technologically mediated daily livesArguing for art educators to learn how to program software and manipulate hardware appears in art education literature as early as 1980s when Linda Ettinger (1988) envisioned a future when art students would create new media by developing their own software Ettinger challenged art educators to ask questions when students make work with computer such as, does the student control medium, or does medium control student? …