Class: Children’s Lit in Augmented Reality
Year: 2022
Institution: Kent State University, School of Emerging Media & Technology & Design Innovation

Friend Frog was created by an interdisciplinary team of students in a course I co-developed and co-teach entitled Children’s Lit in Augmented Reality, a collaboration between Kent State’s School of Emerging Media & Technology and the Design Innovation Initiative. In this experiential, project-based course, student teams learn the foundations of the Unity gaming engine to develop AR experiences connected to children's storytelling with a focus on social justice and inclusivity, addressing the question: How can we introduce social justice learning through children's books and then incorporate that thinking into an augmented reality experience that is meaningful and adds value?

Friend Frog is a mixed reality adaptation of a book by the same title written by the celebrated children’s book author Alma Flor Ada. Created specifically for the Design Innovation Hub’s immersive media lab, featuring a 360° immersive projection space, students created high-resolution scans of the original book, modified those scans to remove text and add QR codes, and created a custom AR app for Android that brought the book to life.

Class: Creative Coding
Year: 2020-21
Institution: Kent State University, School of Emerging Media & Technology

I developed this course as part of the School of Emerging Media & Technology’s re-imagining of our B.S. degree program. I both teach the course and manage a group of part-time faculty who are teaching additional sections.

Course Description

In this course students will be given a hands-on introduction to computational thinking and object-oriented programming through the framework of creative coding using JavaScript and p5.js. Students will learn how to use variables, loops, functions and classes to make original works of creative code for screen-based media that move, interact and unfold over time. Emphasis will be placed on play and experimentation as critical facets of creative problem solving.

You can learn more about this course by visiting its home page.

Class: Reframing Experience
Year: 2020
Institution: Kent State University

Course Description

Reframing Experience​ is a hands-on, project-based, experiential learning course in which students will engage a range of local communities in Northeast Ohio in order to gain a deeper understanding of the social and ecological fabric that makes the region unique. Over the course of the semester, students will work together in interdisciplinary teams to create an immersive, public-facing exhibition in Kent State’s brand-new Design Innovation Hub that blends 3D Lidar scanning, new media storytelling and immersive media technologies aimed at helping viewers to get in touch with the limitations of their own experience by learning about the experience of others.

The course will bring together faculty from Design Innovation, Music, and Emerging Media and Technology, as well as students from a wide range of disciplines including the Performing Arts, Emerging Media and Technology, Visual Communication Design, Journalism & Mass Communication, and Communication Studies, in conjunction with meaningful perspectives and collaborations from interested students in any other major at Kent State University.

Class: Reframing Experience (student project)
Year: 2020
Institution: Kent State University

Akron Civic Duty was one of the interdisciplinary, collaborative final projects to come out of the Reframing Experience course. In this project, students incorporated 3D scanning, historical research, and interviews to create an interactive 360 tour of the historic Akron Civic Theater in Akron, OH. The project frames the history of the theater as a microcosm for the fight for racial justice waged by people of color in NE Ohio.

You can learn more about the project, and interact with the 360 tour, by visiting the project website.

Class: Capstone in Emerging Media & Technology
Year: 2019
Institution: Kent State University

In the Fall of 2019, I invited the students enrolled in my Capstone in Emerging Media & Technology course to participate in my research-based creative practice by collaborating with me to create a mixed reality exhibition commemorating the 50 year anniversary of the Kent State Shootings that took place on May 4, 1970.

Exhibition Description

May 4: Through the Looking Glass is an immersive and interactive experience that seeks to open up new spaces for thinking and feeling the profound legacies of May 4, 1970, during which the Ohio National Guard occupied Kent State’s campus and fired 67 shots into a crowd of students protesting President Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, killing four and injuring nine. 

Made in collaboration with Alan Canfora, a Kent State student protestor who survived the shootings, along with the Department of Special Collections and Archives at Kent State University, Kent State’s May 4 Visitor Center, and Ohio History Connection, Through the Looking Glass leverages emerging technologies to create new modes of engagement with local and regional archives.

The project deploys 3D scanning technologies, immersive multi-channel video installation and augmented reality to offer viewers a different perspective from which to grapple with the May 4 shootings. The project features virtual artifacts pertaining to May 4 and its aftermath, a 3D scan of the site where the shootings occurred, and excerpts from an audio interview with Alan Canfora, who survived the shootings.

You can learn more about this exhibition, and see additional documentation, by visiting the project web page.

Class: Independent study project with 7 undergraduate Interactive Media Design students
Year: 2018-19
Institution: University of Washington Bothell

During the 2018-19 academic year I led a year-long independent study project with seven Interactive Media Design students to build an augmented reality storytelling platform and community-sourced archive. The project is a collaboration with The People’s Geography of Seattle, a public scholarship initiative committed to raising awareness about issues of gentrification and displacement and to strengthening ties between local community organizations doing anti-displacement activism.

You can read more about this project by visiting the unARchived website.

Class: Creative Coding
Year: 2020
Institution: Kent State University, School of Emerging Media & Technology

For their final project in Creative Coding, students are invited to create an original choose-your-own-adventure style game. In Headstone & Rain, Katie explores themes around mental health, love and loss in a project inspired by 8-bit graphics and horror.

You can experience this story by following this link.

Class: Interactive Media Design - Introductory Studio
Year: 2018
Institution: University of Washington Bothell

Rape Culture is a Choose your own Adventure-style story game created for iOS that is designed to educate players both about what rape culture is and how ubiquitous it is within our broader contemporary culture.

The game puts players into the shoes of sexual assault survivors. As they progress through the story, players are confronted with real experiences of sexual assault anonymously collected by the student.

Class: The Tablet and the CAVE
Year: 2016
Institution: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

For their final projects in The Tablet in the CAVE, students were tasked with creating artworks that bridged real and virtual space by putting on a virtual group exhibition inside a point cloud rendering of the Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, IL.

This project was inspired by the rules and chance operations that Italo Calvino used to structure his novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The student created her own chance-based system to create a narrative structure which she then translated into a six-part, three-dimensional, multimedia collage which was virtually installed into the Sullivan Galleries’ rotunda space. As viewers look around within the virtual environment, different parts of the collage become activated.

Class: Interactive Media Design - Capstone Course
Year: 2018
Institution: University of Washington Bothell

Exploretum is a functional prototype of a location-based game created in partnership with the Washington Park Arboretum & Botanic Gardens in Seattle, Washington. The app uses GPS and scavenger hunt-style play to educate users about the importance of biodiversity as they explore the park.

Class: Smartphone & Wireless Studio
Year: 2017
Institution: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Blindness is a conceptual art app created for iOS that explores the ways in which disability—specifically, visual impairment—intersect with digital culture.

The app appropriates and transforms an excerpt from José Saramago’s novel Blindness. The text is digitally set in a way that is intentionally difficult to read in order to force users who aren’t visually impaired to consider the challenges visually impaired people face when using digital devices.

Zooming in on the text enlarges it, but the larger it gets the lighter the text color becomes, making it nearly illegible. But by running their fingers over the virtual page, users can simulate a braille-like experience: the text becomes legible and a text-to-speech function pronounces each word aloud.

Class: Introduction to iOS App Development
Year: 2018
Institution: University of Washington Bothell

Waves is an interactive installation and companion mobile app that addresses isolation, depression and other mental health issues within the context of student life on college campuses. This project is comprised of two parts: a video prototype showcasing how the installation would work, and a functional prototype of the iOS companion app.

Class: Hacking the Book
Year: 2014
Institution: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Patchwork is a language-based artwork about gender nonconformity created for the web using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Rather than write about his own experience, this student chose to anonymously solicit the work’s text from his queer community, asking people to submit their first memory of experiencing gender nonconformity. Referencing the AIDS memorial quilt, the project takes the form of a digital quilt in which each tile contains a single story or memory.