Lesley STEAM offered the pre-college Creative AI & Design course for the second consecutive summer. We recognize the importance of creativity that, fundamentally, requires having or showing one’s ability to produce new and valuable things. With the proliferation of generative AI or GenAI, more and more creative people are using machines as tools to interrogate AI and make art. With this in mind, we worked closely with Cambridge Youth Programs (CYP) to recruit Cambridge, MA youth to explore and go beyond the fundamentals of creative AI, which refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of generating novel and original content, such as art, music, writing, and design.
Left: Installation view of the exhibition “Designer’s Choice: Norman Teague—Jam Sessions” at MoMA. Photograph by Jonathan Dorado; Right: Installation view of Stephanie Dinkins’s If We Don’t, Who Will? in the Plaza at 300 Ashland Place. Photo by Avery J. Savage
Students were introduced to artists such as Stephanie Dinkins who creates art about AI as it intersects race, gender, and history. They saw the designs of Norman Teague, whose Adobe Firefly-generated works offer a reinterpretation of design history.
Dinkins programmed the generative art to prioritize (more diverse) worldviews and figures. She did so by fine-tuning different AI models, programs that recognize patterns through datasets. Dinkins and her team of developers fed the models images by the Black photographer Roy DeCarava, who captured photos of Black people in Harlem. They also programmed it using African American Vernacular English so that the models would learn to recognize its tonality and better generate images based on the stories of people who use it. —Melissa Hellman via The Guardian
Norman Teague used Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of generative AI models, to imagine a world where iconic objects in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) design collection were created by a more diverse chorus of voices. Teague, and his assistant designer Daniel Overbey used Firefly to revisit 15 pieces in MoMA’s collection from the perspective of Black history and inspiration.
This summer we invited 13 Cambridge, MA youth from diverse backgrounds to explore and learn the fundamentals of generative artificial intelligence or GenAI. This experience created space for youth to bring their identities and interests into creative computing in ways that allows them to see themselves in GenAI. They worked together and addressed questions such as: What is generative AI and where do we see it in the art world? How does working with AI tools affect creativity? Can AI teach us how to be more creative? What are the benefits and harms of GenAI?
PHOTO: Setting up a paintbrush bot (with LSTEAM director Sue Cusack)
This summer we invited 12 Somerville High School (SHS) students from diverse backgrounds to explore the combination of three-dimensional art, machine learning artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics. The in-person course built upon an existing collaboration with SHS teachers Karen Leary (math) and Laura Peters (robotics) and Lesley STEAM. Every day for two weeks SHS students met the SHS/LSTEAM at Lesley University’s College of Art and Design or LA+D. Like the 2021 course, students earned 4 Lesley college credits that were matched by 2.5 math or 2.5 art credits. The skills they learned can be applied to other classes they can take during the school year such as math, art, robotics, and computer science.
Nettrice Gaskins was one of the artists featured in a New York Times article about the Smithsonian’s reopening of the long-closed Arts and Industries Building. Her artificial intelligence artworks are part of the Smithsonian’s inaugural FUTURES exhibition.
Nettrice Gaskins has joined the Ford Global Fellows community. There are 48 new fellows and 24 fellows from 2020. Together, all 72 will learn from each other to design and to reimagine solutions to inequality. #GlobalLeadersConnect
Dr. Susan Rauchwerk, right, leads CYP staff through an activity. Photo courtesy of Lesley University.
In addition to the summer 2021 Art, A.I. & Robotics course at Somerville High School, the Lesley STEAM team worked with Cambridge Youth Programs or CYP staff on an alternate reality game or ARG. Most educational ARGs consist of scenarios that lead participants to collaboratively solve puzzles and accomplish activities. LSTEAM used this social learning format as a professional development opportunity for CYP.
Sixteen Somerville High School (SHS) students from diverse backgrounds came together to explore the combination of art, storytelling, artificial intelligence (A.I.), and robotics. Their teachers worked with Lesley STEAM to weave this content together with relevant STEAM and CTE standards and learning objectives. The final product was a hybrid course that took place in the High School’s new FabLab, as well as online with Lesley University’s College of Art and Design faculty, a comic and graphic novel artist. They earned four Lesley college credits that were matched by 2.5 math and 2.5 art credits from SHS. Many of the skills they learned can be applied to other classes they can take during the school year such as math, language arts, art, and computer science.
Inspired by developments in artificial intelligence such as machine learning and A.I. sensing, the SHS/LSTEAM team facilitated several activities such as learning Scratch programming language, building basic robots, then students gained fine arts and storytelling skills from drawing comics. Class activities culminated in a capstone “artbot” project. The main objectives of the class were for students to:
Show their understanding of storytelling by animating a character using craft material & servos.
Demonstrate knowledge of robotics by building robots that alter the environment through art.
Show their understanding of the iterative design process by rebuilding/repurposing their robot for new ends.
Students began the class by learning about artists who explore human-machine collaboration and interaction such as Soughwen Chung and Stephanie Dinkins. They learned about Joy Buolamwini, a coder who uses art and research to illuminate the social implications of artificial intelligence.
During the first two weeks, students learned how to use design thinking based on a culturally relevant making model from LSTEAM staff. The model included “design cyphers”, concept mapping, and “collaborative peer reviews.” They learned about the fundamentals of computer programming with Scratch, as well as how to build and program robots to imitate human creative expression. Later, they used an A.I. sensing extension in Scratch to enable their robots to respond and react to human movement.
During the third week, students worked with their peers, teachers and LSTEAM staff to synthesize what they learned in art and storytelling with their A.I. robot builds. In the morning, they took “Comics and the Graphic Novel” online with Barrington Edwards, summer faculty from Lesley University’s College of Art and Design; and in the afternoon, they met at the FabLab to engage in tasks that allowed them to combine clearly and coherently different ideas from visual storytelling with their physical robot prototypes. These activities culminated in student presentations synthesizing their work at the end of Friday class.
This SHS student capstone “artbot” project is a Kraken monster that paints.
For the last and final week, students worked independently on their capstone projects, with support from the SHS/LSTEAM team. Students participated in collaborative peer reviews and gallery walks to get feedback from their peers, school teachers and administrators, and outside experts. On the last day each individual student or small group of students presented their final projects to the general school community.
Making the Artbots
For this class, students were tasked with designing, programming, and prototyping, and presenting their artbots, which are robots that respond to people and make art. They created a short comic about how to make an artbot and presented them during class. To build the artbot students were given design constraints such as:
Your artbot can move freely or be attached to an object or a person
Your artbot must generate or help users to make art
Your artbot must convey a story or a message (ex. through gesture)
You are encouraged to use pose detection / pose estimation
You are encouraged to use sensors or other peripherals in your robot design
You must design and fabricate your own chassis that can include single or multiple motors/servos, wheels, or other moving parts
Pose estimation is a computer vision technique that predicts and tracks the location of a person or object. This is done by looking at a combination of the pose and the orientation of a given person or object. Students learned how to add code modules and extensions to Scratch that detect human movement using the computer’s in-board (web) camera. This builds on the Face Sensing block that uses machine learning that is trained to see faces.
Examples of the students’ final ‘artbots’ include “Cube”, a robot that is controlled by two mini-computers called BBC Micro:bits; “The Crab” that moves left, right, forward, and backward using servos motors; a “Boatman Painter” bot that actually paints; a “Kraken” bot that draws; a “Ladybug” bot that realizes how beautiful the sunshine is and draws sun symbols on paper; and a Butterfly bot that collaborates with humans to draw colorful pictures. Two students created a skateboarding “Ninja Turtle” that used music as the art form to define its movement. And finally, one student created their version of the “Scratch cat” as a motion-sensing A.I. robot that uses peoples’ body movements to draw.
To learn more, check out the students’ final artbots:
This course was made possible through the support of BiogenSTAR, Somerville High School, Lesley University College of Art and Design, and the City of Somerville.
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Quilt Math
Young people will create a Community Collage of Pattern Making. They will be coloring individual 3D paper tumble blocks and designing quilt squares using different foam shapes.
Oct 23, 2025 6-8pm
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