My dissertation elucidates how art practice can be a useful and helpful model for learning, teaching, and conducting research for HCI and the broader STEM fields. It focuses on "improvisation", a fundamental strategy and skill often used in the broader genres of arts, including cool jazz and the avant-garde. To achieve this goal, this…

This dissertation looks at the nature of creativity and what it takes to create a creative environment between the home environment and the elementary classrooms. Children make meaning best through play, creativity and problem-solving; this theory is built on Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (1978) alongside schema theory and Sternberg…