Choreographing Science was a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project that brought together middle school youth, professional choreographers, and scientists to explore cutting-edge research through dance, computation, and collaboration. By linking choreography and coding, participants investigated how small parts interact within larger systems—whether as moving bodies in dance or as agents in computer models—to generate complex patterns and meaning.
Exploring science differently—through dance, coding, and collective imagination.
Over four years we iteratively designed and ran three camps, which included professional development for collaborating scientists, in person camps for kids, scientists, and choreographers, and ongoing analyses of the learning that happened in these spaces. Camps were held in community centers, such as a youth theater and a Boys & Girls Club and lasted 1-2 weeks for a total of 25-60 hours.
Middle schoolers, professional choreographers, and scientists—from fields such as marine biology, materials science, physics, and biomedical engineering—worked side by side to engage with cutting edge scientific research, with all participants positioned as co-learners and collaborators. Everyone learned from each other as they all learned together.
Through a complex systems lens, participants explored research topics such as spinal cord injury repair, the biomechanics of walking, and structures of lithium ion batteries by modeling these phenomena both choreographically—through rule-based movement structures—and computationally—using agent-based modeling in NetLogo.
Megan is a materials scientist and engineer who works in a lab where she is trying to understand how different atomic materials and structures can be arranged to create more sustainable batteries that maintain the performance of lithium ion batteries. Her research focuses on the relationship between guests (lithium ions) and hosts (inorganic crystalline structures of battery components), exploring if and how host structures change (or not) in response to the movement of guest species during battery cycling.
One summer, instead of working with graduate engineering researchers in her lab to create and test small, holdable batteries, Megan pursued this line of research by dancing with middle schoolers and choreographers. Together the group engaged in a process of choreographic modeling — identifying lithium, niobium, and oxygen, as the components or agents in the guest-host system and thinking through the rules and relationships that would govern each agent’s behavior and how they respond to one another. One group took on the role as niobium and Megan quickly explained how it connects, “If we are niobium, we would connect by bonding with oxygen.” Then, someone in the group made a suggestion, “Ooh, maybe our fists could be the oxygen bonds.” One girl struck a pose with arms extended wide. Another grabbed onto her fist, and Megan and the other youth connected their hands. The group quickly assembled into what began to look like a human obstacle course.
Megan started to explain how lithium ions moves through the structure and one of the youth who was still sitting jumped up to take on the role of lithium, moving easily through some parts of the structure and slowly navigating others where the size and geometry of pathways made it more challenging. As they played around with their choreographic model and more youth joined in to represent lithium ions, details about how and how many bonds can form become important. Megan began to share more descriptive information about niobium bonds, “Niobium can form 1 bond or 2, but the bonds are stiff so your arms must be straight. The bonds are not formed in a straight line, so our levels can change.” Megan and the youth put this information to work immediately and watched how their choices began to change the structure they were making in interesting ways. Everyone begins to realize how these changes make it harder for the lithium ions to move through the niobium-oxygen structures and that some orientations require far more energy than others. Megan explains excitedly that in her research she is trying to understand the best ways to formulate niobium-oxygen bonds to create spaces for Lithium ions to move through and rest with the least amount of energy
Their work together raised questions for youth about how lithium can and cannot move through the molecular structure. “Do the lithium ions have to follow the same path? What happens when one gets stuck? What would happen if there were more lithium ions? 15? 100? 1000?” They recognize that they can further investigate these kinds of questions by designing a computational agent-based model.
“The participants connected concepts from my research on atomic structure and energy storage to topics they had learned in school, asked insightful questions, and deepened their understanding through both discussion and movement. The process pushed me to refine my explanations, strip away jargon, and focus on fundamentals.”
—Megan