Our professional development workshops and youth camps bring scientists, choreographers, and middle schoolers together to explore science through movement, modeling, and collaboration.
You can’t just throw a scientist in a room with a bunch of middle schoolers and expect them to learn from each other! In PD sessions, professionals experience the same embodied and creative processes that guide the camps, building shared language and tools across disciplines. The camps are immersive learning spaces where participants co-create performances and computational models that reveal the beauty and complexity of scientific systems in motion.
PD
In the months before the camps started, the design team led 12 hours of workshops for the professional scientists and choreographers who would be at the camps. These sessions were opportunities to build connections with each other and to orient to the project’s interdisciplinary approach of combining choreography, complex systems thinking, and computational modeling.
We started each session with an embodied warm-up, grounding ourselves in the kinds of movement activities that would fill the camps. Professional choreographers got to preview how youth’s ideas and embodied exploration could cultivate scientific inquiry. Professional scientists were supported in communicating their research in kid-friendly ways and framing their explanations as starting points for shared exploration with middle schoolers. Professional scientists were also supported in building “starter” NetLogo models of their systems to share at the camps, learning to break down their research topics into entities, rules, and patterns. Everyone got to experience a variety of choreographic tools and a complex systems lens.
During these sessions, the professional scientists and professional choreographers also joined the design team to review and co-develop plans for camp activities.
Camps
Each Choreographing Science camp was an intensive one- to two-week program (25-60 hours) where middle schoolers, professional scientists, and professional choreographers engaged side by side in embodied scientific inquiry. Camps were hosted in community spaces and built on the idea that everyone—youth and adults alike—is a learner, researcher, and choreographer.
Each camp was structured around the scientists’ research topics, including spinal cord injury repair, the biomechanics of walking, particle physics, or what happens inside a battery. Participants were supported in using a complex systems lens, which means breaking down the science topics into parts—agents, rules, and emergent patterns—that could be more easily represented through models. Participants represented and explored the science topics through two kinds of models: choreographic models and agent-based computational models.
Week 1 introduced tools and representations across both modalities—dance and computational modeling. Week 2 focused on refining and investigating questions raised by the youth. Each camp culminated in a public sharing where participants communicated their scientific discoveries through fused models—performances in which live choreography and digital simulations ran together.
