Provost's Personalized Education Grant Awarded!

We are happy to announce that Annmarie Duggan and Gianni Downs have been awarded the Provost’s Personalized Education Grant.   

In an effort to meets the needs of the department, Duggan and Downs proposed the creation of a Creative Skills Studio to provide adequate space and equipment for mentoring combined with the creation of a Design Mentorship App that will review students’ work and deliver feedback in real time.

The Department of Theatre Arts currently lacks the appropriate space to conduct 1-on-1 mentorship with design students.  This mentorship necessitates large workspaces for laying out of architectural and engineering type drawings, access to students and professors laptop screens, and the ability to demonstrate traditional skills and techniques associated with drafting and model building.

The department also struggles with inadequate equipment. Given the highly-digital nature of the industry, mentors must be able to demonstrate techniques in CAD and Photoshop programs to the students in lighting, sound, and projections that they will use within these design fields. 

The grant proposal offered a 3-part approach:

STEP 1

Create a mentoring studio where the mentor and student can use both traditional and digital technological tools to look at designs and design approaches. This space would be large enough and equipped so that the team can work in a variety of methods associated with design skills like: CAD, Photoshop, 3D printing, traditional drawing and drafting, model building, sound editing, video editing, projection mapping, plotting of architectural prints and light plots.

 

STEP 2

Create an app that, when combined with a Go-Pro camera in the theatre spaces, will let the mentor to tag a recording of the students’ technical rehearsals. The app will be connected to the light, sound, and/or projection board, so that the mentor can tag a cue and provide a clear visual reference with production timecode to the note being given. This new system will allow for an individualized mentoring session later between mentor and student.

 

STEP 3

Expand the app to deliver notes to the student in real-time from the mentor in a secured and private application. The mentor could attach a tag containing notes to a cue or time code associated with the light/sound/projection board so that the student would have the choice to react in real-time or save the note for a later session in the studio.

Congratulations to Annmarie and Gianni – and to the department!