Happy Birthday

Why teachers should care about beauty in science

Aug 4, 2016

Figure 1. “We are a way for the universe to know itself” - Carl SaganScience is one of the most powerful ways to engage with the beauty of the universe.We use science to understand the cosmos and, in the process,find beauty in our understandings and...

Beirut, Nairobi, Paris

Nov 15, 2015

After I had posted my "Paris, City of Love" design on FB, my friend Pilar Quezzaire posted on my wall the following question: What about Beirut and Nairobi, Punya? Can you make one for them as well? In another posting she linked to the...

Undo & the the progress of technology

Sep 6, 2008

I have wondered what it would be like if life had an undo button, and what we would do without all this cool technology we have? I guess this is what happens when we use technology for too many hours a day. I was reminded of this when I Stumbled-Upon this online comic...

Untangling a decade of creativity scholarship

Feb 22, 2017

How do we capture a program of scholarship in an image? This is particularly complicated when the work is a tangled web of connections between research, teaching and practice, spread out over multiple publications, presentations and people. One attempt to do...

The (type)face of Obama

Apr 10, 2008

As a follow-up to a previous posting about the many (type)faces of politics, here is an article in the NYTimes titled To the letter born, discussing the manner in which the Obama campaign has leveraged the use of typography in their campaign.

15 years of blogging

Jan 2, 2023

January 1, 2008. 15 years ago, almost to the day - I posted my first note to this website (screenshot below). My first blog post, dated Jan 1, 2008 I have had a web presence since 1998 - hand coded, HTML pages, traces of which are still available on the Wayback...

Why don’t students like school… In 30 mins!

Aug 8, 2013

One of the challenges faced by all instructors is ensuring that students actually read the textbook. This summer we came up with a innovative assignment to address this issue. The book in question was Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? A cognitive...

School design in MLFTC News

Jul 26, 2019

One of the most exciting projects we have been involved with in the Office of Scholarship and Innovation (OofSI) has been our partnership with the Kyrene School District. We have written about it previously (on the OofSI site as well as on my website),...

How artists work

Aug 10, 2008

An interesting (and growing) collection of "habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. And in the specific anecdotes and the way people describe their own relationship to their own work." Kind of cool and...