Featured Learning Lab Projects

Ramyar Rossoukh | Expos 20: Journey to Mars

Mars has become the next great frontier in human conquest and exploration. Why Mars? What is at stake in our efforts to reach Mars? What does it say about life here on Earth? In this expository writing class, students examined at a range of scholarly literature on Mars as well as films, science fiction, and virtual reality simulations to examine some possible futures in which humans have colonized outer space and become a multi-planetary species.

Ramyar Roussokh’s Expos course visited the Learning Lab during their first unit in which they analyzed the film, The Martian. As many folks who’ve taught film know, it is often extremely difficult to get students to move beyond mere plot summary, to force them to analyze the images and properly filmic qualities of the piece rather than a relatively thin version of the story. So, for their visit we printed up two collections of stills from the first 4 minutes of the film. We offered both a computational sampling of the piece—one still every 2 seconds for the first 4 minutes—and a “cinematic” sampling, grabbing a single still from each and every one of the film’s first 200 shots, which is the number of discrete shots we encounter in the first 4 minutes of the film. When the students arrived, they found both sequences of stills lined up next to each other on the tables, tangibly introducing the complexity of film analysis. Even shrunk to an inch in height the stills ran the length of two big LL tables end-to-end. It was quite a sight! For their activity, the students selected stills to compare and contrast using a glossary of film terms we printed out on cards. Students used the images and terms to present insightful, multimodal analyses of the film’s opening scenes, which most certainly did analyze the images qua images rather than mere conveyors of plot points. The concrete materiality of the cut up images—even more than the digital display of clips on the computer—made the film an object or artifact in need of analysis rather than a story, and this had a powerful effect on the students’ work.

Later in the semester, students returned to the Learning Lab for a pre-drafting exercise. Students delivered short pitches (~1 minute) in which they used visual evidence to explain their Unit 3 paper research question using images of Mars (both real and imagined). We knew that students would be in different stages of their writing process at during their visit, so two prompts were designed. The first helped students who were unsure of a research question to develop one, while a second helped students with a proposed question refine their arguments.

Lastly, the Learning Lab hosted an optional event on a Sunday evening where students were invited to play the board game “Teraforming Mars” with their professor and talk through the implications of their game choices.

Margaret Rennix | Expos 20: Narratives of Immigration

Immigration has become an increasingly divisive topic in U.S. politics, as thousands of people fleeing violence and poverty in Central America have arrived at the nation’s border. While conversations about immigration tend to focus on its economic and cultural implications, the specific experiences of immigrants can get lost in the political shuffle. In this course, students engaged actively with how narratives of immigration are told and transformed, especially as individual experiences get processed into legal asylum cases.

Margaret Rennix’s Expos 20 students first visited the Learning Lab for a session where they developed "elevator pitches" for their research.  This workshop exposed the students to the technology and format of their eventual capstone project. In late November, students returned to film their capstone projects in the Learning Lab’s small studio. Over the course of the day, all 29 students filmed multiple takes over 15 minute appointments. After filming was complete, Learning Lab media staff created edited videos for each student. In December, the students attended a capstone event in the Learning Lab. Their individual videos were loaded onto laptops with headphones, and students took turns visiting each station, watching the videos, and talking with their peers about their projects.