4: CyberGame Pedagogy
Lesson: Taking a Chance with Your Art
Grade: Fourth Grade
Time Allotment: Two 60 minute class periods
Enduring Idea: We have the power to control and to release control over some areas of life.
Exploring chance in games through collaborative art-making and interactive display.
Summary: Students will discuss power, control, and chance as variables in common board and computer games. Extending the conversation out, students will see how control and chance interact in the world, the art world, and their personal art story. In table groups, students will collaborate to make an artwork based on chance. After looking at “Easter egg” projects, the students will then hand the power over to the audience. Each table will secretly brainstorm a hide and seek location for their creation. Over the next month, students will seek out the artwork of fellow fourth graders, noting found locations on a large map outside the art room, rehiding the work, and encouraging other students and staff to join the dialogue. In a follow-up class, students will analyze the interactive work, both the creation and dissemination of their art via chance. This might take the form of class discussion, journaling, or creating a new work of art.
Artworks, Artists and/or Artifacts:
Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance by Jean Arp
(streetworksart) by Graeme Sullivan
Finding a Fitzgerald, Public Paintings by Christopher Fitzgerald
Chutes and Ladders, Trouble, Candyland, Twister, Monopoly Junior
Key Concepts Addressed in This Lesson:
--Artists can intentionally give up control over their art.
--Art is a process that includes display and audience participation, whether as passive viewers or active changers.
Essential Questions Addressed in This Lesson:
Who has power?
What is within our control?
What is left to chance?
How does audience impact art?
Standards:
1a.3 Use a variety of materials and media and understand how to use them
to produce different visual effects and different responses for viewers.
1a.5 Select works for exhibition and work as a group to create a display.
3a.3 Create 2D artwork from memory or imagination to tell a story or embody and idea or fantasy
4a.1 Integrate knowledge of the visual arts and apply the arts to learning other disciplines
4b.2 Investigate uses and meanings of examples of the arts in children’s daily lives, homes, and communities
5a.1 Understand there are different responses to specific artworks
5a.2 Describe how people’s experiences influence the development of specific artworks.
5a.4 Participate in classroom critiques of examples of art from themselves, the class, and art history
Interdisciplinary Connections:
Social Studies: Behavioral Sciences (Individuals, Institutions, and Society)
--Understand the interactions between individuals, group, and institutions.
--Understand the factors that contribute to an individual’s uniqueness.
--Understand the development of culture through time and the interactions among and within societies.
Lesson Objectives:
Knowledge--Students will know that some artists allow game concepts like chance into their art.
Skills--Students will create collaborative artwork that involves chance in the making and display.
Dispositions--Students will reflect on power and control in the art making and display process.
Assessment:
Teacher Research and Preparation:
create dice chart for art creation process
prepare background sheet for artwork
create campus map for tracking locations
photograph and print mini images for making the map
Teaching Resources:
images of the work of Jean Arp,
Christopher Fitzgerald, and Graeme Sullivan
websites of Christopher Fitzgerald and Graeme Sullivan
Student Supplies:
dice, paper, markers, crayons, colored pencils,
oil pastels, graphite pencils, glue, collage paper
