Maiden Erlegh School – Stellar Projects 2017 launches with a Year 8 workshop with Graphics students Louise and Ben

“With littlebits you can make whatever you imagine …”

Stellar Projects, a five year collaboration between Maiden Erlegh School in Reading and ArtLab, launched in 2016 with Tim in Space, a day of collaborative art making and co-research.  Imagining life in space; the artefacts, artworks and sensory experiences it might produce, Year 7 students collectively made Littlebits animated interactive space forms and life forms and inhabited scapes with clay.  These were 3d scanned and attached to a letter to Tim Peake proposing to create the first art exhibition in space through 3D printing students’ creations. Read the letter and see the digital scans here.

This May ArtLab co-researchers Louise and Ben, the fantastic designers of our blog, both students from Graphic Communication, launched Stellar Projects 2017: ‘Life on Mars’ with our 2016 co-researchers (now in Year 8) from Maiden Erlegh.  Stellar Project’s ambition is to support a network of young people engaging with art and electronics, who then facilitate workshops with their peers, leading workshops and sharing their experiential learning, furthering others access, experimentation and then again sharing their learning with a new group.

The Year 8’s worked with Louise and Ben to design posters advertising their forthcoming workshops to Year 7’s.  Asking ‘what could be improved from last year’s poster?’ Louise writes:

‘We showed students the previous project poster and asked them what they thought and could be improved – highlighting things like use of colour, imagery, typography and general composition of all the information. We provided them with a list of the required pieces of information i.e. location/date/time/title and asked them to organise them in order of importance. This then prompted different treatment to each piece of information, i.e. if they thought the title was most important, this was shown through it’s size or placement on the poster. So we asked the students to work in groups and create a draft poster – using large sheets of paper and pens, each group produced one or more wireframe sketches of their ideal poster and concepts. They used these drafts to help create their poster digitally using Photoshop (some students were more comfortable using software like Publisher, Word and PowerPoint).’

Each group shared their ideas in turn, before populating the walls of the school with their posters advertising their workshop. Click here to see what happened next!