Bridging the gap between art and academics

What if you could learn not just math, but science, technology and engineering through arts and crafts? Bridging the gap between these academic disciplines and fine arts is Mathura M Govindarajan, a creative technologist, who works on projects that encourage alternative ways of education. She was recently in the city to conduct a workshop on and we caught up with her to find out more.

“I’ve been practising many arts and crafts for a while now, like doodling, mandala drawing, origami and so on. I have an engineering background with work experience in software, after which I pursued a course in interactive telecommunications in New York University. The idea of the course was to bring together art, communication and technology,” begins Mathura.

She was teaching at another place in New York City, when she discovered more about teaching/learning science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) through art. She explains, “It appeals to me that when you teach someone through art, you’re not only creating a reason for them to do something but also break barriers and make it easy for a group of people to sit together in the same space and learn.”

Various event venues across cities like Bengaluru and Chennai have been helping her organise workshops where she uses art to teach STEM. About the recently concluded workshop in the city, she says, “I taught architectural kirigami, which enables people to create 3D spaces. I don’t know if the participants realised but we were talking about geometry and math a lot while creating art.” Though she feels she can’t comment about how scientifically accurate these models were, because some of them were inspired by artist MC Escher’s models, at the end of it, what mattered is that it got people thinking.

Mathura elucidates, “Every time one tries to exercise their creativity in art, they’re challenged with a new problem — what the measurements are or amount of cuts needed. Suddenly, you find yourself tackling a problem, and that problem will teach you more things about STEM because it’s your design and not something off the internet.”

Though she had provided them with basic design templates to begin with, the attendees eventually wanted to make their own designs. “I’ve noticed that if I give some participants a set template or an origami model to make, they get stressed out after a few folds and refuse to proceed. So I find it better to build it up in a more organic way,” she shares.

Tying up the ends, Mathura says that the beauty about bringing academics and arts closer is that people are enabled to do what they want. “At the workshop, I was just helping the participants get the necessary knowledge to create what they liked. So, on the whole, art is an easy tool to teach and I find arts and crafts to be a therapeutic way of expressing ourselves too,” she concludes.