About the Media Lab

Digital imaging has opened up a new world of possibilities for all fields that depend on visual thinking and visual communication. Whether the focus is on science, medicine, math, technology, or the humanities, digital media literacy has become a fundamental part of education in the 21st century.

Students in the Media Lab at Newton South use digital media to learn the basics of visual thinking and visual communication. As in a traditional visual arts workshop, students explore the visual elements and principles of design and learn about how context affects meaning.

Enabled by new media technologies, however, students can explore many more solutions to creative problems than before. In their search, they can view multiple perspectives of an object, reconfigure the cross-sections of an object, or reorganize the shapes in a composition. This in-depth visual exploration would have been impossibly time-consuming before the advent of digital imaging.

Students in the Media Lab practice a broad range of techniques including time and motion manipulation, text and image integration, 3D imaging, and interactivity. Through these means, they develop their observation and analytic skills, create visual and verbal narratives, and learn how to effectively communicate information and express ideas.

The Media Lab is interdisciplinary. Students make connections between fields and bring their interests and talents to their media projects. They use math skills to solve a problem in an animation; manipulate a skeleton and access our anatomy library to figure out how a human joint moves; and investigate wave motion to make a convincing image of a moving object.

Students also use skills they have developed in the Media Lab to produce videos, animations, and presentations for other courses. They might create a book illustration for an English class project, an animation of a science concept for a science class, or a poster for a theatre production.

The skills, hard work, and creativity that the students bring to their projects are impressive. Every year, student work is presented at an end-of-the-year festival. Former students who are applying these skills in college or the workplace come back to share their experiences with current students. They also inspire us by sharing up-to-the-moment developments in the field.

> Boston Globe article about the Media Lab

SPECIAL THANKS TO:

• The Newton Schools Foundation for a grant to purchase materials for the 3D Animation and the Human Body course.
• The Newton South PTSO for a grant to purchase a camcorder and supplementary materials for the Media Lab