Wood, Z. J., & Costello, E. L., & Keen, A. W., & Eckhardt, C. (2019, April),  A cross-disciplinary minor to engage student’s creativity and engineering skills   Paper presented at 2019 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting, California State University, Los Angeles , California. 10.18260/1-2--31811

\bibitem{asee_peer_31811}
  Wood, Z. J., \& Costello, E. L., \& Keen, A. W., \& Eckhardt, C. (2019, April), \emph{ A cross-disciplinary minor to engage student’s creativity and engineering skills }
  Paper presented at 2019 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting, California State University, Los Angeles , California.
  10.18260/1-2--31811

Zoe J. Wood, Enrica Lovaglio Costello, Aaron W Keen, and Christian Eckhardt.  " A cross-disciplinary minor to engage student’s creativity and engineering skills ".  2019 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting, California State University, Los Angeles , California, 2019, April.  ASEE Conferences, 2019.  https://peer.asee.org/31811 Internet.  16 Apr, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_31811}
  Zoe J. Wood, Enrica Lovaglio Costello, Aaron W Keen, and Christian Eckhardt.
  " A cross-disciplinary minor to engage student’s creativity and engineering skills ".
  \emph{2019 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting, California State University, Los Angeles , California, 2019, April}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2019.
  https://peer.asee.org/31811 Internet.  16 Apr, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_31811
author = "Zoe J. Wood, Enrica Lovaglio Costello, Aaron W Keen, and Christian Eckhardt"
title = " A cross-disciplinary minor to engage student’s creativity and engineering skills "
booktitle = "2019 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting"
year = "2019"
month = "April"
address = "California State University, Los Angeles , California"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/31811}
number = {10.18260/1-2--31811}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - It is well documented that groups composed of diverse team members achieve better results when tackling complex problems (McKinsy & Company).  With this in mind, Cal Poly introduced the Computing for the Interactive Arts (CIA) cross-disciplinary minor, blending art and computer science, in fall 2016. This minor is rooted in two important contexts.  One being that interactive entertainment is a billion dollar industry; video game revenue in 2012 was valued at $14 billion and is expected to grow to $29 billion in 2021.  There is clearly a need to prepare students with both creative and engineering skills to work in this field. The second important context for the creation of the CIA minor is the gender composition of the fields relevant to interactive entertainment. At Cal Poly, the computer science major on average is composed of 24% female students, while the art and design major has 26% male students.  Uniting a mix of students from these two fields allows participants to explore multiple disciplines of high interest and creates a varied pool of students with good potential to form diverse teams. With these tenants in mind, Cal Poly created the CIA minor to prepare students for technical, creative jobs (and creative, technical jobs) while working to bring together diverse teams for problem solving, potentially bridging the gender gap found in both art and computing. 
We present the CIA minor curriculum, which focuses on creating a collaborative, cross-disciplinary environment in which Art and Design students integrate coding and algorithmic thinking in creative works and in which Computer Science students apply the principles and methodology of design thinking to visual applications. The minor enables students from different disciplines to collaborate on projects requiring both a technical and a creative perspective.  The minor is composed primarily of existing courses from the Art and Design and Computer Science departments with the addition of a two-quarter long capstone project, in which teams of students from mixed educational backgrounds work together to make a final creative technical project.  Example capstone projects include virtual reality experiences, mixed reality, and traditional video games.
In this paper, we also present demographic information about the three years of mixed disciplinary cohorts that have been admitted to the CIA minor.  Each cohort averages 11 students who are a mix of computing and art majors, with a total of 27 students having completed the CIA minor capstone class.  Of the students who have declared the minor, 69% overall are female and 60% of the participating computing majors are female.  The minor consistently attracts a larger percentage of female computing students than the computer science major.  When surveyed, the majority of students who have completed the capstone responded that they believe the minor increased both their creative and technical skills.  In addition, 75% of CIA alumni (both computing and art majors) have jobs in a technical industry after graduation.  Finally, we present reflections on the CIA minor in the hopes of encouraging others to consider what is gained by uniting art and engineering.
AU  - Zoe J. Wood
AU  - Enrica Lovaglio Costello
AU  - Aaron W Keen
AU  - Christian Eckhardt
CY  - California State University, Los Angeles , California
DA  - 2019/04/04
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  -  A cross-disciplinary minor to engage student’s creativity and engineering skills 
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/31811
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--31811
ER  -