teaching

Giant Dinosaur Marionettes: Engineering Education, Art, and STS

Apex Gallery, art, Events, teaching

Sometimes people assume that engineers aren’t creative, but this is far from the truth, as the current Apex Gallery exhibit of dinosaur marionettes shows. In his introduction to mechanical engineering course, Dr. Cristian Vargas Ordóñez (in collaboration with Matt Whitehead, Senior Instructor of Art and Director of the Apex Gallery) asked students work in teams to use the engineering concepts they were learning to create and present large dinosaur marionettes.

This project shows what’s possible within engineering education and at the intersection of arts and engineering. It’s also a great illustration of a core principle of STS, which attends to how knowledge is created. Javier Lezaun, Noortje Marres, and Manuel Tironi write that “the larger aim of STS research and intervention . . . [is] to activate new collective imaginations of what an epistemically, technically, environmentally and materially engaged polity might be.” Working together as teams to create something new is a version of this aim at the scale of a college classroom, and it’s good practice for STS thinking and for working creatively with others in other areas! (Our Creativity and Collaboration in STEM minor further reinforces these connections.)

More details about the art exhibit are included in the press release below, and the marionettes will be on display in the Apex Gallery this week, with a reception this afternoon (Wednesday, 11/19) from 4-6 pm.

Art Exhibit Features Giant Dinosaur Marionettes Designed by Mines Mechanical Engineering Students

RAPID CITY, SD (Nov. 19, 2025) – South Dakota Mines mechanical engineering students brought engineering and imagination together to build large dinosaur marionettes, each one crafted with a variety of materials ranging from papier-mache and fabric to metal and 3D printed parts and designed with at least two movable parts.

The creatures are now on display in the Apex Gallery in the university’s Classroom Building. The project is part of the freshman introduction to mechanical engineering course taught by Cristian Vargas Ordóñez, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Leslie A. Rose Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Dr. Vargas Ordóñez in the Apex Gallery with the dinosaur marionettes.
Continue reading →

Audio Walks: Exploring the Experience of Place

Humanities, STS Faculty, teaching

By Bryce Tellmann

Most semesters, I teach at least one section of Introduction to Humanities (HUM 100). In order to anchor the class’s exploration of such a potentially broad topic, I choose one or two topics to guide our semester-long inquiry into the human experience. This semester, those two topics are place and sound. On the one hand, they are nearly universal categories of human experience, as we inhabit location and experience vibration every day. But on the other, they are infinitely variable. One person’s experience and understanding of a place, or of a particular set of sounds, may be entirely different than another person’s, even if that place and sound are outwardly identical.

One way that my students are exploring the possibilities of sound and space is by experimenting with an artform called “audio walks.” Popularized by artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, these mobile art installations ask the participant to go on a walk, retracing the artist’s footsteps as they listen to an audio recording of the artist’s walk. The artist will often comment on their surroundings, including exact navigation directions for the listener. Inevitable differences in the artist’s recording of their walk and the listener’s own environment (different people passing by, different vehicle sounds, even different times of the day or seasons) draw attention to the differences between the ways we represent experience and our actual experience. This, in turn, helps students appreciate the ways that media technologies affect how we experience, understand, and value the world around us.

Some audio walks are straightforward, presenting an ostensibly “authentic” recording of what the artist experienced on their walk. However, the artist may also choose to more actively compose their audio walk, either by preplanning events to be captured during the recording or by editing the recording after the fact. Such additions amplify the disjuncture between what listeners hear in the recording and what they experience as they retrace the walk.

Eden Otten, a freshman Civil Engineering major, captured the contrast well in a discussion board reply:

I think a sense of community in sound is more fleeting than one in place. We still shared the same trail to Boneyard, and I was in the same place that this audio tour gave meaning to. However, many aspects of sound that gave the walk uniqueness were gone in the days between capturing it and listening to it. We experienced the place the same, but the unique sound couldn’t be a shared experience, as I could hear your contributions to the soundscape, but you couldn’t hear mine.

Below are links to download some of the students’ audio walks. If you’re on campus, I encourage you to download one or more to your mobile device and go on the same walk that the artist did! Walks are best experienced with headphones.

Continue reading →

Printing in the Classroom: Hands-On Creation & History of Technology

art, Classes, Humanities, teaching, Technology

By Christy Tidwell

This semester, I am teaching a section of Connections: Humanities & Technology (HUM 200), which is one of our core STS courses as well as a general education course that students from across the university take to fulfill their humanities requirement. There are many ways to teach this course to get students to think more critically and more deeply about the relationships between the humanities and various technologies, and this particular semester’s class begins with a few weeks exploring printing technologies.

What better way to understand printing technologies than to try them out?

To incorporate a hands-on approach to printing in the class, I worked with our art professor, Matt Whitehead, to prepare an activity for students in the art room. We wanted to give students a chance to work with printing presses in a couple of different ways, to try using a typewriter and a Leroy lettering set, and to check out some old toy moveable type presses. These toy presses date from the 1940s and are no longer totally functional, so they were more on display than for use, but they still allowed students to get a better sense of what a moveable type printing press is like on a small scale.

Photo of a mini printing press ready for use.
A mini printing press from the Open Press Project, with students working in the background.

After a brief introduction to some basic printing techniques and explanation of what was available, students were given the freedom to explore these technologies in whatever order they wished. Some made an effort to try everything and even combined elements (the printing press with text from the typewriter or lettering set, for instance); some really focused in on one technology or technique and tried it multiple times or in multiple ways.

Continue reading →

Writing on Demand vs. Writing on Purpose

computers, teaching, Technology, writing

By Evan Thomas

What does it sound like to sound educated yet know nothing? In a 17th-century comedy by Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (“The Middle-Class Aristocrat”), a rich cloth merchant tries to imitate aristocratic education and speech. He takes philosophy classes and learns that his normal expressions “require a little lengthening” – he must learn how to stretch heartfelt statements (“your lovely eyes make me die of love”) into aristocratic contortions (“Of love to die make me, beautiful marchioness, your beautiful eyes”; “Your lovely eyes, of love make me, beautiful marchioness, die”; “Die, your lovely eyes, beautiful marchioness, of love make me”; “Me make your lovely eyes die, beautiful marchioness, of love”). The joke is on him, as his rhetoric tutor cruelly exploits his easy admiration for excessive, voluminous, amplitudinous, prolix, verbose, copious speech.

The example of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme is echoed in a new development in AI. Recently, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a large-language model (“LLM”) AI that appears to have tremendous facility at composing passable long-form texts. As an educator in higher ed, I don’t think that writing pedagogies are remotely ready yet for the instructional challenges posed by this technology. The main concerns that academics have had about AI and collegiate writing have to do with academic integrity. These are important concerns and addressing them will probably have massive relevance in the years to come.

Headline: Schools Ban ChatGPT Amid Fears of Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Cheating
Headline: Teachers Fear ChatGPT Will Make Cheating Easier Than Ever

However, not all academics are especially concerned by the threat posed by AI language models. First, some academics express confidence that their domain-specific knowledge is too inscrutable for a machine to understand. Second, others suggest that the strength of their bonds with their students would make it impossible for their students to make an unnoticed switch to a different voice. Whether the first or second case is true, whether some content or character is indelible, there are finer, more constructive applications of LLMs to writing in higher ed.

Continue reading →

Planting Seeds: Anchoring Ethics in the Dirt

Classes, Environment, teaching

By Christy Tidwell

My Environmental Ethics & STEM class asks big questions about knowledge, values, justice, and responsibility – both individual and systemic – related to environmental issues. Although I try to situate these conversations in specific, real-world examples, they can still sometimes seem abstract or beyond the scale of my students’ reach. They may wonder what they can do to address climate change, for instance, or to change corporate policy.

But they can, of course, make a difference, and we look for ways to identify the actions they can take (again, not just individually but within larger contexts). In the meantime, to help connect us more fully to the environment, this semester I asked my students to plant seeds and to do their best to grow them and keep them alive. It’s my hope that working to protect and nurture one small plant will give the class a personal connection that issues of pollution, plastics, or water rights may not always have.

Continue reading →

Automatic Art: or, How to Take the Human out of the Humanities

art, Humanities, teaching, Technology

By Evan Thomas

I often teach a general education Humanities course (HUM 200, officially titled Connections: Humanities and Technology) on the topic of “Automatic Art.” As a Humanities class, we study representative elements from the entire range of arts and letters:

Those are representative examples of the coursework – but what is “Automatic Art”? The term doesn’t actually have much reality outside of my course. (Frustrated students will often turn to the surrealist technique of Automatic Writing, which does exist, but has little bearing on the collection of objects we study.) I like to tell students that “automatic art” is equivalent to “taking the human out of art,” but what does that actually mean?

Continue reading →