ACM Interactions

Jennifer Jacobs is an assistant professor in Media Arts and Technology at UC Santa Barbara. She studies ways to support expressive computer-aided design and manufacturing by developing new computational tools that integrate computer programming with traditional materials and manual control. She received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab and her research has been presented at international venues including SIGGRAPH, CACM, Ars Electronica and and CHI. [email protected]

Learning remotely, making locally: Remote digital fabrication instruction during a pandemic

Posted: Fri, September 04, 2020 - 11:29:41

The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally disrupted learning by requiring a society-wide shift to remote instruction. This shift has raised specific challenges for students and educators in classes that rely on physical making. We teach digital fabrication—a subject that combines computational design tools and computer-controlled fabrication machines. When our campuses in Santa Barbara and Seattle shut down during the start of…