Interview

TECHNOLOGY
Can Smartphones
Help Innovative Learning?
By: Justin Osborn
9th grade, Clarkston Schools
As I look around my class and see
students engaged with their
smartphones, I wonder how this
technology has affected the classroom. Has
it helped learning or taken away from it by
causing distraction? How will it affect the
classroom in the future?
With technology becoming regular in class,
the line of distraction and utility has become
increasingly blurred in recent years. From
serving as a dictionary in foreign language
classes, to accessing textbooks in Science,
phones have become very useful. But on
the other hand, phones can and do distract
in classes, when students ignore teachers
during History or text instead of writing in
Language Arts. The question then lies in how
we should use phones in school.
Some teachers have creatively embraced
the phones, having students use them to
download apps to study or participate in
class. Language teachers experiment with
making social media posts in languages other
than English. Others will give easy access to
textbooks on phones to save the backpacks of
their students.
There are also teachers who have resorted
to taking all phones from students when they
enter the classroom, or taking away a phone
when it ventures out of its owner’s pocket.
While extreme, this allows teachers to make
sure their students learn effectively.
I believe that teachers should learn how
to incorporate these technologies into their
lessons to promote innovative learning. By
doing so, students will be in the center of
what happens in the classroom, which will
lead them to better learning habits. Only then
a teacher can fully connect with his or her
students. To raise innovators, teachers must
innovate with new technology.
The google
artist
By: Sonne Kimbad
12 th grade
International School, Bloomfield Hills
Every Stanford dorm seems to have that
creative, go-to person. The felt-pen
artist who enhances the hallway white
board, the annoyingly smart kid who cuts
class to make posters for Big Game and still
aces the midterm . . . the only one you’d trust
to design the T-shirt.
Dennis Hwang was that guy. He graduated
with a degree in art and a minor in
computer science. Hwang is still that guy.
Webmaster manager for the search engine
powerhouse Google, Hwang is the “Google
doodler”—the cartoonist who embellishes
the firm’s wide-eyed typographic logo. With
tens of millions of people viewing Google’s
home page daily, the guy who used to design
Burbank and Cardenal’s dorm shirts is, in
CNN ’s words, “the most famous unknown
artist in the world.”
Hwang, 28, manages a team of 23 people
charged with keeping Google’s heavily visited
pages technically fit, fast and sleek, but
he also has charge of the creative drawings
that decorate the Google logo on holiday,
special occasions such as the Olympics, and
offbeat little commemorations such as artist
Edvard Munch’s birthdate. Hwang is modest
about his celebrity, but admits he gets
hundreds of fan e-mails every time a new
doodle posts; sometimes thousands, if he’s
done something “particularly surprising,”
he say
His family moved back to Knoxville when
he was in middle school. Hwang found himself
speaking no English, trying to follow
what was going on. It didn’t take long for
him to catch up academically. When it was
time for college, he thought he wanted a pure
art school, “but when I visited them, none felt
like home,” he recalls. “The first place I went
at Stanford was the art department and it
just clicked. It’s a very free environment. The
professors are almost like classmates.”
Hwang immersed himself in fine art as
well as some programming classes. He also
was captivated by Professor Marc Levoy’s
freshman seminar Science of Art. Levoy recalls
two aspects of Hwang that still ring
true: “He smiled a lot and he has a childlike
exuberance. In the summer after his junior
year, Hwang’s former resident adviser in
Cardenal, an early Google employee, convinced
Hwang to take an internship as an assistant
webmaster. His life has barely slowed
since. He devoted his senior year to Google,
working 40 hours a week.
From the beginning, Google had a sense
of humor. A little stick figure illustrative
of the event on the Google logo is a clue to
where they were. Users loved it, and soon the
company hired an outside graphic artist to
come up with other simple cartoons to mark
special events.
Hwang’s original job involved straightforward
programming chores, but soon after
his modification of a Fourth of July doodle
caught the founders’ attention, word of
Hwang’s art experience and his talent got
around. Pretty soon, Hwang became the official
doodler, completing about 50 doodles
a year.
Hwang creates the images, using an electronic
tablet and stylus for his sketches. The
doodles are fun, usually whimsical—and
sometimes baffling. Know about Gaston Julia,
for example? Visitors to Google on February
3, 2004, saw the Google logo with a hurricane-shaped
“o” against a backdrop of equations
to celebrate the French mathematician.
Although he has little free time, Hwang
tries to “keep up with the latest tools” in
computer animation. His most difficult doodling
tasks, he says quietly, involve honoring
artists whose styles he has studied and
admired for years, such as Claude Monet.
Amid an almost infinite supply of people and
events to doodle, “artists’ birthdays are the
most precious to me,” Hwang says. “I’ve always
studied art history and trying to imitate
their style is the most pressure.”
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