Abstract
Many courses in theatre technology address knowledge domains that exist at the intersection of art and technology. Any theatre technician, for example, must be versed in the technical details of their discipline. They must also be comfortable improvising, developing creative solutions to unexpected challenges, and working with shifting goals and expectations as productions evolve. Learners typically acquire the skills, practices, and assumptions in each of these different domains through very different signature pedagogies. This intersectionality of art and technology can make developing effective teaching approaches challenging, as learners and instructors find themselves coming to different chunks of domain material with different assumptions about how to teach it or how to learn it. This essay presents the instructional design of a course in show control system design for live entertainment. The course discussed is dual-level (graduate and undergraduate), focusing on understanding, designing and installing systems that connect and automate typical live entertainment control systems, like those for lighting, sound, and video. The instructional design of the course attempted to integrate two signature pedagogies: the studio model and the lecture-drill-test model. This essay describes some of the instructional design research that informed the design of the course, the design itself, some results of student work, and reflections on the success and challenges of merging the two signature pedagogies.
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Notes
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Students in the Spring 2017 offering of THTR 550 held a variety of disciplinary interests within theatre: one graduate student and one undergraduate student were primarily interested in lighting design; two graduate students focused on sound design. One graduate student was a set designer with an interest in video/projections design, one was a technical director, and four of the undergraduates were primarily studying mechanical/structural engineering.
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For example, knowing how to electrically create data from a particular entertainment control protocols at the signal-level, or to build the software necessary to packetize data for UDP transmission.
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Appendix
Appendix
Equipment provided for the final show control project:
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HO-scale model railroad track and locomotive, controlled by a programmable logic controller (PLC)
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Ten (10) magnetic relay switches (to be placed under the track for sensing the locomotive)
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One (1) ETC SmartFade lighting console
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One (1) DMX-controlled fiber-optic light modeling system (24 dimmers)
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Five (5) Mac computers running QLab software
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Two (2) Fastlane USB to MIDI adaptors
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One (1) MIDISport 8×8 MIDI splitter/merger
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One (1) MIDISolutions R8 8-port MIDI Relay Controller
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One (1) MIDISolutions F8 8-port MIDI Footswitch Controller
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Five (5) 5” HDMI LED Displays
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One (1) 1-in, 8-out HDMI Splitter
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Dionne, R. (2018). Problem-Based Learning and Studio Instruction in Theatre Technology: A Case Study. In: Fliotsos, A., Medford, G. (eds) New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89767-7_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89767-7_15
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