Elementary students in Bradenton, Fla., participating in the 25th annual My Favorite Home art contest sponsored by Neal Communities are using AI to refine their vision of a dream home.
More than 330 students from Stewart Elementary are working on their concept of a dream home in this annual art contest sponsored by Neal Communities, a Southwest Florida private homebuilder. The contest gives students in grades K-5 a chance to design their ideal home, and winners in each grade level will be selected at an event on Nov. 18. The top three home designs will be featured on the Neal Communities, Neal Signature Homes and SimplyDwell Homes holiday cards. Music teacher Allison Rekow has written an original song titled “Home Sweet Home” that 5th graders will perform during the presentation.
Students are working under the directive that the home “can be anywhere and look like anything they can imagine.
“You can really see the personalities of the students in the designs of their individual dreams,” said Kristen Simpson, K-5 visual arts teacher at Stewart Elementary.
Students in grades K-2 are reading “The Big Orange Splot” by Daniel Manus Pinkwater, a classic children’s picture book about individuality, creative self-expression and resisting conformity.
“Students struggle with getting their ideas on paper,” said Simpson. “The images created by AI are to give the students a jumpstart with their vision.”
Students come up with their version of a dream home and the details they want in it. They can draw their image and have AI fine-tune it, but all contest images are created by hand.
“We discuss how digital art is something many companies are now using,” said Simpson. “Many artists create their own images and use AI to fine-tune and smooth out their work.”
Students are learning that AI can only generate from the words it is given. They learn the more information and detail they can provide with words, the more the image will fit what is in their imagination. After generating an image, students can specify what to remove or change, drawing partly on classroom discussions of architectural styles, window shapes, textures and other design features.
Each grade level is taking a different approach to the project. For kindergarten, the students draw a picture of their dream home. Their project is a collage of shapes to build their homes. First graders work with the teacher and use AI to help bring their vision to life. Second graders are learning about textures and will create a 3D home using the textures they choose for the outside. The homes will have a tea light inside to light them. Students in grades 3 through 5 are using a variety of options to design their dream homes and some students are drawing their homes and using AI to help fine-tune their images.
Each grade level will work with a new art medium. Third grade will use watercolor pencil, and fourth grade will use metal foil and emboss their home.
Fifth graders will be doing a kinusaiga project based on the art movement begun in 1987 by Japanese artist Maeno Setsu, also referenced in some sources as Maeno Takashi or Satsu Mayano, who created the art form in Japan as a creative way to repurpose and upcycle old silk fabric scraps from retired kimonos (kinu means silk, sai means color and ga means picture).
“Allowing the students to use AI to help fine-tune their images has helped spur on their ideas and created a great deal of excitement among the students as they are able to adjust the image to meet their imagination,” said Simpson. “Many students struggle with ‘I’m not a good artist,’ so using the image they create and seeing it fine-tuned is a huge boost to their self-esteem. Others have such great imagination but struggle with putting it on paper, so the use of technology is helping those images come to life.”
Simpson plans to use the $1,500 supplies donation from Neal Communities to bring in materials her students would not have been able to experience.
In addition, a $5,000 donation from Neal Communities will help fund a free after-school art club. This year, the focus of the club will be fiber arts, where the students will have the opportunity to learn crochet, sewing, embroidery and kinusaiga.
