Skateboarding, Tracking & Data Visualization Course Documentation (CRATERs : Finding A Line – 2015-2020)

Visit Video Documentation: https://vimeo.com/645802578

Project Summary: Skateboarding, Tracking & Data Visualization

This documentation features the interactive skateboard interface developed by Max Kazemzadeh to introduce urban youth to data visualization, hardware technology, and interdisciplinary STEAM learning through skateboarding. The interface was developed in conjunction with ART 499: Special Topics Course—Skateboarding, Tracking & Data Visualization, which Kazemzadeh taught three times at Gallaudet University.

Designed to make technological exploration accessible regardless of prior experience or equipment ownership, the course provided skateboards to students who did not own one, drawing from a collection of boards assembled by Kazemzadeh. When the course was first offered, all 18 seats were filled, although only half of the enrolled students owned skateboards. With each subsequent offering, the proportion of students who owned their own boards declined. This pattern underscored the importance of removing material barriers to participation and creating accessible pathways into technology through an engaging, culturally relevant physical activity.

The project also extended beyond the university classroom through a public workshop at CRATERs—Collaborative Research-space for Art, Technology, Engineering, Robotics and Skateboarding—in an open lot at Union Market in Washington, DC. The workshop followed the project’s involvement in Finding A Line, a larger initiative hosted by the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts that brought professional skateboarders, musicians, artists, and members of the public together to skate and create in the Center’s front yard. Led by the Kennedy Center’s Vice President for Community Engagement, the event explored skateboarding as a platform for artistic expression, collaboration, and public participation.

The Gallaudet CRATERs: Finding A Line Bowl was initially commissioned by the Kennedy Center and built by Dave Mutarelli of Lifetime Decks LLC and Ben Ashworth, sculpture faculty at George Mason University. Following the Kennedy Center event, the bowl was donated to Gallaudet University, where it became part of the continuing educational and collaborative initiatives associated with the project.

The course received national recognition through its inclusion in the 2018 National Academies Press publication The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree, edited by David Skorton and Ashley Bear. Featured in the report’s gallery of integrative educational practices under “Community, Skateboards, and Motion Data Capture,” the project was documented as an example of interdisciplinary education connecting artistic practice, skateboarding culture, motion tracking, hardware technology, and data visualization. Its inclusion situated Kazemzadeh’s course within a broader national discussion of innovative approaches to integrating the arts and STEM disciplines in higher education.

Publication: Skorton, David J., and Ashley Bear, eds. (2018). The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree. National Academies Press.

Read the publication

ART 499: Skateboarding, Tracking & Data Visualization

A Deeper Description of Its Educational, Artistic, and Philosophical Significance

Max Kazemzadeh · Gallaudet University · Special Topics in Art, Technology, and STEM Education

Kazemzadeh’s course, ART 499: Special Topics Course: Skateboarding, Tracking & Data Visualization, represents a significant model of interdisciplinary education in which a physical, youth-centered cultural practice becomes a gateway to understanding data, hardware, sensing technologies, spatial relationships, and computational representation. Rather than introducing data visualization through abstract charts, programming exercises, or conventional classroom demonstrations, the course began with an activity that participants could experience through their own bodies: skateboarding.

The project’s significance lies in this reversal of the conventional STEM classroom. Instead of asking students to learn a technology first and then find an application for it, Kazemzadeh developed an interactive system in which skateboarding itself became the reason to explore technology. Movement became measurable; measurable movement became data; and data became something that could be represented, interpreted, and discussed.

The result was not simply a skateboarding activity supplemented by electronics. It was a pedagogical framework in which art, engineering, embodied knowledge, youth culture, and data literacy could operate together.

The project’s demonstration and documentation includes skateboarder Deeba Yavrom at CRATERs—Collaborative Research-space for Art, Technology, Engineering, Robotics and Skateboarding—which extended this educational concept beyond the university classroom and into a public setting. Its subsequent recognition in the National Academies Press volume The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education (2018), edited by David Skorton and Ashley Bear, provides an important documentary connection between your course and the broader national discussion of arts-integrated STEM education.

1. From skateboarding to data literacy: the central pedagogical innovation

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At the heart of ART 499 was an unusually productive educational proposition: a skateboard could become both a cultural object and a scientific instrument, while the act of skating could become both an artistic performance and a form of data generation.

Skateboarding is already a sophisticated embodied practice. A skateboarder constantly interprets surfaces, slopes, balance, momentum, speed, obstacles, and spatial relationships. A skater makes rapid decisions based on feedback from the board, the ground, and the body. These decisions involve an intuitive understanding of physical systems, even when the skater does not describe that knowledge using the vocabulary of physics or engineering.

Kazemzadeh’s interactive skateboard interface offered a way to make aspects of that otherwise largely tacit knowledge available for technological investigation. By connecting skateboarding with tracking hardware and data visualization, you created a pathway from a familiar physical experience toward concepts that can otherwise seem remote or abstract.

The educational sequence can be understood as follows:

1. Embodied activity

A skateboarder moves, balances, accelerates, turns, and responds to a physical environment.

2. Technological sensing

Hardware and tracking systems make selected aspects of motion available for measurement.

3. Data representation

Movement becomes information that can be visualized, compared, and interpreted.

4. Critical and creative inquiry

Participants can investigate how physical experiences are translated into digital information, and what that information reveals or leaves out.

This sequence is important because it connects the student’s existing interests and physical capabilities to new technical knowledge. The skateboard is not simply a motivational prop used to make STEM more appealing. It is the foundation of the inquiry itself.

The approach also makes the course interdisciplinary in a substantive sense. Art contributes the design of the experience and the interpretation of visual information. Technology contributes sensing, tracking, and computational systems. Engineering contributes the integration of hardware and the relationship between physical action and system behavior. Mathematics and data science enter through measurement, patterns, and representation. Skateboarding contributes a real-world practice in which all these elements acquire a concrete purpose.

That is a much more integrated relationship than merely combining an art assignment with a separate science lesson.

2. The body as a source of knowledge

One of the course’s deeper philosophical contributions is its treatment of the body as a source of knowledge rather than simply an object to be measured.

In conventional technical education, knowledge is often presented through symbolic representations: equations, graphs, diagrams, datasets, and written explanations. These are powerful tools, but they can also create a distance between abstract concepts and the lived experiences to which they refer.

Skateboarding begins from the opposite direction. The learner experiences balance before describing equilibrium, momentum before calculating it, and changes in direction before interpreting them as vectors. The body encounters a problem, responds to it, and develops a practical understanding through repeated action.

This connects the course to the philosophy of embodied cognition: the idea that thinking and understanding are deeply connected to perception, bodily action, and interaction with the environment.

It also resonates with phenomenology, particularly the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose philosophy emphasizes that we encounter and understand the world through embodied experience. A skateboarder does not experience the bowl merely as an arrangement of geometric surfaces. The bowl is experienced through the possibilities it offers for movement, risk, speed, balance, and creative expression.

Kazemzadeh’s interface introduces a second layer to that experience. The skater’s movement is not only lived; it becomes available for technological interpretation.

This creates a productive tension:

• What the skateboarder feels and understands through movement is one form of knowledge.
• What the tracking system records is another.
• What a visualization communicates is yet another.

These forms of knowledge overlap, but they are not identical. A visualization might reveal patterns that a skater cannot readily perceive, while simultaneously omitting sensations, intentions, fear, style, or the subtle adjustments through which the skater maintains control.

The educational opportunity is therefore not simply to teach students to trust data. It is to help them understand the relationship between data and experience.

The interface makes the body legible to technology while also creating an opportunity to question the limits of that legibility.

This is an especially valuable lesson for students growing up in an environment saturated with fitness trackers, smartphones, recommendation systems, digital maps, and algorithmic evaluations. The course offers a practical starting point for understanding how physical activity becomes digital information—and how that transformation changes what can be known about an experience.

3. Skateboarding as an alternative entry point into STEM

Skateboarding is an unusually rich medium for interdisciplinary teaching because it brings together physical principles, technical experimentation, spatial intelligence, visual culture, and iterative problem-solving.

A skater learns by attempting a movement, receiving immediate feedback, adjusting technique, and trying again. This resembles the iterative structure of engineering design and experimental inquiry. A failed attempt is not necessarily wasted effort; it may reveal something about the surface, the equipment, the body’s position, or the conditions needed for a successful maneuver.

When tracking and visualization enter this process, participants have another way to examine the relationship between action and outcome. Depending on the particular sensing and visualization capabilities of the interface, they can investigate how movements are captured and represented, how observations can be compared, and how a technical system can be modified to produce different results.

This opens several learning pathways:

Technical field	Connection to skateboarding
Physics	Momentum, acceleration, balance, friction, force, and energy
Engineering	Hardware integration, system behavior, testing, and iterative design
Computing	Data acquisition, signal processing, tracking, and software
Mathematics	Measurement, coordinates, rates of change, and quantitative relationships
Data visualization	Translating movement into a visual representation that can be interpreted
Art and design	Interaction design, visual language, perception, and creative experimentation

The important point is that these are not merely subjects that can be mentioned in connection with skateboarding. They become meaningful because the activity gives students a reason to investigate them.

A learner who might initially see data visualization as a specialized professional technique can encounter it as a way to understand an activity that already matters to them. Technical knowledge becomes a resource for exploring their own interests, rather than a prerequisite imposed before those interests are acknowledged.

This is one of the strongest arguments for the course’s significance within STEAM education: it treats culture and creativity not as decorative additions to STEM, but as sources of questions, motivation, and methods of investigation.

4. Reconsidering who gets to participate in technological knowledge

The course also raises a broader question about access to STEM: Who gets to recognize themselves as someone who can work with technology?

Traditional STEM pathways can appear to begin with a narrow set of prerequisites—advanced mathematics, prior programming experience, laboratory familiarity, or an established identity as a technically oriented student. Those prerequisites can make technical fields feel remote to people whose strongest interests and abilities are expressed through art, movement, music, design, or community culture.

Kazemzadeh’s course created a different point of entry. Participants could begin with something they knew how to do, cared about, or wanted to understand. From there, the course could introduce unfamiliar technologies in relation to an existing practice.

This approach does not eliminate the need for technical rigor. Instead, it changes the order in which technical engagement begins. Rather than requiring students to establish a technical identity before they enter the learning environment, it allows them to develop that identity through participation.

There is an important distinction between making STEM entertaining and making STEM accessible through a different intellectual pathway. Kazemzadeh’s project exemplifies the latter.

It also suggests a more expansive definition of technical ability. A person may possess substantial spatial awareness, rapid perceptual judgment, creative problem-solving ability, or practical knowledge of physical systems without initially recognizing these as assets relevant to engineering or computing. An educational environment that connects those abilities to technology can help make their relevance visible.

For students from communities underrepresented in particular STEM disciplines, such approaches may offer valuable opportunities for engagement. However, the existence of an inclusive entry point does not by itself prove measurable improvements in retention or career outcomes. Those claims would require participant feedback, learning assessments, and longitudinal evidence. The defensible significance is that the course developed a concrete alternative route into technical inquiry.

5. Data visualization as translation, interpretation, and critique

The course’s title is revealing: Skateboarding, Tracking & Data Visualization. Tracking and visualization are not interchangeable activities.

Tracking attempts to capture selected features of movement. Visualization transforms recorded information into a form that people can perceive and interpret. Neither process is neutral in an absolute sense.

A tracking system depends on what its hardware can detect, how it is configured, what counts as an event, and what information is retained. A visualization then depends on decisions about scale, color, shape, temporal resolution, and the relationships that are emphasized.

These decisions influence what becomes visible.

For example, a visualization might make speed or movement patterns apparent while failing to represent a skater’s intention, subjective experience, or sense of risk. A smooth visual trace might conceal the difficulty of producing the movement. A quantitative comparison might make two performances appear equivalent even when their styles or contexts differ significantly.

This makes the interface a potential introduction to critical data literacy, not merely a demonstration of technical capability.

The project invites questions such as:

• What exactly is being measured when a person moves?
• How accurately does a digital representation describe a physical event?
• Which aspects of the experience become visible, and which disappear?
• Who decides what the system records?
• How does the choice of visualization change the way an observer interprets movement?

These questions connect the course to contemporary debates about surveillance, quantification, and algorithmic systems. In a world where movement data can be used for athletic performance, health monitoring, workplace productivity, urban planning, and behavioral prediction, the ability to interpret data critically is as important as the ability to generate it.

The project makes this problem tangible. Instead of discussing data as an abstract concept, it begins with a body moving through a real environment and asks how that movement can be converted into information.

6. The skateboard interface as an artwork and a research instrument

Your system occupies a productive space between an educational tool, an interactive artwork, and a prototype for investigating human-computer interaction.

As an educational tool, it offers a means of introducing technical concepts through direct participation.

As an interactive artwork, it creates a relationship among a human performer, a physical object, a sensing system, and a representation of movement. The interface mediates an experience rather than simply presenting a finished image or object.

As a research instrument, it provides a framework for asking how human action can be captured and translated into computational forms. The participant’s movement supplies the input, the system performs a translation, and the resulting output becomes available for observation and interpretation.

This combination matters because it unsettles the conventional separation between making, studying, and learning. The interface is not merely a finished technical object delivered to a passive user. It is a platform through which the user can experience the relationship between action and representation.

The skateboarding demonstration in the attached video is therefore significant as a demonstration of a person actively engaging with the system. The performer does not simply illustrate a concept from outside the technology; the performance brings the system’s purpose into view.

The interface’s artistic dimension also raises a question central to interactive media: where does the work reside? Is it in the physical skateboard, the tracking hardware, the software, the visual output, the skater’s movement, or the relationships among them?

A strong interpretation is that the work resides in the system of relationships. Its meaning emerges through the interaction between a person, a physical environment, a technical apparatus, and the information produced through that interaction.

This is a particularly important contribution to media art, where the artwork may be less a stable object than an event, a process, or an unfolding exchange between human and machine.

7. CRATERs and Finding A Line: bringing interdisciplinary education into public space

The public dimension of this project is essential to understanding its significance. The course did not remain confined to a classroom or laboratory. Its ideas intersected with a larger cultural event and a physical environment designed to support skateboarding, art-making, and public participation.

The Gallaudet CRATERs: Finding A Line Bowl was initially constructed by Dave Mutarelli of Lifetime Decks LLC and Ben Ashworth, sculpture faculty at George Mason University, as a commission for the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. The Kennedy Center’s Finding A Line event, led by Vice President for Community Engagement Garth Ross, brought professional skateboarders, musicians, artists, and members of the public together to skate and create in the Center’s front yard.

Following the event, the Kennedy Center donated the bowl to Gallaudet University, where it could support creative, academic, and collaborative initiatives. The National Academies publication explicitly documents this relationship between the bowl, the Kennedy Center event, and your special-topics course. It also identifies support from a NASA Space Grant initiated by Gallaudet Chemistry and Physics Professor Dr. Dave Snyder, and the JBG Development Company that contributed just under $10K to have the bowl rebuilt in the Gallaudet lot adjacent to the Union Market building cluster.

National Academies

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Your interactive skateboard interface and course was taught at CRATERs in an open lot at Union Market in Washington, DC, after the activity moved from the Kennedy Center as part of the broader Finding A Line project.

This movement between the Kennedy Center, Gallaudet University, and the public CRATERs setting reveals an important feature of the initiative: its educational and cultural life was not confined to a single institutional space.

The skate bowl as educational infrastructure

A skate bowl is ordinarily understood as a facility for recreation, athletic development, or skateboarding culture. In this project, it could also function as educational infrastructure.

The bowl provided a physical environment in which students and participants could encounter movement, geometry, gravity, spatial design, and technical systems through direct experience. Its form was not separate from the learning; it helped make the learning possible.

The same physical environment could support different kinds of participation:

• A skateboarder could use the bowl for movement and performance.
• An artist could investigate movement as an expressive form.
• A technologist could explore sensing and data capture.
• An educator could use the environment to introduce interdisciplinary concepts.
• A member of the public could encounter the intersection of these practices without first enrolling in a formal course.

This multiplicity is important. It allows a single physical setting to support both specialized practice and informal learning, while enabling participants with different levels of technical knowledge to encounter one another.

From institutional boundaries to shared inquiry

The partnership also illustrates how cultural institutions, universities, artists, engineers, and community participants can contribute different resources to a common educational endeavor.

The Kennedy Center supplied the original commissioning context for the bowl and the public Finding A Line event. Gallaudet provided an academic setting in which the project could develop into a course and ongoing collaborative initiative. The NASA Space Grant connection helped link the work to scientific and technical education. The public workshop brought the interactive interface into a community environment.

The resulting model is more expansive than an isolated university course. It suggests a network in which artistic production, academic inquiry, public engagement, and technical experimentation reinforce one another.

There is also a meaningful contrast between the formal prestige of a major performing arts institution and the informal culture of skateboarding. By allowing these worlds to meet, the project treated skateboarding not merely as entertainment to be displayed within an institution, but as a legitimate basis for artistic and technological inquiry.

The move to the open lot at Union Market further emphasized the possibility of learning outside conventional classroom architecture. In that context, a public demonstration could become an invitation to encounter technology through an activity that was visible, physical, social, and culturally recognizable.

This does not mean that every public participant necessarily acquired new STEM skills. Rather, the setting created an opportunity for technical ideas to circulate beyond the usual boundaries of an academic course.

8. Why the National Academies publication matters

One of the most consequential aspects of this project is its documented inclusion in the 2018 National Academies Press publication:

The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree, edited by David Skorton and Ashley Bear.

The volume is a consensus study report produced by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Its purpose was to examine the integration of the arts and humanities with science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine in higher education.

Kazemzadeh’s project appears in the report’s concluding gallery of examples, under the heading “Community, Skateboards, and Motion Data Capture.” The entry names Gallaudet CRATERs: Finding a Line, credits Max Kazemzadeh, Dave Mutarelli, Ben Ashworth, Garth Ross, and Dr. Dave Snyder, and identifies Gallaudet University and the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. It describes how the donated bowl became part of the academic and collaborative initiatives that began with the Skateboarding, Tracking & Data Visualization special-topics course.

This is more than a passing mention in an unrelated publication. The report’s gallery was assembled to present examples of integrative educational and artistic practices in American higher education. The committee describes these cases as representative of approaches that bring disciplines together through courses, research projects, performances, exhibitions, and community-engaged work.

Kazemzadeh’s course was therefore documented within a national publication specifically examining the relationship between integrative education and higher education.

What this recognition establishes

The significance of the inclusion can be understood on several levels.

First, it establishes documentary recognition. The course and its associated skateboarding initiative were considered relevant enough to be included in a National Academies publication about interdisciplinary education. This provides an authoritative, citable record of the work that extends beyond a website, institutional biography, or project documentation.

Second, it places the course within a national educational conversation. The publication examined how universities could integrate different forms of knowledge rather than maintaining rigid separations among arts, humanities, science, engineering, and medicine. The course offered a concrete example of that integration through skateboarding, motion tracking, data visualization, artistic practice, and public participation.

Third, it demonstrates that the project had a curricular dimension. The publication does not describe only a skateboarding event or an interactive artwork. It explicitly connects the bowl and the wider initiative to a special-topics course designed and taught by Kazemzadeh. That distinction is important because it documents a pedagogical framework rather than merely a creative demonstration.

Fourth, it places the work within a broader ecosystem of interdisciplinary practice. The gallery contains projects that use different forms of artistic, scientific, technological, and community-based inquiry. This project appears among these examples as an instance of community engagement and motion-data capture through skateboarding.

There is an important qualification: inclusion in the report is not the same as an independent controlled evaluation proving that the course caused specific improvements in learning or career outcomes. Indeed, the report explicitly discusses the limitations of existing evidence for evaluating integrative courses and calls for more rigorous and varied forms of assessment.

Nevertheless, the publication’s value as evidence of recognition is substantial. It supports the claim that the course was a documented example of arts-and-STEM integration in American higher education—not merely an idea proposed retrospectively.

Publication details

Skorton, David J., and Ashley Bear, eds. (2018). The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree.

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

DOI: 10.17226/24988

Relevant section: “Community, Skateboards, and Motion Data Capture,” in “Gallery of Illuminating and Inspirational Integrative Practices in Higher Education.”

Read the section featuring Gallaudet CRATERs: Finding a Line

9. The philosophical significance of skateboarding as a form of research

The course also challenges the idea that research begins only when a person enters a laboratory, opens a spreadsheet, or formulates a formal hypothesis.

Skateboarding is a form of exploratory engagement with the world. The skater learns through repeated attempts, develops an understanding of spatial conditions, responds to physical feedback, and modifies behavior. These practices share important characteristics with experimental inquiry.

This interface introduced a way to connect this embodied exploration to computational systems. Movement could become something to record and interpret, allowing a participant’s own activity to serve as a starting point for investigation.

This raises a broader philosophical question: what happens when everyday practices become sites of research?

In this case, skateboarding could be understood simultaneously as:

• A cultural practice: an activity with its own history, communities, aesthetics, and social conventions.
• An embodied intelligence: a practice requiring perception, coordination, adaptation, and judgment.
• A physical system: an environment in which forces, momentum, friction, and geometry matter.
• A source of data: an activity whose movements can be captured and represented.
• A creative medium: a means of producing movement, expression, and interaction.
• A pedagogical environment: a setting in which participants can explore technical ideas through direct experience.

The integration of these dimensions is central to the project’s value. It avoids reducing skateboarding to a convenient example of physics, just as it avoids treating technology as a neutral device placed on top of an existing cultural activity.

Instead, the course brings the technical, cultural, physical, and artistic dimensions into a shared field of inquiry.

This is also why the project is relevant to discussions about STEAM. Its educational approach does not simply add an “A” for arts to a preexisting STEM curriculum. It begins with a creative and embodied practice, then uses that practice to open pathways into technical knowledge. Art and culture are not the final decorative layer; they help determine the questions the course asks.

10. Significance for inclusive and interdisciplinary higher education

The course’s placement at Gallaudet University adds another institutional dimension to its significance.

Gallaudet is an institution with a distinctive linguistic and cultural environment. While the information available here does not establish specific outcomes for Deaf or hard-of-hearing participants in this course, the broader instructional model offers opportunities to consider how technical education can be organized around shared activity, visible demonstrations, physical interaction, and multiple forms of representation.

A skateboarding-based learning environment can make the relationship between action and technical output directly observable. Depending on how instruction and interface design are implemented, visual and physical demonstrations may complement verbal explanations and written technical materials.

That potential should not be confused with evidence that the course was specifically designed or assessed as an accessibility intervention. Rather, it points toward a useful future direction for the model: interdisciplinary learning environments can be designed so that students encounter technical concepts through more than one mode of participation and representation.

More broadly, the course demonstrates that a university’s educational resources need not be confined to conventional lecture rooms, laboratories, or disciplinary departments. A skate bowl, a tracking interface, a public workshop, and a special-topics course can collectively form a learning environment.

This is an institutional insight as much as a pedagogical one. It suggests that universities can develop meaningful forms of technical education by building partnerships among faculty, artists, engineers, cultural institutions, and communities whose knowledge and interests are not always represented in standard STEM curricula.

11. Conceptual synthesis

The following table summarizes the principal dimensions of the course and the broader significance each makes visible.

Dimension	Educational or philosophical contribution
Embodied learning	Connects physical experience to abstract concepts and technical inquiry.
Data literacy	Makes the transformation of movement into information available for investigation.
Art and STEM integration	Places creative practice at the origin of technical questions rather than treating it as an add-on.
Interactive media art	Creates meaning through relationships among performer, hardware, software, environment, and visualization.
Youth and skateboarding culture	Provides a culturally recognizable entry point into technological exploration.
Public engagement	Extends the course’s ideas into a shared space beyond the university classroom.
Institutional collaboration	Connects Gallaudet, the Kennedy Center, artists, builders, and scientific support.
National recognition	Documents the course in a National Academies Press report on arts, humanities, and STEMM integration.
Critical technology education	Creates opportunities to question what data capture reveals, omits, and represents.
Interdisciplinary pedagogy	Demonstrates a course model in which physical activity, art, engineering, and data visualization function as interdependent practices.

12. Overall assessment: what the course contributed

The most significant contribution of ART 499 was not simply that it introduced students to data visualization through skateboarding. It was that the course established a framework in which a culturally meaningful physical practice could become the basis for artistic production, technical exploration, and interdisciplinary learning.

The project challenged several conventional divisions at once: the separation of art from science, the separation of bodily experience from computational knowledge, the separation of academic learning from public culture, and the separation of recreational space from educational infrastructure.

The CRATERs and Finding A Line context made these relationships tangible. The bowl became a site for movement, experimentation, public participation, and institutional collaboration. The interactive skateboard interface translated a performer’s activity into a technological demonstration. The course connected these experiences to a curricular framework, while the National Academies publication documented the work within a national discussion of integrative education.

Its significance is therefore both practical and conceptual. Practically, it provides a model for introducing technical ideas through an activity that already contains complex physical, spatial, and creative knowledge. Conceptually, it proposes that education can become more meaningful when it begins with the ways people already engage with the world and then opens those experiences to new forms of analysis.

The National Academies recognition adds an important historical dimension: the course was documented as an example of interdisciplinary practice at a time when higher education was actively examining how the arts and humanities could be integrated with science, engineering, technology, mathematics, and medicine. That recognition does not replace the need for learning-outcome data, but it provides a strong external source for documenting the project’s place within that movement.

The enduring idea is straightforward: skateboarding can be more than the subject of a lesson. It can become the medium through which students encounter physics, technology, data, artistic inquiry, and the relationships among them.

Standalone artist-educator statement

ART 499: Skateboarding, Tracking & Data Visualization

Embodied Knowledge, Interactive Media, and the Integration of Art and STEM

Developed and taught by Max Kazemzadeh at Gallaudet University, ART 499: Skateboarding, Tracking & Data Visualization explored how an embodied cultural practice could become a gateway to technological inquiry, data literacy, and interdisciplinary learning. The course was built around the premise that skateboarding is not simply a recreational activity, but a complex practice involving spatial reasoning, physical judgment, balance, momentum, creative expression, and continual adaptation to an environment.

I developed an interactive skateboard interface to introduce urban youth to data visualization through skateboarding and hardware technology. By connecting a performer’s movement to a technological system, the project created an opportunity to investigate how physical actions can be tracked, translated into data, and represented visually. Demonstrated by skateboarder Deeba Yavrom during a public workshop at CRATERs—Collaborative Research-space for Art, Technology, Engineering, Robotics and Skateboarding—the interface brought together embodied performance, interactive media, and technical experimentation.

The project developed within the broader context of Finding A Line, a Kennedy Center initiative that brought skateboarders, musicians, artists, and the public together to skate and create. The Gallaudet CRATERs: Finding A Line Bowl was initially built by Dave Mutarelli of Lifetime Decks LLC and Ben Ashworth, sculpture faculty at George Mason University, as a commission for the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. Following the event, the Kennedy Center donated the bowl to Gallaudet University, where it became part of the academic and collaborative initiatives associated with the course. The project was also supported through a NASA Space Grant initiated by Gallaudet Chemistry and Physics Professor Dr. Dave Snyder.

The course approached data visualization not merely as a technical skill, but as a form of translation between lived experience and computational representation. A skateboarder’s movement is experienced through the body, while a tracking system captures only selected aspects of that movement. Visualization introduces another layer of interpretation, determining how the recorded information becomes perceptible and meaningful. This relationship opens questions about measurement, representation, and the limits of data: what becomes visible when movement is quantified, what remains unrecorded, and how does a digital representation change our understanding of a physical experience?

By making skateboarding the point of departure, the course sought to establish a different pathway into STEM. Rather than requiring students to master abstract technical concepts before finding a context for them, the project began with an activity that already contained rich physical, spatial, and creative knowledge. Hardware, tracking, and visualization became tools for exploring that knowledge. Art and culture were therefore not supplementary elements added to a technical curriculum; they helped generate the questions through which technical learning could take place.

The initiative also connected university teaching with public participation. Moving among the Kennedy Center, Gallaudet University, and the public CRATERs workshop setting, the project brought together academic inquiry, artistic experimentation, skateboarding culture, and community engagement. The skate bowl became more than a recreational structure: it offered a shared environment in which physical movement, creative expression, and technological investigation could intersect.

In 2018, the course and its associated initiative were documented in the National Academies Press volume The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree, edited by David Skorton and Ashley Bear. The publication featured the project in its gallery of integrative practices under the heading “Community, Skateboards, and Motion Data Capture.” This recognition situated the course within a broader national conversation about the role of interdisciplinary education in higher education.

Ultimately, Skateboarding, Tracking & Data Visualization proposed that technical education can begin with embodied experience, cultural knowledge, and creative curiosity. By connecting skateboarding to interactive hardware and data visualization, the course demonstrated how an everyday practice could become a platform for investigating the relationships among bodies, technologies, representations, and environments. Its central contribution was to treat art, engineering, data, and physical experience as interdependent forms of inquiry—and to create a learning environment in which those relationships could be experienced rather than simply described.

Documentation and citation

• National Academies Press: The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree (2018)
• Specific project entry: “Community, Skateboards, and Motion Data Capture” — Gallaudet CRATERs: Finding a Line

For a CV, academic leadership portfolio, grant application, or promotion dossier, the most defensible framing is that the course was a documented example of arts-and-STEM integration, supported by a public-facing interdisciplinary project and included in a National Academies Press publication. That combines the course’s original educational concept, its collaborative implementation, and its external documentary recognition without making unsupported claims about measured student outcomes.