Paul Dietz, a distinguished engineer in residence and director of fabrication in U of T’s Department of Computer Science, hopes his paper animatronic creations can engage more kids in STEM through the power of storytelling (photo by Polina Teif)
Could a talking paper octopus be the key to igniting kids’ curiosity about technology?
University of Toronto engineer Paul Dietz certainly thinks so. With the help of a menagerie of mechanically controlled puppets, he has a plan to help students learn to think creatively across a wide range of fields.
All it takes is some simple circuitry, a few arts and crafts supplies — and a lot of imagination.
A distinguished engineer in residence and director of fabrication in the Faculty of Arts and Science’s computer science department, Dietz is the whimsical mind behind the Animatronics Workshop. The program collaborates with schools to provide opportunities for children to create, design and build their own robotic shows.
Dietz has been partnering with schools where kids create their own animatronic stories — from staging pre-programmed puppet shows to hosting Q-and-As with Shakespeare — departing from the competition-based competitions typical of many youth robotics efforts.
Dietz’s program has been his passion project for a decade and a half, developed on the side while he worked day jobs engineering innovations for companies like Microsoft, Mitsubishi and Disney, as well as his own startups.
Now, at U of T, Dietz is focusing on bringing accessible and affordable animatronics to classrooms across Canada. The goal, he says, is to teach kids to use technology as a tool for storytelling, dismantling what he sees as a false divide between the arts and sciences.
“One of the first participants in this program was a young girl who was really into writing creative stories and really loved science. And she saw these as two conflicting parts of her world,” says Dietz, who is also a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
“After what she did in animatronics, it suddenly dawned on her that you can do both. If you do engineering right, it is a creative art.”
In a capstone course on physical computing in K-12, Dietz encouraged undergraduate students to explore how computer-based systems can bring stories to life in the classroom (photo by Polina Teif)
Dietz had a similar realization as a teenager in the late 1970s, when a behind-the-scenes tour of Walt Disney Imagineering got him tinkering with an animatronic robot penguin.
This early fusion of technical skills and storytelling sensibilities set Dietz on a path that turned flights of imagination into real-world breakthroughs that shape our engagement with technology.
A prolific inventor and researcher, Dietz is best known for co-creating an early progenitor of the multi-touch display technology that’s ubiquitous in today’s smartphones and tablets. Other innovations include 'Pal Mickey,' an interactive plush toy that guided visitors through Disney theme parks, and parallel reality displays that allow multiple viewers to see individualized content on the same screen.
Dietz says his storied career debunks the common misconception — often reinforced in schools — that creativity is exclusive to artistic pursuits, while science is the domain of strict rationality, where there are prescribed methods of inquiry to arrive at a single correct answer.
As Dietz sees it, weaving a narrative and programming a robot are propelled by the same creative impulse — they just exercise different skills. He believes a well-rounded education should equip students with a diverse arsenal of tools to explore new ideas.
“If you’re an artist, you have to learn the mechanics of sculpting or painting or whatever your medium is,” he says. “We should be looking at engineering and technology as those tools, and the key is … learning how to use them creatively to achieve things that are actually positive for our society.”