Creative Computing
Show Course DescriptionWhat can computation add to human communication? Creating computer applications, instead of just using them, will give you a deeper understanding of the essential possibilities of computation. Conversely, excitement about your project ideas for using computation will best propel your acquisition of skills necessary to realize those ideas. In this class you will learn to program the computer even if you have never coded before. But more importantly you will learn to develop a “why to program” the computer, at a personal level and a societal level.
Each week there are two small assignments, one to go further creatively with a technology introduced in class the week before, and one to respond with a blog post to writing prompts and short readings, podcasts or videos. Class time is divided into three parts, conceptual discussions of the students’ writing posts, a quick review of students’ “making” assignments, and then a workshop session getting the “hello world” of the next technical skill working before leaving class so you are ready to take it in a more creative direction during the week.
The primary language used to teach the basics of repeat loops, variables, if statements, functions, arrays, and objects is javascript using the p5.js library. Beyond that, the topics in the class keep up to date on the most fun and interesting new technologies, from Physical Computing to Machine Learning, to help students learn how, and more importantly, why to program the computer.