Creative Computing

Catalog description

What 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 computational project ideas will best propel your acquisition of skills necessary to realize those ideas. This six week course is divided in two parts. The first portion starts with the expressive capabilities of the human body & how we move through the world. The Physical Computing skills will allow you to go past the limitations of the mouse, keyboard & monitor interface & at locations other than the home or the office. The platform for the class is a microcontroller (Arduino brand), a very small inexpensive single-chip computer that can be embedded anywhere & sense & actuate in the physical world. The core technical concepts include digital, analog & serial input & output. The second portion of the course focuses on fundamentals of computer programming (variables, conditionals, iteration, functions & objects) as well as more advanced techniques such as data parsing, image processing, networking, computer vision & 3D graphics. The Java-based ‘Processing’ programming environment is the primary vehicle. Processing is more oriented towards visual displays on desktops, laptops, tablets or smartphones but can also connect back to the physical sensor & actuators from the first part of the class. The course is designed for computer programming novices but the project centered pedagogy will allow more experienced programmers the opportunity to play further with their project ideas and make lots of friends by helping the other students. Note: This course is for non-ITP students.