Running creative coding workshops

Someone from Ada’s List recently asked for tips on running creative coding workshops for girls. I’ve run a few, so I put together some thoughts. More
Someone from Ada’s List recently asked for tips on running creative coding workshops for girls. I’ve run a few, so I put together some thoughts. More
Now you’ve learned how to bake some delicious Cake objects (hop over here if you’ve forgotten!), we need something to put them in. Step forward arrays. Arrays are a special sort of list – they have slots in them, like an old-fashioned milk bottle holder, that you can place things into. The restriction is that you have to tell Processing when you create your list both how big you want it to be, and what sorts of thing you want to put into it. Afterwards, your array can only hold a maximum of that number of those particular objects. For … More
The very first things we need to talk about are Cake objects. Objects are simply arbitrary collections of variables and functions, and they are defined in classes. More
Coding is nothing more than telling a computer what to do to achieve your creative goal. It’s like making a fabulous cake using a rather stupid robot. You have to assemble all your ingredients and equipment, then tell the Rather Stupid Cake Robot exactly what to do with each thing to make your cake. More
A great starter for those of an artistic leaning to learn to code is Processing: a specially-designed open-source tool aimed to get you up and creating visual experiments quickly. You are given a big head start to create chunks of code, organised into “sketches”. More
I been running a series of online / IRL courses helping people to learn Creative Coding using Processing. I’ve found that the use of metaphors can really help people get their heads around the weirder bits of learning to code. But what about metaphors for coding as a whole? Should I go lego, marbles or cakes? More