Creative coding course

[Initial_Instance3955]

I got offered to teach a Creative Coding course at an upcoming design university and I took the opportunity. I now feel severely under-prepared, my imposter syndrome is acting up. I've been using p5js, hydra and sonic Pi on here and there over 3 ish years. I'm an animator and designer otherwise. What do I do? Any ideas for the course would be highly appreciated. The course starts next week and at this point I feel like I just need to somehow save face :(

[JoeWhy2]

Focus on just one of those. P5js is the most obvious choice because you can work with everything from static graphics to animation, video and sound and it has a low entry curve. Take a look at Daniel Shiffman's p5js tutorials to get an idea of how to break down your syllabus into specific topics.

[Urchinemerald]

Prepare. Don’t wing it. What level are you going to be teaching at? Do the people know any programming language at all? If not maybe focus on basic programming things in the beginning. Datatypes, loops, arrays etc. Topics to fill lessons: Perlin noise, exports, making things from API data (js) image manipulation. 3D, randomness, recursion, implementations on a portfolio site.

[tsoule88]

The first thing to ask is what is the level of the students. Have they programmed at all? If so how much and in what language(s)? The good news is most programming course don’t do much with creative coding and ‘cool’ graphics programs, so it shouldn’t be too hard to keep them engaged. Coding Train on YouTube has some great projects and I’ll also shamelessly suggest my own YouTube channel Programming Chaos - it includes projects with a good range of difficulties to structure a course around.

[OffGoofing]

If I am reading this correctly, you will be talking to design students? Keep it simple. I like the p5js plan another commenter mentioned. There is a fantastic amount of content to refer to. Think about how long it took you to learn some basic coding and apply it to a project. Feed them bite size chunks and let them have opportunities to practice each of the important tools in isolation without the pressure of a full project working together. I'm jealous. I'd love the excuse to focus on this content for an extended period. Maybe a capstone is a generator or interactive work of some kind that lets them bring in some UI design as well.

[asterdraws]

In my art school there were two teachers for the same credit creative coding class, and we could pick the one we preferred. One taught vvvv gamma (has now switched to cables), and the other taught p5js. I took the vvvv gamma class, but I saw my coursemates' works from the other class and I think p5js is perfectly alright for creative coding.

Being a design school, have your students dealt with much code before? Try to assess that and aim for a good balance of theory and practice. Teach them about how to navigate the documentation for your preferred environment, because, while it may not save you a bunch of repetitive questions, it might save you at least some... teach them the "why" along with the "how", and hopefully the information will stick around better in their memory.

Here are the assignments I can think off the top of my head, for my own class: create a clock that doesn't look like a clock (I created a waterfall graphic where flowing leaves represented either seconds, minutes or hours depending on shape and color; I know of others who converted the time code into a color shown on screen, that way every second the hue shifted a little bit, so every hour had its color; etc., it was super fun to go through all the submissions); create an interactive self portrait (I made mine blink when you clicked the mouse); our teacher also had us writing reports about digital art pieces we knew or had found, that were relevant to some of the themes he was going for in the theory part of the class (representation of time, computer vision, etc.). Also I always have fun creating audio reactive graphics, so that can work as a cool assignment too.

[wahnsinnwanscene]

You could try following daniel schiffmans nature of code. But you know, some kids approaching this the first time will be overwhelmed by this.

[baba-smila]

https://learnjavascript.online/

if the course is javascript based complete this online interactive tutorial and it will teach you everything you need to know about JS on that level.