Welcome to Creative Computation! {

Hi!

Whoa! It’s a course about learning how to code??? You have so many questions, like…

• Do I already need to know how to code?
• Why should I learn to code?
• How can I learn to code?
• Can I just copy and paste stuff from Stack Exchange?
• Can I use AI assistants?
• What kind of stuff will we be making?

Do I already need to know how to code?

Nope.

Why learn to code?

Hopefully you don’t seriously need to ask this question, but…

Software is an incredibly exciting medium for artistic expression. Think of videogames and virtual reality experiences and digital media installation work and weird websites and amazing apps. It’s all driven entirely or primarily by software.

Software is how the world works. Beyond the world of art and entertainment, so much of our lives are dictated and shaped by software. We do banking with software, we talk to our friends via software, we order pizza with software, we buy pet food with software. Software, software, software.

Software pays the bills. Getting a job as a software developer of some kind, or as an interdisciplinary-person-who-can-code is a lot easier than getting a job without any coding knowledge. People want to pay those of us who can create software.

Programming is how we create software

Also, this is Computation Arts. Guess what the fundamental way we control and think about computation is?

Yep, it’s programming.

Why JavaScript?

In this course we’re learning a specific programming language: JavaScript. Why?

• Because it is the language of interactivity on the web

Pretty much every fancy thing you see a web page do is being done with JavaScript.

• Because it is a good learning language

JavaScript is a great learning language because so many people use it for so many tasks. For any question you have, there is likely an answer online. For any kind of program you want to write, there is probably a community online.

Also, JavaScript is a modern language with the standard features we expect to see. Your knowledge of JavaScript will allow you to learn other languages much, much more easily.

• Because it is incredibly popular

Given that JavaScript is what drives the web, it’s understandably a very popular language to use out in the world. Any web developer needs to know JavaScript!

• Because it has countless libraries and extensions available

JavaScript has been around for a long time and has had many, many libraries and extensions created for it that give you greater power with less work! (More on this later in the course.)

• Because it is not just for the web

JavaScript isn’t limited to programming for the web. With technologies like Node and Electron you can build your own stand-alone applications in JavaScript.

Why p5.js?

In this course we use a “library” called “p5.js” on top of JavaScript to do our work. Why?

• p5.js is a web-native, JavaScript version of Processing, the popular teaching environment, so it has a tried-and-true teaching history.
• p5.js provides a thoughtful and constrained set of elements to learn programming with
• p5.js allows us to create visual programs quickly and easily

Check out some examples of people using p5.js to do neat stuff.

Why focus on playful interaction?

In this course you’ll often find there’s an emphasis on being playful. Why?

• Because playful interactions tend to be computationally interesting

Play is one of the most interestingly complex interactions we can create using software. The most obvious example if the enormous videogame industry, but playfulness is everywhere and is a great design approach to all kinds of interactivity.

• Because if we can program something playful and interactive, we can program pretty much anything

The skills needed to make playful experiences demand learning all kinds of coding approaches, from user-interfaces to tracking user data to sophisticated input schemes.

• Because it’s just more fun to practice programming with play

Ultimately, if the thing you’re making is designed to be fun and playful (whether it’s a game or something else), you’re probably just going to enjoy making it more!

Note: play does not mean games.

So how do I learn programming?

By being taught.

• This is a course designed to teach you programming in JavaScript
• From the ground up
• With the specific aim of giving you a solid foundation in the fundamentals
• And therefore the ability to expand your abilities moving forward

By asking questions.

• This is a course where we absolutely welcome questions at any time
• If you’re ever slightly confused, getting lost, have something to contribute: speak up
• The course is far more interesting when people are asking questions
• If you have a question there is a high, high probability someone else is wishing someone would ask it too

By practicing.

• Programming can often make perfectly good sense when someone explains it to you
• It’s logical, there aren’t that many scary concepts (really!)
• But the only way you really learn is to practice
• You need to spend a lot of time programming

Unsurprisingly it’s like learning anything practical. Practice makes perfect. When you learn the guitar, it’s one thing to listen to someone tell you the different strings and how frets work and then watch them play a song using that information, but it’s very different getting your brain to understand how to do that.

Practice, practice, practice.

By playing around.

• Programming can be intimidating because it’s easy for things to go wrong and that can scare us away from just playing around with it
• But playing around with code is fun, and a great way to learn what’s possible
• Having an experimental mindset is a great way to learn more about how programming behaves in the real world

By helping others.

• Like any course, there will be different levels of ability with programming distributed among you
• If you can help someone else with something, do it - it will help you learn the concepts better too
• But do remember that everyone here is trying to learn, so give people space to work things out for themselves

Don’t use the internet too much!

There’s so much information about programming on the internet it could get confusing. Try to resist diving all the way in before you quite know what you’re doing.

For this course you hopefully shouldn’t need other resources, even though they can be helpful.

Most especially please resist taking code from online and using it in your own projects. Naturally people do this in the real world, but when we’re learning it tends to cause far more trouble than it’s worth. You’ll end up doing it anyway, but be aware it can lead to problems understanding code yourself.

Don’t use AI at all!

Yes indeed, AI “copilots” are changing the way people are programming out there in the world. However, working with AI programming assistants really needs you to already know how to program:

• So you can read its output
• So that you know what to prompt it with
• So that you’re not stuck making what the AI wants you to make
• So that you can catch its mistakes (and oh boy will it make mistakes)

The world continues to need people who actually know how to program. Those people can make software on their own and they can work well with AI.

We are going to be those people.

What kind of stuff will I make?

It’ll depend a lot one what you want to make and how much effort you put in, but there are examples from previous edition(s) of this course available.

Summary

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