DSDN142 Creative Coding: Reflections on the lecture and first tutorial

Tuesday’s tutorial was primarily to get administrivia out-of-the-way and introduce us to the idea of the amount of breakdown needed to create a set of instructions that someone could take away and create an object from, or that could be used as an instruction set for a computer program. I don’t know why I picked my glasses to try write a set of drawing instructions for, as they turned out to be hard to describe. I think the major problem for me was trying to describe the type of curve that needed to be drawn to represent the curve of the frame. I had no idea how to do it. I ended up trying to describe it using length and the word curve and how far above or below the end point should finish in relation to the start point. As it turned out when my partner for the exercise tried to draw the image from the instructions, things did not go well and while there were curves in the drawing they were nothing like my glasses. There were also no verticals as there should of been. Kind of makes me think I have a bit of practicing I need to do in instruction writing, particularly in clarity and perhaps more breakdown of the task too.

The lecture on Thursday was good as we delved into form and the use of parameters to change the structure of the form to create new variations of it. It was useful to see some of the project boards that had been done previously to get an idea of the sort of thing we are going to be doing. I feel clearer about the idea of the form but nervous about the coding part of it. Hopefully after today’s tutorial I will feel less nervous. I also need to think about the type of form I want to start with, it’s tempting to go with a circle made up of lines maybe but perhaps something simpler would be better….