Thread by @everestpipkin

i've wrapped my first semester as a professor! i'm so impressed with my students and all the work they've made

partly for me + partly for others, i thought i'd do a brief post-mortem on my classes, starting w Introduction to Interactivity (syllabus -> everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/)

EMSII is a (required!) creative coding class. all art undergrads take it at CMU, so it has both the challenges + the rewards of teaching folks who often use very non-digital mediums. it can be hard to start from the ground up, but the work is sometimes really surprising and new

we began the semester talking about net art, file systems, and early internet history. as an icebreaker, we blogged together on a google doc, like a very old chatroom. (our day 1 blog -> docs.google.com/document/d/1fR…)

we covered github. we learned html + css, and built homepages. we talked about the homemade web.

here are a few homepages that were particularly choice (they were all great tho):
everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…
everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…
everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…
everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

the second week, we looked further back. we talked about rules-based artworks, instructions, game poems and fluxus, and their relationship to algorithms. we played drawing games.

(my lecture notes-> docs.google.com/document/d/e/2…)

then we talked about zines and mail art, and the relationship of these homemade networks to the early internet. we introduced @alienmelon's electric zine maker, which we used to design and lay out 5 analog algorithm poems in a minizine!

alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zine-…

we assembled these zines and traded them among ourselves so that everyone ended up with one of each. we went outside on a beautiful day to play them in the garden.

after this, we talked about branching narratives and interactive fiction, from choose your own adventure (tm) to borges. we introduced twine, and learned about expanding it with scripts and variables (and the concepts of variables and if/else true/false) (docs.google.com/document/d/e/2…)

here are a few student twines that stood out to me (again, they're all good tho):

everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…
everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…
everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

then, we covered pixel art (the why and the how) and how it relates to conceits of computation like the binary value. we introduced bitsy and talked about game jams and jam culture. we made bitsy games!

(they absolutely killed it with the bitsy games, links to follow)

voyager: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

decent cup of coffee: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

mycelium: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

echos: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

cosmic girl: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

spatial limitations: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

up: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

after this, we dived deep into hacking and modding culture, hackathons, speedruns, mods, alt controllers, and ideas of the life-hack as applied to artwork. (my lecture notes-> docs.google.com/document/d/e/2… )

they picked a project from before and spent a week hacking it- in code or with a new controller.

a bitsy with the framerate + draw altered: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

two bitsys smashed together into one: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

DDR-style controller: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

after a month and half of these brief projects we moved into p5js, where they were writing code from scratch. their final projects had to respond to input, have an environment, change on refresh and that respond to the time of day.

through this lens, we talked about variables, functions, passing around values, for loops, logic, randomness, procedural generation, updates, animation, time, transformations, interactivity, text, and input.

btw here is my guide on p5js! docs.google.com/document/d/1Hw…

running full-tilt into scripting isn't easy, but they all made stuff. i'm impressed tbh: i certainly didn't onboard into javascript in a month.

here are a few i liked in particular:

editor.p5js.org/iz.horgan/sket…
editor.p5js.org/shhorgan/sketc…

and especially:

everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

finally, we spent our last month in unity, where we built collage-game walking simulators. we talked about derive, "asset flipping" and collage, wandering, environmental storytelling and the history of indie games that use these motifs.

(lecture notes-> docs.google.com/document/d/e/2…)

we covered unity from start to export, including objects, assets, materials, textures, sound, terrain, lights, the player, physics, cameras, scripting, text, GUIs, colliders, skyboxes, and the navmesh!

i already posted my unity guide, but its here -> docs.google.com/document/d/1xw…

we covered a lot of ground and i'm super proud of all of my students. they're second year undergrads, mostly don't work with code, and they did so so much!

you can check out everything they made on the student website, which is at: everestpipkin.github.io/emsII/students…

(gonna save talking about my advanced class for another day ~)

(also i wanted big thanks to @RobbyKraft @jnchmbrs @molleindustria @golan @laurenleemack @radiatoryang whose syllabi i spent lots of time reading and borrowing from in trying to figure out how to teach this stuff, y'all are all credited in situ but ofc thanks here too)