My Art and Code overview continues… (See: Part I)
Sunday - Toolkit Overviews and Dorkbot @ Brillobox
Sunday was a day of presentations. From 8:45 to 17:45 we were treated to 45 minute demos of various arty programming toolkits. In the evening there was a Dorkbot Pecha Kucha-ish gathering at a pub called the Brillobox.
Some notes I jotted down during the presentations:
Alice - Presented by CMU’s Don Slater.
Alice is a 3D programming environment for creating animations, games and videos. 3d models of objects and characters are programmed visually by dragging/dropping/connecting various Instruction-Tiles together.
Jotted Down:
Five Fundamentals of Programming
- Sequence
- Decision
- Repetition
- Data Persistence (Variables)
- Methods (Modular Abstractions)
Pd or Pure Data is a graphical programming language for audio and video programming. Data (most often audio signals) flows through various specialized transformation or generation nodes/objects which are visually connected together by the programmer using “wires”.
1000 words == Picture
Jotted Down:
Closed tools split creators from consumers.
We need to think about programming as something every does / will do.
Scratch is a graphical programming environment for children ages 8 and up. Like Alice, the programs are created by snapping graphical blocks together.
Jotted Down:
Remixing of Scratch programs is encourage via their website.
There appears to be a nice learning path from Scratch through Processing to Java. Perhaps we could use Scratch as an introductory programming language at the college. David Malan has been using it for a intro comp sci course at Harvard.
Scratch is implemented in Squeak Smalltalk.
May 16th is Scratch Day.
Scratch anime!
Hackety Hack - Presented by _why
Hackety Hack is a Ruby-based environment designed to make programming accessible for kids, (especially teenagers). Its motivation: The Little Coder’s Predicament
Jotted Down:
Why claims to be a freelance professor, in other words, half-way between a scarecrow and a seeing eye dog.
A logic/programming card game called kaxXxt is also in the works.
The ASCII sword-fighting program stirs-up long dormant memories of Monkey Island.
And then we ate lunch. To be continued…