Nick Montfort, Associate Professor of Digital Media
Enrollment: Limited: Advance sign-up required
Limited to 15 participants
Lunch provided
This one-day course is an introduction to programming that requires no previous experience. Through practice, we consider how to think with computation, how computation and media interact, and how computing is part of culture. Programming is introduced as a way to iteratively design artworks and humanities projects so that one can discover the direction of the project during programming. The idea of exploratory programming differs from the instrumental programming done to a pre-determined specification; beginning programmers, as well as others, can benefit from this different perspective. Students will develop and share several short projects during the day, will modify existing code, and will learn some programming fundamentals. The medium we will focus on will be text, but students completing the course should be better prepared to use computing with other media as well.
Students should bring their own notebook computers running any typical OS: GNU/Linux, Windows, or OS X. Windows and OS X, installing Anaconda with Python 2.7 is required before the session begins. GNU/Linux users, please install iPython notebook. OS X users will need a text editor set up for use with plain text files (not TextEdit!) and, if one is not installed, should install TextWrangler. To continue after the course, installing Firefox and Processing is also recommended.
Contact: Nick Montfort, nickm@NICKM.COM
Written by
Andrew Whitacre