Unit 0: Drawing #

This initial unit prioritizes getting students making personally-meaningful things as fast as possible. This means we aren’t aiming for completeness. In particular, we’re not introducing data structures in this unit; most students won’t need them, and we’ll spend a lot of time with them in the next unit.

Working within the context of drawing, students practice building up complex programs from simple ones. We’ll use Python’s turtle library. Loosely inspired by Chris’s Python drawing unit from GMS.

Programming:

• Imperative programming
• Basics of syntax
• Control flow: sequences, loops, conditionals, functions
• Levels of abstraction: functions, modules
• Decomposition and code reuse.
• Introductory debugging strategies.

Labs #

Each cycle will contain 3 labs with core content designed to last 80 minutes and extension content. Class sessions in each cycle will be chunked into an 80 minute session and two 135 minute sessions. This should allow all students ample time to complete the core content of each of the three labs in a cycle while providing extension content to students who complete the labs more quickly.

Check-ins #

Check-ups will serve the purpose of reviewing past content and preparing for future content. After each lab, students will complete a check-in question to check their understanding of a practice or concept covered in the lab. These will usually be code-based problems like asking students to create various drawing primitives. Additionally, some check-ups will ask students to do preparatory work like finding pieces of art they like or identifying patterns in the world.

Project #

Create some personally-meaningful drawing. First, a draft will be due with a sketch of the final project and some planning, including planned subroutines and pseudocode. Each drawing project should highlight the unique opportunities of computational art by utilizing repeated patterns, abstract designs, customization, and/or user/viewer interaction.

Programming: Introduction to functional programming; abstraction. Types: int, float, bool. Introduction to data structures. Iterating over lists. Students will build on code reuse from unit 1, this time writing functions without side effects that can be composed. Curriculum: Based on introductory unit from BJC.

Homework #

Write basic functions to perform calculations on numbers and lists. Biggest, smallest, mean, median, mode. Quartiles. Scale, clamp, bin.

Labs #

Lab 1: Students will write code to plot histograms, scatter plots, and the line of best fit. Lab 2: Students will be introduced to the basics of Pandas and matplotlib, the standard Python libraries for data analysis and plotting.

Project #

Collect some data or use an existing dataset. Frame a research question and use the data to answer it.

Unit 2: Games #

Games and other interactive media are some of the most important texts of the digital age. We will play and discuss several games, discussing how they work technically and drawing on theoretical perspectives to talk about how they create meaningful experiences for the player. Programming: prototyping, decomposition of larger problems, incremental & iterative development of larger projects.

Homework #

Learning how games work can be a great spur toward imagining new ones. This unit’s problem sets will be focused on implementing simple game mechanics.

Labs #

Lab 1: Using the Arcade platformer tutorial, program a maze game. Lab 2: Write an algorithm to procedurally-generate random mazes to initialize the maze game. There will also be ad-hoc mini-labs based on what students need for their games. Likely candidates are gravity, inventories, simulating perspective, animation techniques.

Project #

Create a game that matters, perhaps as part of a group. This will be very open-ended, but students will be required to submit a substantial proposal, including a game concept with some evidence of prototyping and iteration; wireframes of the game interface; decomposition of tasks and who plans to work on what.