Programming is a creative process performed by programmers to instruct a computer on how to do a task. If you are an artist or musician, you can make custom instructions or software to create digital visual art and animations, tell a story, manipulate photos, create sound or a whole software instrument, make a game, or build an art installation. Why would you want to do this instead of using Photoshop or a software synthesizer? If you are someone that makes artwork, is interested in aesthetics, or otherwise likes to explore cooking or creating film or design, you will also enjoy being able to build your own custom art tools for the computer.
In this class, we’ll take a playful approach to learning the concepts of programming and then take our first beginner steps. We’ll talk about the connections between writing recipes and writing code and the basic components of every programming language. We’ll cover an introduction to the visual programming language Scratch and then build our own simple instruments, synthesizer, or visual art. When you finish this class, you’ll have created your own first programs, and be ready to jump to the next level and start learning Python, Processing, Java, or other programming languages.
