Though Jim has just come back from a trip to China as is moving to New York in a couple of days, he still came in to talk to us about programming as art! You can find out more about Jim and his work on his website.
Jim told us that he was drawn to computer-based art in high school for two reasons: he had always wanted to draw but never knew how and had always loved producing skateboarding videos with digital cameras.  He started experimenting on his own and has …

I have finally had a chance to go through all of the first assignments — wow! I was really happy to see how much creativity you exhibited. Right off the bat, you were able to create some very cool patterns to show off. You clearly have learned a lot of Python syntax and are problem-solving very well.
Someone asked me today when I use programming in my every day life… do you think I posted all the images in this message by hand? No way. I …

Stuart Reges is a lecturer at the University of Washington who has written an excellent Java textbook, teaches really great courses and has played a large role in inspiring me to teach.  Stuart’s talk today touched on a number of intriguing topics he explored over the summer, some with direct ties to computer science and others with less obvious ones.  The goal was to give you an opportunity to come into contact with some fascinating, deep ideas you might not otherwise encounter.
Stuart started by showing us examples of fractals or infinitely …

I started off talking a little bit about the importance of making Python programs human-readable.  We talked about grouping functions at the top and code that Python executes at the bottom.
We talked about the print function which lets us display text to the user.  We also learned that Python is really good at doing math.  You can use + – * and / with it, but beware of division!  If you divide two whole numbers, the result is always a whole number because decimals are just truncated.  For example,
print(5 / …

We discussed the importance of reducing redundancy in our program both to save effort as we write them and to make them easier to read and maintain in the long run.  I showed two ways of reducing redundancy: loops and parameters.
We learned how to use a for loop to group statements that should run more than once.  Statements in a for loop must be indented, just like statements in a method.
for i in range(<number>):
statement
statement
I also showed that we can pass information into …

I talked a little more about what programming languages are and introduced the one we will learn this semester, Python.  I also introduced the environment we will be starting with, Turtle Graphics.  Turtle Graphics is released with Python and gives us a nice, visual way of getting used to some of Python’s syntax (structural elements like colons and tabs).  Students got a chance to start playing with the language and I challenged them to build me a house using functions for each part of the structure.

We talked a little bit about the programming language we’ll be starting to work with, Python.  I mentioned it’s a good language to get started with because it’s easy to get into and very flexible.
To get our feet wet quickly and start producing interesting images, we’re starting out working with turtle graphics.  Turtle graphics is a set of libraries built into Python that let us draw 2-d graphics easily.

Students spent today opening up computers and identifying the pieces inside.

Today we discussed what a computer is.  We started out by placing all kinds of items ranging from a dishwasher to an iMac and from a cup to a dog on a continuum from ‘definitely a computer’ to ‘definitely not a computer.’  Very quickly, we saw that there was disagreement.  Is a computer simply something that can do mathematical operations?  Does it have to be digital?  We had some great conversation on the ramifications of calling certain things computers and others not.
I admitted that it’s not in fact an easy …

Today was primarily an introduction day — everyone got their schedule sorted out and got an opportunity to introduce themselves to the class. I was really happy to see a good representation from each grade level and I hope we’ll all get to know each other well over the semester.
I went over a bunch of slides describing the course and its goals. Slides are on the course calendar as is the syllabus and the letter I am sending home with you.  I think the most important take-aways are …