At the beginning of this module, I was a bit focused on the title “Creative Coding”. I was confused about the concept of coding being creative. But after fully reading the description and looking at the resources provided, it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I first thought that I would need to understand and explain what coding is during my presentation. Based on my research, I know that coding is how we communicate with computers and tell them what to do. I was familiar with the site since I had made attempts to learn Python and Java before this class. Also, through research, I found that creative coding is the use of software and code to be expressive and create art forms. One of the first resources I saw was Codecademy. I did some HTML in my senior year of high school so I was also familiar with the language. It was nice just refreshing and learning new things about HTML. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is used to create the structure and content of a webpage. It was fun to create a website and it didn’t take long even if the site isn’t real. I didn’t have a lot of time to complete the course because of when I chose the topic so I moved on to CSS. I always thought that you could design a website with HTML but after taking the first section of the CSS module, I realized that I was wrong. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. It is used to style HTML content on a webpage. This is where you add and adjust color, font type or size, images, element position, and more. I found this to be creative because you are using code to design the webpage by adding different art elements and visual aspects to the webpage. Professionals such as Front End Developers use both to make it easier for users to interact with any device without having to type code.
Another way to make creative coding is the use of bots. A UMW grad, Lauren Orsini, made a Twitter bot that creates tweets on its own. A Twitter bot is a computer-generated stream of incomprehensible tweets. I wasn’t able to create my own but the process is fairly easy from what I read of Lauren’s instructions. The majority of the work has been completed and you just need to download it and add it to your command prompt on your computer. I looked into the Twitter page and saw some of the tweets and majority of them didn’t make sense, but it is interesting how in a way through code, one can make a bot which I will consider as AI to do work for you in other ways.
The last resource I was able to look into was Processing. This is an app that is used for creative coding and is used to create visual media. I was only able to get through the intro video but I saw some of the work that can be done through processing from fashion design to creating some architectural pieces. The program was a free download and I think I will take some time to learn about it.
