Code Toolkit: Python, Fall 2020

Week 1 — Homework assignment

Due: Tuesday, September 8, 8pm

  1. Review this week's lecture notes.

  2. Download and install the Processing PDE, if you have not yet done so. My instructions are here (PDF) .

  3. Create a sketch on paper. If you want some inspiration, consider the robot drawings in the book(*) (see pages 2 and 32), or you can do a "self portrait" ... or anything else.

  4. Drawing with numbers. Approximate some x,y points on your drawing, or maybe approximate some grid lines (page 15 or 17 in the book(*) may offer some help), or, if you are on Mac, you can use the screencapture utility to "measure" pixel values. Using some of the various Processing draw primitives, create a sketch in Processing that creates your drawing. See processing.org/reference for more help on other types of shapes, known as "2D Primitives".

  5. Raster images. Based on the example at the end of this week's lecture notes (with more information in the book(*) on pages 89-90), add one (or more) image files to your sketch, and in your code create a PImage and draw it to the screen using image(). Note the difference between this method and the previous one. Think about the advantages and disadvantages of each. How would you go about reszing these different images? And what would it look like in each case?

  6. Visit the help page, read the instructions there, create a GitHub account, and post a Gist to send to me. If you don't actually have a coding question, that's fine — you can just post a Gist of the code you're working on. I just want everyone to get comfortable using this.

  7. NOTE: I moved the due date for completing the Manovich reading to next week since there's already a lot of other homework for this week, and we didn't quite get far enough in lecture. You can get started on the reading this week and complete it for next week. Sorry for the change-up but hope that's helpful.

    Please also note that I am only asking you to read chapter 1, pages 18-55 of the Manovich book. The rest of it is also great, and I've included a PDF of the entire thing. But I only plan to discuss chapter 1 in class.

  8. Save your work as "homework01" (please use this naming scheme exactly for weekly assignments to help me find your work throughout the semester), and upload the entire sketch folder to your folder in the Student Google Drive.

* PLEASE NOTE: When I wrote "the book" above I was referring to the book Getting Started with Processing (which is mentioned on the resources page). We will not be using this book this semester because it is based on the Java version of Processing, so I included these references accidentally. However, since I mentioned it here, I've included a PDF of the pages that I referenced above (plus a few others) in case they are helpful.