DSDN 142: First Coding Experiments

So, I had my first tutorial for Creative Coding today, and that was an experience in itself. We got to learn about some of the aspects of why code is the way it is, and why computers need to have everything dumbed down for them. 

The first exercise we did was to create a set of drawing instructions for a a secret item, and then have one of our neighbors attempt to follow our instructions and draw the object we had described. While it may sound easy, it's really not, unless you have something simple to draw. I chose to use my drink bottle as my subject, but this proved to be quite a hard task to define how to draw. It was a mission, but eventually I came up with instructions, that in my head made sense. However it proved to not work for the other people I then tested it on.

Below are the set of instructions I created, and then at the bottom of the page are the results of people following my instructions. The unnumbered one was meant to be what it would look like.  

What we then discovered as a result of this experiment was that for drawing instructions to be easy to understand, they needed to reflect ultimate simplicity. For an object to be able to be drawn, it needed to be broken up into basic shapes and theses shapes then needed to be broken up again, until all the details of the shape were simplified.


For a computer to be able to construct a shape we know, we need to first split it apart int the component shapes that make up the whole, and then construct it from the ground up for the computer.


"Computers are stupid, they need to be told all the details." ~My Tutor


While this course does sound tricky for now, and though I've never done any sort of coding before, I'm still looking forward to learning more about it.