Creative Coding at Black Families Technology Awareness Day 2023

Creative coding is a way of using computer programming to make art and designs. With creative coding, you can create anything from simple drawings to complex animations and interactive art pieces. You can experiment with different colors, shapes, and sounds to create something unique and interesting. Creative coding is a great way to use your imagination and bring your ideas to life. Students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Black Families Technology Awareness Day learned about creative coding by making coded Valentine’s Day cards for Art Technically’s Love Letters project.

To start creative coding, you don’t need to have any prior knowledge of programming. There are many easy-to-use tools and software that you can use to get started, like Scratch, p5.js, and CoffeeScript. These tools have a visual interface and simple programming blocks that you can use to create your designs.

At Art Technically, our creative coding workshop and lesson plan use the Kano Make Art platform which allows you to use CoffeeScript to create square designs.

Once you get comfortable with the basics, you can start exploring more advanced concepts, like animation, user interaction, and data visualization. The possibilities are endless! Creative coding can be used to create many different types of designs, such as:

• Animated characters and scenes
• Interactive games and simulations
• Graphical user interfaces (GUIs)
• 3D models and environments
• Data visualizations and graphs

In addition to being fun, creative coding can also help you develop important skills. For example, you can learn problem-solving skills as you figure out how to make your designs work. You can also develop your creativity, as you experiment with different ideas and approaches.

If you’re interested in creative coding, you can check out our Creative Coding workbook and the Kano Make Art platform. You can also attend coding workshops or enroll in a coding class. You can even request a CoffeeScript workshop for your school or class by emailing team@arttechnically.org! These photos are from the Creative Coding workshop held for RPI’s Black Families Technology Awareness Day on February 4th, 2023.

Creative coding is a fun and rewarding way of making art and designs using computer programming. With easy-to-use tools and a little creativity, you can bring your ideas to life and develop important skills. So why not give it a try and see what you can create!