Creative Coding

Creative Coding

Creative coding is an exploratory and experimental process that uses code as a medium of expressing ideas to create artwork. We will use these basic skills for creating visual art projects.

Course description

Programming literacy has become an essential skill for the society we live in these days, and this is also important in arts because programming has become an artistic medium for exploring creativity. It allows people to express possibilities built on top of the computer's interactivity and multimedia features. In this course, we will explore the cutting edge of programming and visual arts by understanding the basics of programming for creative purposes.

The programming language that we will use during the course is Processing, but learning processing is just a side effect. The knowledge and skills acquired by the students during the course are transferable to other programming languages like Java or JavaScript.

Knowledge and understanding: at the end of the course, students will be familiar with basic programming concepts (e.g., variables, expressions, statements, loops, and functions) and creative coding concepts (e.g., shapes, color, interaction, typography, and 2D transformations)

Applying knowledge and understanding: Students will be able to reproduce existing visual ideas and express their own visual ideas in small to medium-sized programs.

Communication skills: Students will be able to read code written by others and write code such that others can easily understand it.

Learning skills: students will learn how to use programming as a medium for exploring their creativity and how to read technical documentation (e.g., programming language and library references).

Continue reading below for more information.

Summer courses

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Fees, discounts and scholarships

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Application and admissions

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Course level

Master / Advanced / Beginner

Credits

3 ECTS

Contact hours

Language

English

Tuition fee

€735 - €1310

Learning objectives
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- use programming as a medium for exploring their creativity via computer programs.
- read technical documentation (e.g., programming language and library references).
About the course coordinator

Mauricio Verano Merino (Coordinator) is an Assistant professor in the Computer Science department at the VU. He obtained his PhD at TU Eindhoven, where he explored how to engineer different end-user programming environments for DSLs. As a researcher, he has a particular interest in understanding code as a medium of expression and communication. Therefore, his research topics include and combine software language engineering, art, and design. Through his research, he aims to lower the entry barrier to programming for end-users by creating more usable software languages and their tooling. In his free time, he loves sports and is fascinated with using analog, old-fashioned technologies in today’s world.
Forms of tuition and assessment

Students will be taught through 10 sessions in the afternoons. The sessions are hybrid, with a theoretical part and practical session.
The assessment will be based on daily short assignments (20%) and final assignment (80%).
Syllabus

Here you can download the preliminary syllabus for the summer course 2023.
^{*Please note that the new preliminary syllabus will be uploaded here in March 2024. Note that it will be preliminary and that it still might be subject to change.}