courses /spring 07 /danm 220 /syllabus

Instructor Information

Charlie McDowell
Office: 349B Engineering 2
Phone: 459-4772
Email: charlie@cs.ucsc.edu
Office Hours: Tuesday 2-3, Friday 11-12

Description

The courses assumes basic computer literacy and programming experience comparable to a one quarter introductory programming course such as CMPS60G or ART21. You will have an opportunity to improve your programming skill while exploring a number of programming languages and systemps suitable for use by digital artists. You will learn about digital representation of text, sound, images, and movies, and how to create and manipulate those representations under program control. You will also learn about how computers share information over the network with the view of "the Web" as a potential medium for artists. This course will not teach how to use existing applications to manipulate the various media.

Organization

I am trying a new class structure this year. The course is organized as five two-week mini-courses. You are expected to indicate at the first class meeting which three mini-courses your grade will be based upon. You are welcome to attend and participate in all class activities, even those not part of your selection of mini-courses. The five mini-courses (in chronological order) will be:

1. Basic programming review and introduction to programming in Processing.
2. Exploration of selected libraries for Processing and a bit of OOP.
3. Java Applets and a bit of OOP.
4. Python and dynamic web content.
5. Flash/ActionScript

Grading Policy

Your grade will be based on a short programming exercise plus a small project for each of your selected mini-courses and a final project using one of the tools you studied in one of the mini-courses. Your final project may build on one (or more) of your small projects.

• 15% Programming exercises (3 at 5% each)
• 45% Small programming projects (3 at 15% each)
• 40% Final programming project

Class Online Discussion

Students are encouraged to post questions and comments, and respond to other students using the class discussion forum which can be found at: http://ic.ucsc.edu/webct. Note that if you were not pre-enrolled in the class you will need to add yourself to the webct class DANM220_McDowell.