Creative Coding for the Web

Access

Landing page for Creative Coding for the Web

Timeline

September 2020 — Present

Description

When learning how to write code for the first time, it can feel very abstract. Like learning a foreign language, there are new words and symbols that may feel meaningless and unnatural, making it difficult to stay grounded in your learning. To help with this, a good starting point is to think about code as a practice embedded in something we already naturally understand: the physical world and how we move through it. Code exists in an abstract and intangible digital space, but it is often used to represent or simulate some phenomenon in our physical world.

Many existing textbooks that provide an introduction to programming for the web are designed with programmers and developers in mind. For designers, this developer-oriented approach to programming can feel overwhelming and discouraging. As an alternative, Steven teaches web programming through the notion of code as medium of design, considering the many ways that a sample of code functions as a designed artifact. The tutorials embedded within this work, Creative Coding for the Web, offer a design-forward approach to web programming fundamentals, aimed towards design audiences.

This series of tutorials was created during the Fall 2020 semester at Northeastern University (College of Arts, Media and Design) as a part of the teaching materials for courses in programming for the web. These tutorials do not represent a completed product but rather a collection of prototypes that will continue to evolve and be revised in the future.