Next Type Of Motion

Week two, day two. Things are taking a turn for the complicated now, as I'm plunging head first into something that I've wanted to learn for a long time now but didn't have the guts - coding. That most seductive and mystical of languages, full of promise and intrigue. Also, as I'm rapidly finding out, full of what, why and if. I would consider myself to be a logical thinker by nature, but this is something else entirely in its unwavering devotion to rules and patterns. That said, I'm trying my best to keep up with the web devs and programmers here and am retaining at least some of the info that's being pushed through my sleep deprived head.

This week sees us focusing on learning Processing, a very handy piece of Open Source software founded by Ben Fry and Casey Reas that has been designed to make simple coding as painless as possible. After giving us a day and a half of excellent introductory exercises our teacher for the week, Patrick Kochlik of The Product has sent us forth with a distance-sensing Arduino with the aim of coming up with some novel methods of interpreting the data it captures. So far our group of three have designed and coded a panic button, a digital etch-a-sketch, a full blown copy of Snake (the classic old-school phone game) and a sleep monitor that I'll be testing out tonight. What fun!


playing motion-controlled Snake.