recode-fa23

Printing & Annotate Code Exercise

Printing code and annotating by hand can be a useful exercise to help you think more deeply about the mechanisms at work in a piece of artwork. Often with the paintbrush in hand, a different part of our minds are engaged and we can become overtaken by the same pitfalls that seem to limit our ability to think outside whatever box we may find ourselves in at any given moment.

This way of working engages with the concept of embodied cognition, allowing us to work with a different part of our brain, and indeed the body itself, to understand the issues and learn the solutions. I first learned about this concept from an artist talk that the researcher and educator Phoenix Perry gave at Coding Lab in 2021.

Choosing a sketch

• OpenProcessing.org is a great resource. Create a free account. You can easily explore, bookmark, and download a sketch that you like.
• Try to find one less than 100 lines and a single page.
• No shaders (sorry!)

Steps to print

• Install the Print Extension in VS Code.
  
• Once installed and active, you should see a printer icon in the upper right of VS Code when working in the document you. want to print.

• This will allow you to print the code with the line numbers in tact!

Annotating

The goal of this exercise is for you to be able to predict from the code what is happening on the screen. Therefore it is important to look up any built-in functions or words that you don’t understand (Google-ing is fine or use the p5.js, MDN, W3, or other references). You can pretend that if you came back to this document a year later, you would be able to read your notes and understand the entire behavior of the code.

You can assume that the reader has some base-level of knowledge of p5.js, so there’s no need to annotate what setup() and draw() do or how RGB color values work. Dig into the unknowns!

More Tips:

• Use a pencil so you can erase.
• For Loops: Go step by step. Start at the first value of i, or what have you. Once you have that, then reason what the next increment does fully, and so on…
• Annotate clearly as if you were explaining the sketch to another programmer or yourself a year later.
• Look up new concepts that you don’t now, programming, math, or otherwise.