Zach gave us a tools lecture today - he basically showed us all of these amazing tools (programming languages) to try out and experiment with. Some were so simplistic, yet they could do so much! He showed us Context Free, NodeBox, SuperCollider, and Chuck. Context Free and NodeBox were viz tools and SuperCollider and Chuck were sound tools. Zach gave us homework to find a tool that noone else is using and experiment with it for the next week.

I played around with The Dasher Project. It’s a way to type without the keyboard and super fun to use. I don’t know that I could make something with it but it was a cool find. I also spent some time exploring paper.js and I ended up drawing a cat with it!

You can find the code on github.

We spent the rest of the day experimenting with the tools and working on our presentations. All of us did a rehearsal of the presentations and then got ready for the welcome party. There were about 100 people who showed up with some pretty amazing people in the audience (Jer Thorpe). I was super nervous to present in front of that many people, but it was also sort of exhilarating at the same time! So glad I did it but so glad it’s over. I also received a lot of really supportive encouragement from other students which was really nice. It was such a great week!