This course is for students who have already attended a programming course (such as "Informatik für Gestalter") and are familiar with basic programming concepts such as variables, conditionals, loops, and objects. In this course, we will extend and consolidate these programming skills. We will also briefly repeat some of the main basic programming concepts (but quite quickly and thus too fast for beginners). If you are interested in this course and do not have any programming skills yet or if you want to combine this course to a 9 ECTS module, please have a look at the bottom of this text, which describes some options.

Most examples and programming tasks in this course will be about "things that move" (on the screen). We will create many interactive graphical programs by using the Processing programming environment. The main literature will be "The Nature of Code" by Daniel Shiffman (the book is available online for free).

The course consists of two major blocks, each taking one week.
The first block is about objects that move, accelerate, collide, and bounce. We will explore the basic formulas that allow us to let dynamics things happen on our screens. Furthermore, the basic concepts and the usage of a physics engine will be explained. The second block is about autonomous agents, e.g. programs that are "intelligent" (not really...) and make own "decisions", such as non-player characters in computer games. Some basic concepts regarding decision-making, path planning, and swarm behaviors will be introduced. Furthermore, we might have a short look at evolutionary algorithms, which enable our programs to adapt over to time.

However, these aforementioned applications, which are fun to play with and which leave a lot of space for your creativity, are also a means to an end. Along with them, we will refresh and consolidate the knowledge about programming techniques for handling data structures, iterations, algorithms, and multiple aspects of object-oriented programming.

We will have a short kickoff meeting a few weeks before this course starts. During this meeting, some more details will be presented and questions regarding the organization of the course will be answered.

If you do not have any programming skills yet or need more ECTS points in total, there are different options: Students of "Digital Media and Society" can combine this course with "Self-Study: Introduction to Programming". Students of Master Digital Media at HfK can take "First steps into Creative Coding with Processing". Furthermore it is possible to take the (German) course "Informatik für Gestalter und General Studies", which has a 3 ECTS option. However, Digital Media master students can not get any credit points at the latter option.

This course is not available for computer science students but it is open to Digital Media students from the university.

Commentary:
http://www.fb9.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/redak_ipkm/lehrveranstaltungen/wise2018-19/Beaufort.pdf

Kommentar:
http://www.fb9.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/redak_ipkm/lehrveranstaltungen/wise2018-19/Gramse.pdf