I haven’t posted for a long time. I’ve been going through a period of pretty significant latency. Lots of energy has been going into things and nothing has come out of it yet! There’s a lot of activity in the draft folders of my life and not a lot getting published. Hopefully that’ll change soon!


I’m going to be teaching first year programming for UNSW’s Computational Design degree. I’m pretty opinionated about what you need to learn to be a computational designer, and Hank has given me a pretty broad remit to teach what I want so I’m really looking forward to it.

The students will be getting geometry and Rhino/Grasshopper skills from their other modules, so I’m focusing on programming. I want to get across to them that there is more to it than just typing in a particular way; that it’s a thought discipline. It’ll change their brains and make them better able to think about everything else in their world.

It’s still a work in progress, but all the course documentation is here and the course is being run out of this repo.

There are going to be 3 assignments:

  1. Technical Foundations
  2. Holy wars
  3. Open Data Project

The first half of the course has weekly exercises that are auto going to be auto marked. I’ve got the first half of that worked out, I can mark my own work, now I just need to automate pulling each student’s repo1, running the tests against it and keeping track of who’s done what.

At the moment, the exercises for weeks 1-4 are done, lecture 1 is mostly done and lecture 2 is stubbed out. There’s still a long way to go!

On the plus side, I’ve got two great tutors helping me (Aiden and Ishaan) so they’ll catch my slip ups.

If you’ve got any thoughts then do let me know!