Basics Part 1 Creating Shapes & Movement

In part 1 this is where you start your coding journey one small step at a time. You begin with drawing some regular shapes and text. Once you have mastered creating and colouring the shapes then you can bring them to life and make them move. This section also shows you how can interact with the canvas using your mouse.

There are three downloadable units:

Unit #1: Shapes

Unit #2: Movement

Unit #3: Mouse

Example from the book

Basics Part 2 Oscillations, Arrays & 3D Shapes

In part 2 you will cover a range of topics including arrays and oscillations. The use of arrays is a fundamental aspect of coding. They are a way of storing data than can be easily accessed and manipulated. Also in book 2 you will cover 3D shapes which allows you create in a 3D environment. 

There are four downloadable units:

Unit #4: translate

Unit #5: arrays

Unit #6: oscillate

Unit #7: 3D shapes

Example from the book

Basics Part 3 Noise, Classes & Vectors

Part 3 introduces you to a type of random element called perlin noise. This is a smoother and more realistic form of randomness. The is an important ingredient in coding that goes by the name of Object Orientated Programming (OOP for short). It makes use of classes which is a powerful way of coding that many coding languages incorporate. The final part of book 3 covers vectors.

There are three downloadable units:

Unit #8 noise

Unit #9: classes

Unit #10: vectors

Example from the book

Basics Part 4 Keyboard, Mouse & HTML

Part 4 covers a topic broadly called DOM elements that you might use in a website involving CSS, HTML and JavaScript. This section also covers more functionality available for the keyboard and the mouse. A brief look at how you can incorporate the time and date, and using the millis() function to measure the passage of time. 

There are three downloadable units:

Unit #11: keyboard

Unit #12: time

Unit #13: HTML

Example from the book

After completing the four sections covering the basics there are a number of other elements which you might find useful. They aren’t quite as basic but very useful and helpful if you want to develop your coding.

  • Part 1: video and images
  • Part 2: sound and music
  • Part 3: promises
  • Part 4: json

there is no order to them but if you want to have a play then the bits and bobs is quite interesting. I will add them as and when so keep a look out.

Additional Part 1 Video and Images

This part looks at how to use your video camera and manipulate the images to create special effects. Also how to create a png and then incorporate it into a sketch onto the canvas. Both these elements are useful for the games and artificial intelligence sections.

Additional Part 2 Unit 1 playing music

This section explores sound and music. For this you will need a microphone, most machines have them built in. You will be creating and graphing sound using the microphone and downloading free music, and from this you can create visualisation of the sounds and/or music.

Additional Part 2 Unit 2 visualisation

Once you have access to a music file and the microphone you can use FFT to analyse and visualise the sounds and the music using graphs and colours and your imagination. This just gets you started and it would be wonderful to see what you can produce.

Additional Part 3 promises

This covers a wide range of coding concepts based on higher level functions, including the arrow notation. This is not an easy section to navigate but it does give you insight into higher levels of the programming language. My recommendation is to work through these but not to worry about how much you understand. The practice will be invaluable if nothing else and exposing yourself to something you don’t understand is the first step to understanding.

Additional Part 4 Json

Saving, loading or downloading data files is a huge part of coding. This section looks at a popular one for JavaScript the .Json file format. How to create your own, upload a pre-existing Json file and save data as a json file.

More to come shortly…