This course was carried out how I expected a capstone class to be carried out. I was not completely sure what “creative computing” would entail but I knew that I would be working on a project throughout the semester. I was glad that many of the class sessions were dedicated to group work as I found this to be beneficial in the end. I also liked that there were set milestones to promote progression of our projects. Specifically, I enjoyed watching other groups’ milestone presentations. I found it interesting to see how other groups were implementing their own creative ideas and the steps that they took to get there. In a way, it was encouraging to see other groups progression because it made me eager to make even more progress with our project. As for our blog assignments, I had fun writing up about my passion for piano and also reading through a few other people’s posts and learning about some of my peers’ cool creative practices. However, I had a different experience with the reading assignment. I was the last person to choose an article to read and present to the class and therefore there was only one article left. After reading the article, I quickly learned why no one else had picked it. The whole article itself was a tad confusing to understand and jumped around different topics which made it very hard to present to the class. After reading it many times and doing additional research, I did the best I could in relaying the information to the class. However similar to the blog assignments, I enjoyed watching other people’s presentations on their readings as I found some of the topics to be quite interesting and even learned some new things.
I truthfully have never had experience with creative computing before this class and I have come to the conclusion that I enjoy it very much. Throughout all of my in-major courses, all that I have done is finish projects based on a spec. From step-by-step instructions in CS 2114 to being provided with only a required end result in CS 3114, I have never really had to come up with a creative idea on my own and program it from complete scratch. Additionally, as much as I love implementing different types of lists and writing/reading machine code (sense the sarcasm), I have never used my knowledge as a computer science student to create anything similar to what we have this semester. Although it was definitely a different, and at times difficult, process I really enjoyed having almost total freedom over our project and programming something that I found meaningful, creative, and fun. Although we are not finished with our final project, I already have a greater sense of pride and satisfaction of what we have created in comparison to any other project I have completed thus far in my education. I am glad that I decided to take this course for my capstone because without it, I may have never realized this passion for creative computing. In fact, as a lucky, unemployed near-second semester senior (again with the sarcasm), this class may have even caused me to consider looking into a career that involves computer science, of course, but in a more creative sense. One thing that I am certain about is that I would like to continue to work on projects relating to creative computing.
One attractive aspect of creative computing is that it is very open-ended. As we learned the first few weeks of class, there is no set definition for it. I think that this partially holds true for creativity as its own category. I do not think that there is a set way to make creativity “easier” or to evaluate creativity. This is because creativity is not a concrete or defined aspect, there are no wrong or right answers. Although, I do find that some people are just simply more creative than others which means that creativity comes more easily to those people. For instance, my other group members were quick to come up with an interesting idea for our project while I struggled a bit to generate a cool initial idea. However, once one person had an idea, we would snowball off of it with our own creative ideas which led us to our final project idea centered around the theme of liveness. I think that liveness was a great theme option for our class projects. It challenged us while still allowing for a wide range of options and ideas which is evident in the ideas that my classmates have for their projects. Also, I think that it will enhance our final presentations as all groups chose liveness for their theme and therefore, we will be able to see their projects in real time.
I look forward to seeing everyone’s final presentations as much as I look forward to seeing our own. As a team, we started off with a solid idea for our project, however we bounced around when it came to the logistics of it. For example, we weren’t exactly sure how we wanted our visualizer to appear in response to the user’s hand movements with their iPhones or what options we were going to give the user operating the computer and manipulating the visualizer (i.e. color changes, background choices, etc.). Because of this, we were unable to begin adding any final complex features to our visualizer until recently. Although I understand that brainstorming and altering your ideas as they come to you is a vital part of the creative process, I wish that we had begun to add complexity to our visualizer earlier on and make changes to what we had, no matter how big they may have been, as we proceeded with our implementation. I have taken courses centered around HTML and CSS, however I would in no way call myself an expert. That being said, I didn’t take it upon myself to expand my knowledge in these languages to allow myself to be able to get the visualizer to the level of complexity that we want right away. As a result of this, I have resorted to cramming in self-taught lessons these past two weeks when I could have been learning this entire semester which would make for a more efficient process of implementing the final version of the visualizer. From this situation, I learned that it is better to start implementation early and make big changes to a project over a period of time rather than wait until your plans are finalized to start something, a process that is exemplified in my drawings below. This is a lesson that I will be sure to apply to future projects.
Figure 1: What I thought the creative process was prior to this class
Figure 2: What I now think the creative process is at the conclusion of this class
I have found the entire process of our group project to be interesting but the most interesting aspect of it for me has been working on the visualizer. As we have finalized our plans for the visualizer, we have been playing around with HTML and CSS to see the different ways in which we can fulfill the complexity level we hope for our visualizer. We know what we want the overall final product to look like and all of the functionality that it will have, but there are specific aspects of the visualizer that are simply up to how well we work in HTML and how creative we can get with it. It is fun to play around with our HTML code and get immediate visual results of our efforts to work off of and to create new ideas from.
Although I find us to be in a very solid place in terms of our project progression now, I wasn’t completely sure how this project was going to carry out, so I did not have too many expectations for it. I was admittedly slightly nervous because I tend to doubt my abilities when it comes to my major and I am definitely not the most creative person in any room. Before I really bonded and learned anything about my teammates, I based my predictions for this project solely on my own abilities leading me to fear that we may not be able to complete our project on time. Although there were bumps in the road and some confusion, we were able to make a lot of progress throughout the semester which completely contradicted any expectations I previously had. That being said, I think that I got very lucky with my team members this semester. Having started off the semester with an illness that kept me in bed for nearly a month, I was put under additional pressure and stress over having to catch up on my work while completing the work that was current at the time. I was worried about letting my team down, but I soon found that they were very understanding and accommodating of my situation. Furthermore, I believe that I got lucky because of the varying experience and knowledge of my teammates. We all specialize in different areas and thus different parts of our project. This, along with all of our constant positive attitudes, has made for a very pleasant collaboration process in general. I have had some very difficult and frustrating experiences working in groups previously, so I am so happy to be able to say that possibly my last group project as a student ended up being a very favorable experience.