This repo is a course plan documenting a maker-oriented Introduction to Programming course at Georgia Tech CS-6452. The course has been pioneered by the following team at Georgia Tech: Grgory Abowd Aman Parnami Elizabeth DiSalvo Zane Cochran
It's now being redeveloped into a general-use repository by Manasvi Lalwani, who has acted as a Teaching Assistant for the course in the past, in partnership with Mozilla, but in the meantime, you can get started with this:
- Start with the Course Overview Document. This is a lengthy document and the outline should pop-up in the sidebar automatically. But in case it does not, go to Add Ons>>Table of Contents>>Show in sidebar. Pay special attention to Physical Computing Modules and Milestones as it links to major milestones in the class such as assignment prompts and sample student work.
- Read Class Philosophies and Mindset as it shows higher level concepts that need to be kept in mind throughout the course this document also links to some of the final physical computing projects.
- Refer to the Week by Week Class Outline for a more detailed agenda for 8 weeks of Physical Computing
- Find detailed notes in the Curriculum Planning folder that correspond to the Weeks outlined in the previous document. Some lessons have supplementary video resources that can be viewed to see a demonstration of a technique in our class.
- There are also supplementary Powerpoints that can be used in-class. These are yet to be added to the Weekly folders but they do exist as a teaching resource.
This class was offered to graduate students from the Masters and PhD program but it can be taught at an udergraduate level too. This class was offered over the course of Fall semester and taught two major modules: Introduction to Physical Computing and Introduction to Mobile Phone Programming. This repo focuses purely on the firs module i.e. Intro to Physical Computing. It contains guidelines that should not be followed exactly. Some of the exercises require use of resources on the Georgia Tech campus. But educators are encouraged to find alternative resources in their community ortweak exercises such that they use readily available resources. For example, there may be sessions where we use a 3-D printer to prototype a case for a prototype but that can substituted by a manual exercise such as forming a cardboard box case. Each module should be tailored to the individual class. It is written by and for education innovators.
A course plan gives you a schedule of what content to teach in class and methods that hve been successfully used to impart it. This course plan captures the activities followed by the Georiga Tech Instructional team in class and outside of class to get students to tinker with Arduinos and such.
The course has been pioneered by the following team at Georgia Tech: Grgory Abowd Aman Parnami Elizabeth DiSalvo Zane Cochran
This Rapid Prototyping course plan was made by Manasvi because an interesting policy decision which called for this class to be taught in rotation by facutly members. Thus, in Fall of 2016 the class would be handed-off to a new faculty instructor. Word was in the grapevine that members of the faculty were apprehensive about taking on the new curriculum. Manasvi found that they had little familiarity with the content and little prior experience with hardware prototyping. Manasvi spent time taking the class as well as later acting as a teaching assistant for the class and spent time documenting and creating content for this course plan as repository for the community.
This class changed my perspective in many ways by making hardware programmable and accessible. I would not say that it made me an expert in hardware prototyping but it helped me overcome a huge mental-block that hardware was not for me to tinker with. I was able to transfer many of the skills I learned in this class to other classes in MS-HCI where I was able to push my skills and learn more about tinkering with electronics.
CS-6452 Prototyping Interactive Systems(HCC-2) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Wv5CLz1mf0-Lxyammcyn7AI1M7WV4porr7C6DplU5LA/edit?usp=sharing