During the early summer of 2019, I was invited by the team at SuperHi to help create a course to teach beginners ‘creative coding’. By creative coding, we mean experimental, fun programming, to create patterns and animations — a very satisying process of exploration, problem solving and learning by making.

Brief

SuperHi founder and teacher, Rik Lomas, was keen to create a course that could help teach absolute beginners to JavaScript to make the kind of thing I have on my site over here.

He would take care of the narration and teaching, but my brief was to design and develop the course content — a series of projects that increased in difficulty over time, so students could gradually learn different aspects of drawing and animating in the browser.

Structure

It made sense to start by thinking through a rough structure of topics for students to learn so they could start from zero and work their way up over each week of the course. I roughed out some notes (below), which remained largely unchanged by the time I put the lessons together.

Palette

From an aesthetic point of view, it made real sense to create a palette that could act as a kind of family to group the different types of lessons and help make everything feel part of a greater whole. I opted for something very simple – two colours for each project.

I'd also decided to stick to very simple geometry that can be drawn out of the box with most code libraries, figuring that these simple parameters of colour and form should create some nice constraints to work in and keep things nice and manageable for students.

Feedback loops

With these foundations in place, I could begin just making stuff and learning what felt right as I went. I really love this process — making without too much judgement or self criticism, followed by reviewing and judging and then feeding that back into another round of making. And repeat.

I also regularly shared my work with the SuperHi crew and got really valuable feedback to make sure the things I was making were teachable and fit into our loose structure.

I'm really pleased with the outcome. Below is a bit of a flavour of a few of the things you can make on the course, as well as a teaser video I made for Instagram. If you like the look of the course, you can sign up to find out more over on SuperHi.

Teaser video

Below is a short little teaser video I made for our social channels. This also hopefully gives you a bit more of an idea of the cool things you'll learn. Anyway, hope you like it and cheers for stopping by. ✌️