What was the most memorable response to an assignment you've given?
There may be no better proof of an assignment's educational potential than a surprising student response. Here, we ask educators to reminisce about students who responded to assignments in ways that were subversive, or unexpected, or indicative of significant learning. These memories reveal how assignments are not only a fulcrum for student growth, but can lead to greater understanding for the instructor themselves.
The most heartwarming response I've had was when Andy Clymer from the first School for Poetic Computation class saw me two years after he finished the program and said, “I'm still working on your homework.” He's a fantastic type designer who does generative fonts and I helped get him excited about electronics. He got really into synthesizers and robotics from some of the workshops that I did. It's funny because the workshop itself was not that successful; it was one of my first classes teaching technical things and I don't think I was really ready to be the teacher. Still, we tried to adopt a collaborative approach where the students took the lead at the end of the course and told us what they learned, and hearing that he continued from where we left off probably made this one of my best teaching experiences.
Well, this was a response to the whole semester and not just one assignment. One of the students wrote down in the course evaluation that she realized that coding is not just a gentleman's club. And just with that line I felt like I actually achieved something. I know that the NYC coding scene is much more focused on diversity, but in many parts of the world, gender is still very problematic.
Don't be afraid to be a bitch. Don't be afraid to tear somebody down. Some of the most rewarding responses I've had have come from students to whom I gave very negative feedback early on about a bad idea. And they've taken my feedback as kind of fuel for the fire and they've either proven me totally wrong, or they've improved their concept significantly by the time I see it again. For example, I had one student who wanted to make an Oculus Rift VR game and he told me his original idea, and I was like, “This is total shit. I don't like it at all. It's not interesting, it's not new, I don't want you to just make a space shooter. Why use the Oculus Rift to make a space shooter? What are you bringing to this?” So what he decided to do was make a rhythm-based space shooter and he used the diegesis of the cockpit to be the control system for the game. You had to look toward the rhythm of the beat, and the beat got stratified. So when the tom drum beat, one kind of object would shoot out, and you would have to go look at that location to stop it. If you heard a bass drum beat, you would have to look over at the other location. And doing this would destroy the object that was making the bass beat. It was really fun because then the act of turning your head, looking up and down and around, became satisfying because you were doing it on rhythm and at a pulse.
Another student project that really broke my brain, and I've never actually seen anyone do anything like this before, was by a kid named James Cameron. I gave a game assignment, and he wanted to make a horror game that connected through to the real world. He made this horror video game, and it's a really terrible scenario, like a murder has occurred, and all of a sudden you see a phone in the VR, and when you touch the phone your actual cell phone rings. Then the characters start calling you and leaving you messages during the day and they're prompting you to kind of play out this story. That was really amazing, even though his original idea was not spectacular. I was really hard on this kid in his exams—like he missed a semicolon on something and I drew a pirate and wrote, “Now walk the plank.” I think sometimes teachers want to make students feel really good and sometimes that's not the goal. Sometimes you want to make them question if something is worth their time and how they can bring something new to it.
For me, the things that are the most memorable are usually less about the output and more about the process. Like seeing that student who is really struggling in the first few weeks, and then every week, rather than just doing the assignment, she does five versions of the assignment. Then by the end she's a great programmer with a really strong concept in her final project. That's the sort of thing that really sticks with me. In terms of specific responses, one of my students did a project when she was just learning to code where she would go up and ask people for their Processing sketches, like the code itself. She would then try to draw by hand what the outcome would be and after would run the sketch to see how close she could get.
Tega Brain: That's novel, and courageous for a beginner.
Yeah. Let's see, there's another one that is not such a crazy concept itself, but I really liked where the two students were coming from. The project was called “Not Lost in Translation” and they basically made a chat app for themselves. They both spoke English but with a strong accent. And they felt like people didn't understand them a lot. They first just wanted to make something that would translate into the opposite language, but then when they hit some technical barriers, they changed their concept so that you would speak, and you could choose English, or Hindu, or Korean, or whatever language you are speaking. And then it would do a Google Translate of that, and then a Google image search. It would just show the other person a pictogram of what they had said, and then the person would respond by speaking and it would show another pictogram. So the result is totally nonsense, but it was nicely executed.
Then the last one I remember was my student Ben Kauffman's response to the API assignment, where you have to make some aspect of your life controllable. His project was super simple: if you messaged him with the hashtag #brainstamp, he would pull a postcard out of his pocket, mark down whatever he was thinking at that moment, and drop it in the next mailbox that he saw.
My department head asked me to teach a class on artistic data visualization, and I'm a fan of artistic data work but I'm not a fan of much data visualization, and so I was conflicted the whole time I was teaching it, and I really brought that energy into the classroom. But in that class there were folks like Evan Roth and Christine Sugrue. They took these prompts and really created artworks out of them—things like Evan Roth's project Explicit Content Only, a record composed entirely of swear words extracted from a rap album. They took the prompts that I was giving them and created things that would stand in a gallery or would be written about in a blog. For me it's really exciting as a teacher when your students create work that is noteworthy, work that gets people writing or talking about it, because you start to see that feedback loop with culture, which is great. As a practitioner there is a feedback loop of making something, reaching an audience, and getting feedback from it. [Without that cycle,] it's otherwise really hard to understand the value of what you do. For me, the most exciting prompts are the ones that result in work that makes it out there in the world.
In my creative coding class, I do an assignment where I show the floor of the Alhambra Palace and explain how it's a Lindenmayer system, how it can be re-created with an L-system. I then give them a basic turtle graphic sketch in p5.js and give them a couple ideas for how to do Lindenmayer systems and a bunch of links, and tell them to figure it out. I had a student L-system his way toward a perfect replica of this mandala that's in some crazy third-century CE Hindustani temple in his hometown—Calcutta, if I remember. He remembered it, like he knew it visually, and he was like, “There's got to be a way I can make this thing.” It's kind of like a space-filling curve, like a Koch curve, so it's not too hard to do. Most of the kids made these weird turtle graphics things—mazes or Sierpinski triangles or some of those bullshit fractal 101 things. But this kid showed a Google Earth photo of the temple, an image of its ceiling; he hit play on the sketch and walked away. What really stood out was the personal connection he had to the form, which clearly motivated his craft. All the other kids were just like, “Fuuuuck.”
It was by my student Susan Stock, and it's a program that produces a poem. It's based on a poem that she wrote about a friend of hers. She passed the poem through this procedure that randomly repeated small segments of the text, so that it feels like her record is skipping. It keeps on moving back into the text so that it has to kinda catch up to itself. It's called “Susan's Scratch.” And she gave this reading of it in class and it was really affecting, because it was personal. I think that with procedural art in general it's harder, or seen as less desirable, to get at the lyrical, the emotional, or the personal…. It was clear that the procedure brought out something in the original text that wasn't there to begin with.
I think [this] was for my midterm assignment, which is to invent a new form of poetry and then write a computer program that attempts to write poems in that form. The thing that I remember is that once Susan presented this, it was like a switch flipped in my head. I realized I can teach my students how to make jokes with this, I can teach my students how to do data analysis with this stuff, I can teach my students how to be postmodern jerks with procedural text. “Susan's Scratch” just made me think: Oh, wait a second, the emotional range of this is way, way larger than I had originally conceived.
Tega Brain: And of course computers are rarely framed as emotional or for exploring emotion; they are not perceived as having enough ambiguity or unpredictability.
Absolutely. I think that's understandable considering the history of the medium. People in general don't think that systems can be expressive. They're not perceived as having intentionality. People often don't see the act of making rules as being the same thing as the act of writing a poem. And this is sort of what I am trying to attack in my teaching—to say that actually, the process of designing a computer program, designing a poetic form, or designing a game are all processes, and the system that creates these artifacts is itself a thing that can contain lyricism and emotion and a personal point of view. In fact, it has to have a personal point of view and we shouldn't ignore the personal aspect of that kind of making.