3D rotation: Day 3- Coding workshop

Research on real life examples of coding and programming

One example of this that I found particularly interesting was the app "Uber". This app works in collaboration with cab drivers. The location of these taxi drivers are sent constantly to a server so that when the user puts their location into the app they can see the whereabouts of the closest driver. The user can set a pick up location and the request and location of the user is sent to the driver. If the driver refuses then the server searches for the next closest driver to pick up the customer.
I thought that this was a very useful and convenient example programming.

Programming and coding can also have uses in creating artwork. The "Rain room" was an installation set up in the Barbican museum in London in October 2012 by Random international. 

The room was inhabited by a carefully choreographed downpour that responds to human movement and presence. As one walked into the room two cameras, one at the front and one at the side, captured the movement of the visitor through the use of one bright light that was directed into the rain room. Each image captured from both cameras was constantly analysed to let the computer know where the person was in the room. The information from both the cameras would then be combined to create coordinates of the walker and the computer would switch of the valves that control the water release where the coordinates and therefore the person was.

Programming

Also in the morning of day 3 the group took part in activities that would help us to understand what it takes to programme a computer to do something.
We were asked to write down each movement it would take to programme a "robot" to stand up from an initial lying down position on the floor. Using our selves and each other as robots, we were taught the importance of the "user experience", which basically included doing the activity our selves to realise the detail of the instructions that we would have to programme into the "robot".

Bellow are the final instructions that I came up with:

1. Bend elbows and put hands beside waist.
2. Use stomach muscles and neck muscles to lift head and shoulders.
3. Bend right knee to a right angle using thigh muscle.
4. Bend left knee to a right angle using thigh muscle.
5. Transfer weight onto feet by pushing hands on floor and finish in squat position.
6. Push feet into floor and straighten legs to stand up.

To develop our understanding of programming we were next asked to write down instructions for a friend to get from our house to the room we were sitting in at Ravensbourne.

These were quite tedious activities but insightful ones at the same time as we realised the importance of detail within programming. It was quite amusing when we had to read out what we had written and realised that some people had missed out crucial information when writing down instructions such as opening the door to the house and waiting for the traffic lights to change so that it was safe to cross the road.

Coding

In the afternoon we were introduce to coding. We learnt how to put code into the "terminal" programme to make the computer search for a curtain amount of images from google based on the words that we typed in. For example I typed in "10 pink+cat", which initiated the computer to place 10 pictures of pink cats from google images into a folder entitled "fetch".

Here is the process in pictures:

We then learnt how to recall our pictures from files within the folder "fetch".

We were then informed that a webpage had been created with the images we had told our computer to search for.

I have never done anything like this before so at first all the collections of different letters and symbols scared me because it looked so confusing. However after a while I started to see patterns within the code and begun to understand what had to be typed in and in what order to programme the computer to retrieve what I wanted it to. Having said that I don't really think that I will becoming a master of code anytime soon...