Teaching Creative Coding as an Artistic Practice

Framework

In this research, I put into practice art education theorists’ ideas for a creative code classroom, one where the “creative side” is as thoroughly nourished as the technical side. If coding is a creative medium and creative coders are artists, then how do the ideas from art educators about how to teach it apply? Through frameworks and theories from art education- including Studio Habits of Mind (Project Zero), The Creative Research Stages (D’Adamo & Marshal), and The Principles of Possibility (Gude)-as well as ideas from creative code educators and contemporary constructionists, this research explores a course designed to weave a richer fabric, where technical proficiency was tempered by equal attention to processes and activities that support creative thinking and the development of artists.

Methods

This study explores the question, how do you support the creative side of creative coding using ethnographic methodology and a grounded theoretical approach based on the students’ creative actions and projects. I explore how the course supported students in using code as a creative medium, via their creative artifacts and actions (the projects, reflections, and the processes that led up to them).

I used an ethnographic approach combined with analytic methods from grounded theory to investigate the ways that the environment (curriculum) of the course supported students’ projects and processes. I used bidirectional artifact analysis (Magnifico & Halverson, 2013), intertextual tracing (Prior, 2004), thematic coding (Boyatzis, 1998) and constant comparison (Glaser & Strauss, 2017) to understand how students' creative projects and processes were supported by the course structure. This involved documenting their projects and processes and the relevant data around them, including the course environment via project prompts as initiating texts and the curriculum as a key narrative thread. I then used grounded theory analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to develop the framework presented here for supporting the creative side of creative coding.

This study began with redesigning the course via key theories from art education about supporting creativity. I developed a series of proposed modifications to be enacted in combination with the existing course structure. The re-design was based on ideas from art education theoretical frameworks—specifically D'Adamo & Marshall’s (2011) Creative Research Stages, Gude’s (2007) Principles of Possibility, and the Studio Habits of Mind (2022). This approach recognizes the importance of designing a course that aligns with research-based practices, before studying its impact.

This study was conducted at a large midwestern university in an undergraduate program for emerging media art, in the introductory creative coding course, “Intro to Creative Coding.” The participants in the study were all enrolled in the course and were all majoring in Emerging Media Art at the time of the study. The study took place in a single section of the course, taught by the researcher. The course took place over a 15 week fall semester, and students were invited but not required to take part in the study. No extra work, outside of regular coursework, was required for students to be involved; they only needed to be participating in the course and to consent to their artifacts and experiences being included as part of this study.

Of the 25 students in the course, 19 agreed to be part of the study. Of those 19, 11 were selected to be part of the analysis, based on equal gender representation and diverse coding skill representation, the latter of which was based on my own assessment throughout the course and during analysis. I categorized students by high, middle, or low coding skill level, and included students at each level in this study.

I collected data of the creative environment via ethnographic observation and fieldnotes that captured, as in the pilot study, my pedagogy and curriculum. Data was collected from all in-class sessions via field notes written-up from a combination of participant observation (myself as teacher/researcher leading the course) and video recording that captured audio and my computer screen which was connected to the classroom monitors. This field note data captured how the proposed redesign modifications were practically enacted during the course. The field note data went through open and specific coding, and then the data was crunched into large categories that defined each type of activity that happened during each class session and the order: embodiment, code lecture, code together, peer review, peer/independent programming practice, art lecture, and creative process activities. These categories served as operational codes that allowed me to quickly identify the course structure from week to week. I then created hand-written and digital tables documenting the general outline of each in-class session, and the corresponding assignments.

I collected the students' creative products and processes via the assignments submitted as part of the course from the university learning management software. Initially, I organized the student data by generating rich text documents that contained every assignment submitted by a single student for the entire course. This consisted of one lab and one project assignment for each week of the course (15 labs, 15 projects, and 2 in-class programming activities that I also collected) for each of the 11 initially selected participants. The majority of the assignments were semi-text based artifacts that were digital interactive artworks created in the p5.js web editor, although some were images or text. Each project assignment also included, in addition to a coded project, a corresponding text-based reflection, which was also collected. In each participant-specific document, a key image of each artifact and, in the case of code-based works, a link to the original project in the web editor was collected. In the column next to the project images I included student reflections (if applicable), any additional comments submitted by the student, feedback given by me to the student in response to their work, and a blank column for coding. I also collected the number of lines of code for each of the 15 projects, but this data was not analyzed. I then proceeded to do preliminary coding for every artifact for every student to gain a broad understanding of the content and to begin organizing the data into meaningful categories. This involved describing the projects they created, their connections to projects that came before or after, connections to the prompt itself, my interpretation of the meaning of their projects, and anything else that stood out.

For the analysis of the Personal Project I drew from bidirectional artifact analysis, “an analytic method for understanding creative, digital production processes” via artifacts created over time. Typically interview data is part of this process, and here I instead relied on the students' written reflections. I used Glaser and Strauss (2017) method of constant comparison to look for similarities and differences across students’ processes of developing the personal project. I used D’Adamo’s creative research stages as a general model into which I chunked students' different experiences. I analyzed students' experiences at each stage of the Personal Project process in the analysis. This methodology is similar to Halverson and Gibbons' (2009) method of tracing the video production processes of youth at different media arts organizations, in order to understand “the pedagogical process through which youth learn to explore and represent their identities through digital video production” (p. 70). That study collected observations and artifacts, both of student projects and processes, as well as curricular materials, through which they developed a pedagogical framework. As a result of this study, I present my own framework for important curricular elements that support students using code as an artistic medium.

Results

Through this research I found that the curriculum supported students using code as an artistic medium, by giving students opportunities to: (1) make observations about themselves and the world of creative coding; (2) develop technical skills; (3) practice translating ideas into projects; and (4) reflect on their process and experiences.

1.) Opportunities to Make Observations
In spite of how demanding coding technique is, it might actually be the case that the technical part is the easy part of creative coding. Students don’t shy away from coding merely because it is hard and because other technologies are easy. Students shy away from coding because they have already learned what their voice sounds like, or what their artform looks like, through other mediums. And while the veracity of this—that students know their voice or artform—may be more or less true, what is true is that coding is hard because it is hard to find our voice within it. It is hard not to be strangled by the technique, by the rules and unfamiliar stricture of it all in comparison to a favored media that feels second nature. It’s hard to find our way through learning a new language/medium (code) and find what our voice sounds like, through it (Hieronymi, 2017).

What helps students use code for their own purposes? In this course, the project reflections, labs, and early projects served as locations designed for students to pick up information about themselves. Students collected information about aspects of their identities, experiences, and the world of code around them, as a means of providing opportunities for them to recognize themselves. These opportunities supported students by helping them connect to their own frames of meaning. An art [creative coding] class is primarily about exploring what it means to be in the world, and students need these opportunities, and likely more, to tune into their own questions and interests. Through the early opportunities to collect meaningful information, even at the very beginning of the course, students are better prepared to pursue their interests in the space of the personal project. Opportunities to collect observations about themselves and their experiences help students make their way through the code, and in the personal project, find ways to do something personally meaningful with it.

2.) How can you be creative with something you don’t know how to use? It’s like asking someone who’s never played guitar to play something beautiful. For the most part, people can’t just play. And so it is with coding. Students have got to have lots of experiences practicing it. One art educator explains “‘you have to know the rules to break them,’ and this connects to building technique first and then pushing beyond it and its foundation” (Sheridan et al., 2022, p. 33). Participants in this study benefited from varied opportunities to develop technique, which allowed them to develop the confidence and habits that more advanced or already-familiar students have. It is important to think about how play can facilitate technique development—not as a device that enables mastery, but rather as a gift that frees up tension and enables us to show up for the technical in an embodied way that might make more agency with the medium possible. In addition to creating opportunities to play, as part of practicing technique, it is also important that opportunities to practice technique are, over time, partnered with opportunities for students to use it in meaningful ways. In the beginning of learning some new technique, this can be accomplished by building in other types of opportunities for students to notice their own ideas and experiences, alongside the technical. Over time, it is crucial to think about how the opportunities to learn technique can be meaningfully partnered with opportunities to use that technique in “purposeful” ways. Without these stretching opportunities to wield techniques to convey one’s own ideas, all of the accumulated technique will be merely training. Through these varied experiences of practicing technique, students begin to discover the nuanced possibilities of the medium of coding for themselves.

3.) Opportunities to Translate Ideas into Projects
Students need opportunities—as many as possible—to move between the creative dream and the reality of the medium. They need opportunities to practice giving form to their ideas. Translating ideas involves coming up with an idea and imagining how to make it real. It is an in-between stage where students move from the early stages of creative process—making observations, researching—through to actually creating something (D’Adamo, 2019; D’Adamo & Marshall, 2011). In this class, the early projects offer students gradual degrees of freedom to form their own idea, and see it through. In addition to the early projects, activities like creating project plans and discussing ideas with peers help students translate their ideas into projects, by helping them decide what they want to explore. Through these opportunities to have ideas and enact them, students practice having ideas that exist within the language of code. In the process of creating, the ideas become entangled with the unique affordances of the medium of code. Many students were able to use its unique affordances to explore their ideas and passions in an active way. Beyond expressing or representing, many students' projects involved a kind of doing, where they used code to truly pursue their dreams.

Importance

Learning coding to participate in the world-as-it-is is not enough to make all but the most technically inclined pursue it with any real vigor. I found that I, and my students, needed code to do more than merely grant us access to the professional world, which can be accomplished more easily by a variety of other means (e.g. Squarespace, Wix, or Adobe Portfolio for building websites). Code is a powerful tool in the world-as-it-is, visible in the high pay grade of CS graduates. But what does it offer individuals? Next to all the other possible media we could use to construct a life, to imagine and co-create our world, why do we bother with code?

The personal projects of the participants in this course serve as a first draft vision of what code can do. It can allow you to dream a silly laser game that all your friends play together. It can simulate a VJ/DJ booth. It can express complex concepts and questions about being alive. It can marry images and words and the movements of my fingers. It can construct a system that blends images of my favorite films together, allowing me to gain new insight into who I am as a filmmaker. It can make something beautiful, to sit and gaze at. It can create a prototype for a new audio-visual system. It can create a space for us to combine distant interests like history and art.

They say that code is the “pervasive material” that underlies so much of our daily modern life. That is, perhaps, what lends it power in the world. But I think that is also why it is powerful for us. Rather than creating things within the existing structures, code is a creative material that lets us form our own. Rather than, for example, using film techniques to create videos to use in a pre-packaged VJ software, code lets me create my own VJ software system. Rather than using pre-made LEDs to construct an illuminated sunset pavilion, code lets me integrate dynamic color with meaningful form. Code allows me a more total flexibility to create my own functioning system—my own dream machine

Code in this way has a lot in common with contemporary art, where rather than work within given structures—a canvas, a block of wood or marble—artists use their chosen media to construct their own structures. Although it’s too simple to say that business-as-usual coding is like landscape painting, there is something about code’s capacity to fundamentally construct infrastructures (systems) which make it essential for contemporary artists. However code functions in the realm of the digital, where it constructs the logic, the functioning of systems whose physical form is shaped with metal and plastic and sometimes wood and glass. And so in the future, I hope to further explore how students can be supported in using code outside the boundaries of purely digital systems, and practice using code along with the infrastructural tools of contemporary art and sculpture (wood, metal, digital fabrication, paint, even ceramic) to construct new digital x physical forms which honor our human need to understand “what it means to live, to exist, in the here and now, in and with the world” (Biesta, 2022, p. 37).

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