Review of Micro-teaching Session

For my micro-teaching session I decided to have a hands-on session that would give everyone a touch of what is called Creative Coding. Basically this is the idea that, through programming languages you can easily create interactive artwork, sound, or other arts and media pieces. I decided to frame it on p5js, a programming framework that is browser based and with a low entry barrier, so it is usually thought as a good entry point to programming.

The Plan

Below a skeleton of the teaching plan:

• Introduction: what is p5js? To give an idea of what is the p5js programming language and what is it used for. Showing examples and references.
• Example 1: Basic examples. Show basic lines of code that they could use to create some visuals, using mainly shapes and colours.
• Example 2: Moving ball. Going beyond by giving animation to a shape.
• Example 3: Bodypose. To use basic machine learning models to play with the camera and trying body detection algorithms.

What happened

As I think it happened with most of us, the 20 minutes went rapidly, especially because of most of us being used to four hours sessions with students, where you can easily let time for the unforeseen to happen.

Regardless this, most of the hands-on examples were successfully followed by the colleague/students. I attach below a screenshot of the pieces pasted into the Miro board:

After this basic examples, I had to quickly jump into advanced examples, including Machine Learning examples. The idea here was to show where could they get with more practice, but it seems the jump was too abrupt and I have the feeling that the connection with the basic examples was not that clear.

The general consent on the very useful feedback was that they liked the playfulness of the experience, and that for most of them coding was usually a terrifying practice. They appreciated the fact that as soon as they started coding things were much clearer, so it would be helpful to always start the session preparing students by warning them that things get clearer once we start coding.

Another main concern was around monitoring of student’s work during online teaching. We discussed about the possibility of going beyond the sharing of results in Miro or other platforms, but maybe to access online tools that allow to review live the coding that students are building.