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Robot nightjar eggshibition at the Poly, Falmouth
As part of this year’s Fascinate festival we took over the bar at Falmouth’s Poly with visualisations of the camouflage pattern evolution process from the egglab game. This was a chance to do some detective work on the massive amount of genetic programming data we’ve amassed over the last few months, figure out ways to…
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Some tangible programming language research (#2)
Following on from yesterday’s post – here’s a random selection of some (publicly accessible) tangible programming research. Timothy Scott McNerney: Tangible Programming Bricks: An approach to making programming accessible to everyone Timothy S. McNerney: From turtles to Tangible Programming Bricks: explorations in physical language design Juan Gabriel Tirado: Tangible Syntaxes: Exploring embodied and tangible I/O…
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Thinking outside of the screen (#1)
I’m starting a new exploratory project to build a screen-less programming language based on two needs: A difficulty with teaching kids programming in my CodeClub where they become lost ‘in the screen’. It’s a challenge (for any of us really but for children particularly) to disengage and think differently – e.g. to draw a diagram…
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Bumper Crop released
A release of Bumper Crop is now up on the play store with the source code here. As I reported earlier this has been about converting a
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Neural Network livecoding and retrofitting ZX Spectrum hardware
An experimental, and quite angry neural network livecoding synth (with an audio ‘weave’ visualisation) for the ZX Spectrum: source code and TZX file (for emulators). It’s a bit hard to make out in the video, but you can move around the 48 neurons and modify their synapses and trigger levels. There are two clock inputs…
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dBsCode summer school
At the end of July I helped out with the dbscode summer school. The idea of this two week course was to encourage algorithmic literacy, with focus on employment – agile methods and test driven development (TDD), and aiming at people about to enter, or re-enter employment rather than the teenagers we focused on in…
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New Hardware
A Harris, 4 shaft table loom:
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Butterfly game at Royal Society Summer exhibition
Some hungry butterfly hunters making evolution happen at the Summer Science exhibition last week. Thank goodness for multitouch!
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Computation is weaving
With my mind on our upcoming AHRC weave/code project (and seeing as Alex has already started writing code) I thought I’d have a go at visualising how computers work in relation to pattern manipulation. These screenshots are from a ZX Spectrum where I’ve modified some library assembler code for higher level arithmetic to display the…
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Mongoose 2000: Group composition
I’ve recently been building the Mongoose 2000 “group composition” tool that the researchers will use for recording information about a whole pack of mongooses (and synchronise data via a Raspberry Pi providing a local wifi node) in their field site in Uganda. As I wrote a bit about before, one of the interesting things about…