The why and how of teaching creative coding?

I don't know what kind of post this is going to be, to be honest. I think it's going to just be incoherent musings instead of a strong point.

So people who've followed me for a bit might know that my day job, one of them at least, is to teach creative coding to youth---particularly youth that don't have a lot of access to technology otherwise.

I teach drawing with things like Hydra or P5, game making in TIC80, storytelling in Twine, music making with TidalCycles, and a lot more things like that.

A lot of the funding for this work comes from the tech sector that wants to use the arts as a way of getting kids to go "oh, wait, I want to a programmer! let me sell my soul to make ads more obtrusive plz!!"

Of course, I'm an anarchist in the line of Illich and I've deliberately turned my back on the tech sector.

So what's *my* goal?

Before we get into that, fundamentally I'm influenced a lot by the phenomenologists, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty mostly [we don't respect Heidegger in this house], and the small community of people who've applied phenomenologic analysis to technology, the body, and self-perception. Susan Kozel is someone I admire a lot on this front.

But how does that tie into creative coding?

My argument is that computation is a way of expanding our capacity to think, the same way the written word has. It gives us tools that can extend our minds, our perceptual capacities, and allow us to interact with the world in new ways.

I want youth to learn to see computation as a part of how they can be in the world, not because programming is a way of getting The Big Money or even because it's something that needs to be enjoyed for its own merits, but like writing as a useful tool to engage with the world and explore their own thoughts and beliefs.

That's my goal, at least.

But how do I accomplish it? I'm writing a set of free materials that will be available online for self-study or for teachers to use to guide classes. That's helpful for conveying the technical aspects but how do I accomplish those deeper goals?

So often this line of work becomes babysitting or just giving kids a shallow taste of technology. This is what a lot of non-profits are okay with and it's really demoralizing. It feels like I'm constantly surrounded by an environment of lowered expectations gussied up in high-falutin' language. Again, how do I do better than that?

My feeling is that I have to provide more opportunities to make *ambitious* art with this technology, to show the possibility of being strange and unique.

But even here I feel like I have a big obstacle: I don't let *myself* make weird, beautifully broken, fucked up art. I tamp down my own personal ambitions and don't let myself tell my own stories and strangeness.

Is it possible that by letting myself be more dangerous and weird I could help pave a better path for others as well? Or is that just easy thinking in a situation where I frequently feel powerless.

Anyway, if you've come to the end of this post thanks for hanging with me in my rambling and know that you can always email me

At my left_adjoint@rawtext.club address