Saturday, October 23, 1999

Benjamin Fry of the Aesthetics and Computation Group and Bakhtiar Mikhak of the Epistemology and Learning Group recently held a Design By Numbers workshop for MindFest, a "Gathering of Playful Inventors" at the Media Lab.

Workshop participants learned how to create short programs and animations that responded to user input. Input was taken from the mouse or from heat and light sensors connected to crickets, tiny programmable computers.

Design By Numbers is a simple programming language and development environment for teaching non-programmers about the concepts of computational design. The language is described in a book by John Maeda, and the environment can be accessed on the web or downloaded for free. More information can be found at dbn.media.mit.edu

For more information about the workshop, contact Ben Fry. If you're interested in holding a DBN workshop or finding out more about the DBN courseware, contact John Maeda (maeda@media.mit.edu)

Last updated November 16, 1999