More About the Courses I’m Taking

I haven’t really talked much about the courses I’m taking, so I figured I should do that next. In general, all first-year ITP students take the same set of classes during the first semester. The idea is to get everyone on the same page with regard to a basic skill set that everyone is expected to have, both to make sure that we all speak a common language and to make it easier for the teachers in subsequent courses, so that they can have a certain expectation about the skills students have.

They do allow first-years to waive out of certain courses if they can prove that they already possess the necessary skills, which I did in the case of ICM, the intro to programming course. (Actually, I didn’t need to prove anything; I just said, “I know Processing and PHP inside and out,” and that was all that was needed. Piece of cake.) I probably could have also gotten out of taking Comm Lab, but I’d heard from the second-years that it’s one of the most fun courses at ITP, especially when taken with Marianne. So, I took their advice and signed up for the class anyway, in one of Marianne’s sections.

After the first semester, we’re basically free to take any courses we want within the ITP department, and up to 2 courses in other departments (as long as they are relevant to our course of study). The only limiting factor here is the cap on the number of students allowed in each course; because of this, first-year students can’t always take all the courses they want during the second semester. I guess that’s a hurdle I’ll be having to deal with in a couple of months.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s a detailed breakdown of my current course load:

Communications Lab

As mentioned above, this class has a reputation for being one of the most fun classes at ITP. I think this is because the projects are short and group-based, and overall it’s a fairly low-pressure course. The goal is to gain skills in working with a variety of media and software, especially photography and video. Many of us do already have these skills, so it gives us a chance to practice and/or do fun, simple projects we’ve always wanted to do but never had the time. For example, I’ve always wanted to make some of my own stop-motion animations, but there was never time to do so in undergrad unless it was for a class. Aside from that, I can see why everyone loves Marianne. She’s very bubbly and fun, but also highly skilled and insightful.
Marianne Petit, Mondays 3:30–6pm

Introduction to Physical Computing

This is another of the standard first-year courses. Physical computing basically means designing physical interfaces using microcontrollers, sensors (ranging from photosensors to flex sensors to temperature sensors and anything else you can imagine), and components such as LEDs, servos, and speakers. On paper, this is something I’ve had no experience with; in reality, dating the president of the CMU Robotics Club actually gave me a far greater understanding of this field than even I personally realized. A lot of it comes down to understanding electricity and basic circuit design, so I’m happy that my three years of higher-level physics in high school is finally coming in handy! Also, Tom is a fun, casual teacher, and we have a lot of laughs in this class.
Tom Gerhard, Mondays 6:30–9pm

Introduction to Game Design

This is the course I’m taking instead of ICM. I had to replace it with something, but anything I was interested in within ITP was already full because the second-years got to register before us. Then I saw the description of this course on the NYU Game Center website and figured it was perfect. The class isn’t teaching us how to design computer/video games; in class, we discuss the theory behind and literature on game design, the player experience and how to make games fun, and games as cultural artifacts, and then for our projects, we design physical games (board games, card games… anything but video games). The teacher’s philosophy is that teaching a course on video game design would mean spending far too much time on the technical aspects of making a game (the programming and the modelling, etc.) and not enough on really learning how to construct the mechanics of a game to make it fun and compelling. So, what we’re learning is still highly applicable and relevant to video game design, and it is being taught to us by one of the foremost authorities on game design; Eric actually co-authored the principal textbook on game design, Rules of Play. This class is both fun and tough at the same time. We spend a fair amount of class time playing games (which is pretty awesome), but we have a project due every 2 weeks, and working in groups always brings along with it its own set of challenges. This is the only one of my classes that has been a ton of work so far.
Eric Zimmerman, Tuesdays 9:30am–12:15pm

Applications

I’m not even sure how to describe this course except to say that it’s like Human Experience in Design on crack. For the first half of the class (from 4–5:30pm), we have student presentations on last week’s speaker. I’ll come back to this in a minute. For the second half of the class (from 6–7:30pm), we have guest speakers who come and talk about their work and their experiences related to interactive art and new media. Some of them are very well-known, others are not. Some of the talks have been highly opinionated controversial, and others have been fairly calm and run-of-the-mill presentations. Either way, each week 2 groups have to provide a response of some sort to the previous week’s presentation. These responses are usually interactive performance art pieces, rather than straight-up presentations. (Here & here are photos and video of the very first one, which is still the best out of all of them so far, IMO.) Some have been amazing, many have been incredibly weird, and a couple have been awkwardly bad. The one nice thing about this class is that it’s very little work. All we have to do is the group presentation and write a 5-page paper, and that’s it.
Red Burns, Tuesdays 4–7:30pm

Mandarin: Intensive I

This is a class I’m taking for myself; it’s not for university credit and not counting toward my ITP diploma. Learning Mandarin is something I’ve always wanted to do and expected to have time to do in undergrad, but I didn’t; it came down to a choice between Japanese and Chinese, and I went with the former because I knew I wanted to study abroad and work in Japan. However, as far as the languages themselves are concerned, I personally find Mandarin much more beautiful than Japanese. So, I’m very glad to have the opportunity to finally learn it formally. This course is “intensive” because it covers two semesters’ worth of material in one. The idea is that after Intensive III (or, three semesters), we’ll already have gained a very high degree of competency. So, that’s basically my plan.
Yishen Lan, Saturdays 10am–1pm