Innovation campus - The University of Wollongong’s brand-spanking-new younger sister opened its doors to creative education agency Jetpack Beluga over the weekend, playing host to a one-off creative coding workshop as part of the Yours & Owls Fringe Festival this week.
Taking over the entire three floors of the iAccelerate building, Jetpack Beluga delivered the goods with a diverse range of workshop leaders from across the industry. All working creatively within the coding industry. UOW Wellbeing Centre provided a bang-up lunch for us on the rooftop, and we were treated to Gumnut Patisserie delectable delicacies.
Jetpack Beluga is a creative education agency founded and run by Annabel Blake, a current UOW psychology student, entrepreneur and employee of Google Creative Labs. The aim of the day was to provide attendees an introduction and taste of exploring creativity in coding.
Each speaker ran an individual workshop in the afternoon, that aimed to teach a basic element in creative coding. Eitenne and Mat demonstrated one of Polygon Door’s many projects in the form of their Artbots. A combination of an arduino board, some number buttons, a texta pen and a 3D printed model, the robot is controlled by the human user, allowing you to punch different combinations of numbers into the bot to create different patterns on a sheet of paper.
Eitenne and Mat collect and log the most interesting combinations of patterns for future reference. Their research-led workshops aim to question the relationship between artificial intelligence and creativity.
Tanya Butenko, founder of Node Girls - a not-for profit that runs free coding workshop events for women, focused on teaching basic JavaScript writing for all levels. From people wanting to know how they could improve specifics on their websites to attendee Ane, who at the end of the two hour workshop was proud-as-punch for being able to code a notification box that simply said ‘goose-monkey’ with an ‘okay’ button.
Brennan Hatton of Devika Learning demonstrated how simple it can be to start out in game development.
Jetpack Beluga coordinated and provided attendees with a taste of what it means to be creative in coding. It allowed us to ask questions, discuss and experiment with different forms and mediums. For someone like me who knows jack-all about computers and less about coding, I felt like I tasted a morsel of what is an ever-expanding and incredibly important part of the 21st century.
