A Gentle Introduction to Creative Coding with P5js.

A fun step-by-step gentle introduction to creating digital art with computers, designed especially for:

* artists new to coding

* art, design and digital media students,

* technologists wanted to explore their creativity

* teachers and parents seeking more visual and exciting approaches to teaching computer science

Starting from the very basics, you'll learn to:

* understand how computers create digital images

* code with a popular computer language designed for artists, called Processing, enabled for the web with p5js

* develop and appreciate algorithms, mathematical recipes, which can create surprisingly beautiful art

* easily share your code and art on the web, potentially reaching an audience of billions of internet users

We'll discover and practice basic techniques, explore simple algorithms that create interesting visual forms, and work through example projects to experience the process of developing algorithmic art from inspiration, through problem solving, to final refinement.

By the end of the course, you will be coding confidently, appreciating the beauty of mathematics and wanting to explore more advanced ideas and methods.

A sample of the topics covered include repetition and loops, randomness, RGB and HSB colour, trigonometry and orbits, functions, chaos theory, fractals, complex numbers, recursion and natural forms, Perlin noise, l-systems, turtle code interpreter, self-modifying code.

Ever since he was a kid, Tariq has loved the beauty and excitement of science, maths and computing. He devoured everything he could get his hands on in the libraries near his home, in England, especially books on fractals and programming the BBC micro ... this was a long time before the world wide web! Despite all the fun and adventures over the 30 years since then, he still thinks too many amazing ideas are badly explained. His personal mission is to do the hard work to make beautiful exciting ideas simple and accessible enough for anyone to understand and appreciate. He has a degree in Physics, a Masters in Machine Learning and Data Mining, is active in London's tech scene, leads the London Python meetup group (almost 3000 members) and loves doing talks/workshops whenever he can. For a day job, he works mostly in technology and digital strategy, but really he's trying to introduce design thinking. He loves open source, and was lucky enough to lead on open source reform for the UK Government. He leads the beginner-friendly London Algorithmic Art community which meets monthly to explore a very broad range of topics from algorithmic music, coding tutorials to computer graphics technologies. He's been lucky to have taught undergraduate students creative coding, where he learned more than they did. More importantly, he has an amazing wife and a cute clever daughter who seems to have inherited the genes for loving art from both parents.