Week 1

Introduction to the Course

Intro

Before our sync up this week, please read the following 2 links.

• Read my welcome notes
• Get familiar with and sorted with Zoom

Sync Up

This section outlines what we’ll do in our time together this week. You will receive an email from me with a Zoom link, meeting time(s) and other relevant details.

• Introductions
• Review the syllabus
• What-we-know activity
• Explore the course web site
• Discuss week-one plan and expectations
• Explain options for troubleshooting
• Begin Project 1

Activities

This section outlines things you will do outside of our synced up time and before the next class meeting.

Please complete the following by the end of the day (in your timezone) Sunday 9/5:

• Set up Slack and join the course
  • Read this introduction to using Slack
  • Look in your email for a welcome note from me, including an invite to the class Slack, and join up
  • Introduce yourself in the #general channel; tell our group a bit about yourself, including:
    • your pronouns
    • if you’re new to MICA
    • which class you’re taking (the Slack is shared by GD431 and Media Language Workshop students)
    • something you like to do
    • something you like to eat
• Complete the intro survey
• Let me know which times work for you for our future sync-up meetings
• Read the two links under Intro above, if you have not already done so

Because the readings provide important context for the activities, I recommend doing the following in order. Please complete the following before our next sync up:

• Learn a little bit about a lot of things:
  • web browsers (and download one of the recommended browsers)
  • the tools we’ll be using throughout the course and create accounts there:
    • Glitch
    • GitHub
    • Text editors & VS Code
• If git and GitHub are new to you or you want a decent refresher, read this introduction to git ✳️
• Get your new Glitch and GitHub accounts talking to each other; learn how

Assignment

• Make four reinterpretations of a classical painting using 8, 16, 32, and 64 shapes respectively.
  • Due date: 9/10 by 6 a.m. EDT (see in your timezone)
  • Format: 4 PDF documents and one JPG of the original
  • File name: Please use your first initial and last name and the number of shapes to name each file. For example:
    • cswinehart.jpg (this is the original painting image)
    • cswinehart-8.pdf
    • cswinehart-16.pdf
    • cswinehart-32.pdf
    • cswinehart-64.pdf
  • How to submit: Add your files to the paintings folder inside our
    shared GD355 Activities folder in Google Drive
• Please make sure that the painting layer is not visible in your PDFs—each should only contain the shapes you have drawn.

Message me on Slack if you don’t have the necessary access to the shared Google Drive