Week 1

Workshops

In the workshop this week we began to use GitHub for our work. I have used GitHub before but it was only to look at others work and not as a tool to store my code. We learnt how to commit and save our changes when working with multiple people and by ourselves. This was very insightful as I’d never known it could be used in this way. I think this way of working is a lot better and means I can work on my code whenever I need to.

We also began to use HTML to create websites. We first came up with stories in a group and then made these stories into a website. We learnt how to add text to the website and some basic styling for that text. We learnt what elements were and from that how to add new lines and headings. HTML has always been a coding language I wanted to try so I really enjoyed gaining a basic understanding of how to use it. I think the basics that I learnt this week will help me going forward for the rest of the time I use HTML.

I definitely want to learn more about styling to make my website more cohesive and readable. I also want to try and figure out how to add interactive elements to my website as I think that will help me understand how HTML can really be applied. I think when I have an understanding of everything that’s capable with HTML I will be more confident using it to create websites.

Make it Manifest(o)

This week, three of the sessions were dedicated to the university’s manifest(o). We learnt how to use a new program called “open brush” in VR. Open brush is a tool that allows us to create drawings and scenes in 3D. We worked in groups to create utopias and in doing so learnt the techniques of the tool. I enjoyed using open brush and found it easy to create ideas in a 3-dimensional space. I hope there’s another opportunity to use this tool and similar ones in the future as it combines both my interest in computing and art.

After using open brush for a couple hours it became easy to know what brushes to reach for to create what we needed. As a group we figured out how we could take advantage of the resizing tool that the software offers and by the end of our project we could easily manipulate our way around the program and our creation. I think it would be important to further my knowledge of how some of the brushes work. Whilst I was starting to understand most of the brushes, some were slightly more difficult to use and a better understanding of these would lead to better results. I also failed to explore the tools available in the program which I believe would have elevated the final piece.

I found it very interesting to see how people reacted to the headsets when shown to our work. Their reactions helped show us that the work we produced in the time that we had, made an impact on them. Although I learnt a lot of new techniques this week with the manifesto, they are only useful if I am creating work in open brush. I still had a lot of fun producing this work and hope to use open brush again in the future.

The below image is from the first sketch we created: