sketchPatch Creative Coding Workshops

This February (2012) sketchPatch partnered up with Generating Genius to deliver our 3Day Creative Coding workshop and Expo to young people at Crossways Sixth Form College. 

We spent three days working with the students to explore the basics of computer programming and developing projects in a creative context.

At the end of the workshop we printed out the final pieces onto A1 posters, and the students presented their work in a poster presentation style Expo to members of their family, school faculty and special guests. 

The students produced  amazing pieces of generative art inspired by their own imagination, and other projects on the sketchPatch website. 

The project involved a competition, with judges from sketchPatch, Generating Genius and Google marking the final projects on creativity and understanding and use of code.  Everyone contributed amazing new artworks, some original, some modified from projects on the site. The competition winners were...

In joint second place:

Yusuf Yusuf  and Lamin Sodiya

 

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In first place: Samiat Kolawole who is now sketchPatch's latest Featured Sketcher. 

Her Final Project can be seen here.  Samiat's inspiration came from a science theme, which lead to an exploration of the solar system. The rotating sun connotes the solar orbits, and also identifies the empty space. 

Over the three days she gained an understanding and knowledge of how to code, "a little mistake can cause your work to collapse, however if you do it to perfection it will always create a unique and outstanding creative idea." 

The sketchPatch Creative Coding workshops were delivered in partnership with Crossways Sixth Form College and...

and were sponsored by 

sketchPatch workshop @ V&A; - 16th - 17th July

We must be doing something right! Our 3rd workshop for the V&A. They must enjoy is as much as we do :) 

This will be a drop-in session, so please come down and say hi, have a tinker and play around with what everyone is up to. It's great when people version each others work throughout the day. Come and start something off and see how it has evolved by the end of the day. And, as always, print out your sketch and make a badge.

By then we should have our next Featured Artist on the site, but mums the word for now! ;)

Hope to see you there!

Busy busy!

Well, we have been busy here at sketchPatch, not even had the time blog about all the stuff we've been up to since last year! slack or wot!

So here is a quick update of our recent activities...

• We exibited in the acclaimed exhibition Unleashed Devices at Watermans Gallery, curated by TINT Art and Irini Papadimitriou from 1st September to 28th October 2010. Very honored to be part of such an exciting exhibition of digital art. We travelled there in style for the opening on the London Dorkbot boat!
• sketchPatch exhibited in London Design Festival, as part of the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Digital Week, 25th September 2010. :) We were very excited about that. It was great fun, and we met some great people with great projects. A couple of people who hadn't heard of us before, like us so much they came along to our workshop the following week at [ space ]
• MzTEK sketchPatch workshop. MzTEK is a great project :) well worth it's weight in gold!
• We had the great pleasure of running a workshop at the V&A - TWICE!  for their Youth Arts Festival. Once on the 20th Nov 2010 and again on 5th March 2011. Theses were really fun sessions designing yet more badges, only bigger! Sophie ran these workshop with the help of our old sketchPatch buddy, Julie Freeman.
• We took part in the Family Day Festival at Digital Shoreditch on May 7th 2011.  We managed to borrow some computers for the day from [ space ] so a very big THANK YOU to them! We chatted to some nice peeps, ate some MzTEK cakes, they are raising money for a project called Chi-TEK (geeks), and then we made a few more badges.

Ah, thats more than i thought. I'll try and keep up from now on, and put in some pretty pictures and that.

Big Chill chillin'

Next sP adventure is to take our badge making skills to Swap Meet tent at the Big Chill Festival in Eastnor Castle Deer Park, Herefordshire, August 5th - 8th 2010.

http://www.bigchill.net/festival/line-up/swap-meet

We will be sharing the tent with our Dorkbot London friends and MzTEK. Fun & games include

sketchPatch badge making,

light up your rists, MzTEK will be

wiring up bangles

with LEDs, they (and me) will be stitichin', it'll be bitchin'! and Julie will be making some

home made flying moths!

plus more...

so

heaps

of creative

techi fun

and games to keep you busy of a

sunny

/rainy afternoon. 

sketchPatch schools workshop with the Barbican

As you may know, if you have come here through the sP website, this June/July we have had great fun working with the the wonderful people at the Barbican to deliver sP workshops to the wonderful pupils of City of London Academy Islington and Oaklands School in Bethnal Green.

We worked together to create some stunning pieces of interactive visual art, that we then turned into beautiful, unique, wearable art... i.e. badges! (beacuse everybody loves badges!:o)

I worked alongside Ric Carvalho and Julie Freeman to deliver about 25 workshops, to over 200 pupils!  It was an intense week, but so worth it!

sP's aim from the start was to provide a fun environment that demystifies code (traditionally kept at the 'back end' of a piece of work), is easily accessible to everyone and allows a platform for collaboration.  So the workshop felt like a an opportunity to test that out, and it worked out really well. We used the 'hint?' link from the 'write a sketch' page to quickly introduce the code, it was only an hour long workshop and half was taken up by badge making, but we had enough time to talk about different functions and changing variables, and to get some stunning results. The progress of the pupils, who were mostly newbies, was surprisingly advanced. You can take a look for yourself by visiting their Featured Sketchers page here and following the links to each groups sketches.

The project has inspired us to seek other educational outreach projects, so keep an eye out for future sP fun!

CoLA Islington Arts Fest on sketchPatch.net from Sophie McDonald on Vimeo.