a 16 session LIVE COURSE

Mastering vvvv for teaching

Starting on January 31, 2022. Running 8 weeks.

An 8 week (16 sessions) live online course that starts from scratch and prepares you for teaching vvvv in educational settings. A cooperation between vvvv and The NODE Institute.

Course description

If you haven’t heard of vvvv before, please read the Introduction for Creative Coders section in the documentation. 

Since vvvv has a wide range of applications, there are many different learning paths and hence there is no one way of teaching it. Depending on the goal of a course and the background of your students and yourself, there will be different topics to cover and ways to teach.

So rather than teaching a specific method, this course is meant to give you a solid understanding of vvvv to make you confident in teaching it in your own way. Therefore in this course you’ll not only learn how to use vvvv but we’ll also give you some background info on why things are designed the way they are. By explicitly targeting educators, this course will focus more on giving a broader understanding of concepts and getting an overview of possibilities rather than simply solving specific problems. 

You’ll be taught by the developers of vvvv and experts from the community. Sessions will be a mix of introductory lectures, hands-on tutorials and enough time for your questions and in-depth discussions.

Who is this course for?

This course is specifically targeted at people who are teaching creative coding, interactive media or related courses and are ideally affiliated with an educational institution. 

With programming tools and languages it is important to learn to choose the right one for the task at hand. The educators this course is aiming at are curious to learn a new tool and with it a new perspective on programming to then share with their students. 

What is vvvv?

vvvv is a visual live-programming environment with a focus on creative coding. It is used in production as well as prototyping and specifically lends itself to education due to the following:

⇒ It is free for educational use without any restrictions

⇒ It is quick and easy to install, with no copy protection or need for registration

⇒ It comes with extensive documentation, accessible right from an integrated Help Browser

⇒ It connects to most popular protocols and devices

⇒It allows to teach programming concepts like object oriented programming and dataflow in a visual way

⇒ While being a visual language, it can easily be extended via C# and the use of .NET Nugets

⇒ All of its libraries are open-source, thus can be inspected and learned from.

Its only caveat: As of now, vvvv still only runs on Windows. While we’re already working towards supporting other platforms we cannot give a specific date yet when this will be possible. Please keep an eye on our roadmap for staying up to date.


Prerequisites

⇒ Experience in teaching any creative coding environment, like cables, Isadora, Max, PD, PraxisLIVE, TouchDesigner, Vuo, vvvv beta, or text based creative coding, like Cinder, OpenFrameworks, Nannou, Processing, p5.js, OpenRNDR, Arduino or similar

⇒ A PC running Windows 10 or 11 to join the call via Zoom and run vvvv.

⇒ A two-monitor setup is highly recommended to be able to watch the stream on one screen and work in parallel on the other screen.

⇒ A 3-button mouse is recommended for operating vvvv

 

What does it cost?

The course fee is 600€ + VAT where applicable. You’ll receive an individual invoice from the NODE Institute for payment.

Ideally this is paid by your educational institution as a training measure. In case you need to pay this on your own, see if your country offers financial support for further education. German citizens, e.g. may be able to use a Prämiengutschein für Weiterbildung

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

Course outline and schedule

This online course will run for 8 weeks starting January 31, 2022. We’ll have one session á 3h every Monday and Thursday, 6pm CET, adding up to 16 sessions in total.

All participants will be invited to a chat room dedicated to the course where they’ll be able to discuss sessions and get their questions answered even during the week.

With two sessions á 3h a week the course is already quite a commitment. But beware that you’ll benefit most if you also plan in time for some personal tinkering between the sessions. Sessions will be recorded for playback in case you miss one but it is recommended not to rely on this for your whole participation. 

Week 1: Playing with vvvv – part 1

January 31 and February 3

Getting to know vvvv by creating playful examples. Focusing on how little we need to know about the details of vvvv and its language VL to already get things done.

# 2d rendering
# Audio/Video input, playback and effects
# Generative design examples

Week 2: Playing with vvvv – part 2

February 7 and 10

Continuing the focus on play and simply using vvvv as a tool to achieve certain goals.

# 3d rendering with the high level PBR workflow#
# Machine Learning

Week 3: Programming with vvvv

February 14 and 17

Diving into what makes vvvv special, i.e. that it is not only a tool but also allows you to apply modern programming language concepts to create more complex and stable programs.

# Loops, conditions and other regions
# Working with different types of collections (arrays, lists, dictionaries,…)
# Understanding the power of creating custom datatypes
# Escaping the dataflow where needed using object oriented programming
# Async and Reactive Programming

Week 4: Networking and Devices 

February 21 and 24

# Networking Protocols
# Communicating with web API
# Physical Computing

Week 5: Advanced 3d topics

February 28 and March 3

# Particle Systems
# Procedural Noise
# Signed Distance Field rendering

Week 6: Building applications – part 1

March 7 and 10

# Building User interfaces
# Remote controlling parameters via the web
# Organizing larger projects involving multiple PCs
# Mapping and multi screen projections

Week 7: Building applications – part 2

March 14 and 17

# Programming logic
# State machines, Timelines and Scenes
# Structuring programs, separating model and view
# Add load, save and undo functionality to your application
# Discussing version control

Week 8: Topics on demand and Recap

March 21 and 24

We leave one session undefined as of now to be able to react to topics that came up during the course. Recap and discussion about building vvvv curriculums.

You will learn from:

Application and payment

Application deadline: January 16th, 2022
Information of acceptance: January 19th, 2022
Payment latest expected by February 18th, 2022

We’ll get back to you by January 19th to let you know if you’re accepted. The maximum number of participants will be around 15.

We acknowledge that the time between acceptance and start of the course is very short and leaves little time for the payment to arrive before the course starts. Therefore we will expect payments to arrive latest on February 18th.

If you’re accepted we will send you an invoice for the specified recipient. Please help us to speed up the process by sending us missing invoice details as soon as possible.

Please feel free to get in touch with any question you might have regarding the course!