Woops! Weird things happen sometimes when you try to draw with code. Which is more than half the fun! I was sad to learn that this print was no longer for sale after hunting for it in several art supply stores. Then I thought it would be fun to muck around in Processing a bit.…

My sister Emma has a Monster High themed Youtube channel where she does unboxing and tutorial videos. It’s a pretty awesome continuation of the sorts of storytelling games we used to play together as kids. She has always brought life to characters in this incredible way. Nowadays she is both working on her own characters and story worlds as a…

Here’s a wee reference book for Processing, with half blank pages to write in your own things-to-remember. The cover is a procedurally generated composition book (written in Processing, of course!) Link to download here. To make one, print double sided on one letter sized sheet of paper, cut out doubled pages along lines, stack and fold all in…

I suppose this isn’t a hack since this IKEA piece is already made of unfinished wood ready to be decorated, but it does use only IKEA parts! I had to give away my dresser after our recent move since it wouldn’t fit in our new space. I replaced it with a tall, narrow chest of drawers from IKEA…

Or: Choose joy over convenience. I’m in the midst of unpacking and quarter grading so this week’s post shall be brief. A huge life lesson that it took me too long to learn: if where you live is making you miserable, move. Do it as soon as you can. I know it’s a huge privilege to be able to,…

An assortment of things from my first trip to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (with apologies for the photo quality). Mechanical Card Punch machine: I love that they had one you could play with! The mechanism is surprisingly smooth and it required little pressure to make perfect-looking holes. A reference to one of the…

Last night I went to Code for San Francisco‘s weekly Civic Hack Night. I wanted to learn more about some of the projects and share what I learned with my class. My students are currently researching Open Source projects to contribute to as part of a “Collaborative Computing” unit. I had looked at some of C4SF’s projects online and…

I got pretty desperate for chocolate during last year’s no-sugar-November, and even the super-dark dark chocolate bars contained sugar. I was lucky enough to run across this intriguing “brewing chocolate” from Crio Bru at one of those shmancy SF corner grocery stores. You were supposed to brew it like coffee, but lacking much coffee brewing experience or equipment, I made it more…

Here are some handouts I made for a code + digital fab workshop at LWHS using Snap! The class description: Computer Fabrication. Learn how to draw beautiful patterns with a few lines of computer code, then turn your designs into jewelry or decorative decals using a laser cutter and vinyl cutter. A couple things made…

I discovered Desmos while subbing a math class. It’s a nifty, nicely-designed online graphing calculator. The students were working on a project where they had to create designs and animations by combining mathematical equations (such as a bicycle and a stick figure dribbling a basketball). I immediately thought “you could fab these shapes!” By which I mean you could use a…