Portfolio - Web and Code

You are standing in the court yard at your school. The windows along the long corridor frame a display that looks like an over-sized electronic sign board. Messages such as the time, event announcements and random text messages sent in by students are scrolling across the screens.

In 2009 I created a computer rendering of a large scrolling display in the court yard at the Faculty of Education. The message scrolling across the display is “You Belong Here” - something that our curriculum professor had said to us as a new technical education class. I feel this is an important message that all teachers want to give to their students. Accompanying this was a short paper where I talked about this message and what it means to me as a teacher.

As a student in high school I felt I belonged at my school and that made all the difference. I participated in math contests, sports, athletic council, band and helped with dances. These things were fun and made school a more enriching experience.

I created this graphic using the Python programming language and Nodebox, a free graphics tool similar to Processing. I got the idea from looking at the projects created by the Chaos Computer Club who turned a library in Paris into a massive computer display (and then Toronto’s City Hall as part of Nuit Blanche).

This project was a chance to play around with graphic design and programming. I hope to be able to do similar things in a computer studies class where the students can write code to generate visual output using simple tools. I hope projects like this could make programming come alive for students.