Creative Coding
Maker Arts: Inspired by Nature
Every project in this course starts from an organism, because an organism is a design problem that has already been solved. The brief arrives with a known good answer inside it, and a student's job is to reach that answer in code and materials. A loop stays an abstraction until it has to carry the rhythm of a firefly. Then it becomes a timing decision, and a student can see for themselves when they have it wrong.
So I order the units by what the programming demands, and choose the organisms to fit that climb. Light needs only a loop, so it opens the course. Motion brings in pulse width modulation and variables for speed. Sensing brings conditionals and thresholds. Sound brings input mapping to pitch. Systems needs arrays and several boards coordinating at once, so it closes the course, at the point where the pieces have to talk to each other anyway. Bioluminescence comes first and reef systems come last for that reason.
The course ends with every piece wired into a single installation and the lights turned off. Timing that looked right on its own can read as noise once the rest of the room is running, so students spend the last session tuning against each other.
Unit 1: Patterns of Light
Fireflies, bioluminescent plankton, and the firefly squid. Students write loops and multi-LED sequences, then build a lantern and judge it in a darkened room, where the timing is finally visible.
Unit 2: Movement in Nature
Kelp sway and manta ray propulsion. Students drive servos with pulse width modulation and keep adjusting until the motion stops announcing that a motor is doing it.
Unit 3: Responsive Nature
This is where students meet the conditional, and where I stop being much help. A threshold that behaves at my table fails at theirs, because their light is different and their corner of the room is louder. Cuttlefish camouflage gives them the idea; getting a canvas to answer a person and ignore the room is the part they have to own.
Unit 4: Sounds of Nature
Dolphin echolocation, whale calls, snapping shrimp. Students map live sensor input onto pitch and rhythm, which is the first time most of them have made a number turn into something you can hear.
Unit 5: Natural Systems
Coral reefs, oyster reefs, slime mold networks. Students use arrays to run several outputs at once, then connect their module into the class ecosystem and find out how it behaves alongside everyone else's.
How I grade it
Five dimensions, scored 1 to 4, handed out before anyone starts building. I made interactivity a bonus dimension on purpose: a student who spends the quarter perfecting craft still reaches full marks, and a student who reaches past the brief gets credit for the reach.
- Nature mapping
- The student names a specific strategy and shows how it shaped the piece.
- Code craft
- Working loops, readable structure, and comments explaining the timing choices.
- Design and build
- The diffuser does a job, and the assembly survives being handled.
- Interactivity (bonus)
- A meaningful trigger, or a cluster of boards coordinated together.
- Reflection
- Concise, specific, showing evidence that the student iterated.
Troubleshooting, written from the room
I write these into the unit as the failures turn up, so a student can diagnose their own build while I am across the room with someone else. Every line here started as a hand in the air.
Marine Science Capstone
DEEP.
DEEP, the Designing Engineering Excellence Program, is thirty years old. I revived it and wrote the curriculum it runs on now, and I co-teach the course with the school's science teacher. The version I wrote puts students on a problem that is genuinely open, something nobody in the room has the answer to: microplastic pollution, reef degradation, warming water, habitat loss. They get twelve weeks to build a response and find out whether it holds.
That means the science has to leave the classroom. Students run their own water quality tests. They build multi-stage filters from sustainable materials and measure the turbidity themselves, so the efficiency figure is one they produced. They model biomimicry seawalls. They program Micro:bit AI sensors into a data logger that collects time stamped readings, then export that data and turn it into the graphs they will stand behind. We take them to AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles and to the Sustainable Water Infrastructure Project, where they put their questions to the people doing the work.
Each student finishes with six things: a research report, a project website, a working prototype, a physical exhibit, a presentation, and an advocacy campaign. In week twelve they present all of it at a public exhibition to peers, educators, scientists, and community leaders. I built the exhibition in from the start, because a student who knows a marine scientist will ask about their data goes back and checks the data.
Checkpoints
I fixed a review date to every deliverable. Each one falls close enough that a student can still change direction cheaply, and close enough that I see the work while it is being made.
The Media Arts Program
Three Courses from the Program I Founded.
I founded a media arts program at an independent secondary school and ran it for five years, along with its makerspace and its digital media, recording, and art studios. The three courses below came out of that program. The equipment was there and the students turned out to be ready for it, so I built the courses around both: studio recording, colour grading, original scoring, and the theory to argue about all of it.
Media Arts
Introduction to Media Arts
I start students on the camera itself, because a student who understands aperture, shutter, and depth of field is making decisions, and a student on automatic is taking whatever the camera decides to give them. From there they pick up the composition vocabulary, from the rule of thirds through to dominance and subordination, and produce finished work for screen, print, and the web, moving through 2D and 3D graphics, sound and video editing, and 3D printing.
I pair every technical unit with an argument about the technology itself. Students already sense that a camera is making choices for them, and the unit gives them the vocabulary to say what those choices are. We debate how optical technology shapes what we believe about the world, and how a future historian will read an era recorded by webcams, phones, CCTV, and street level imagery. The assignments run from portraiture and landscape through animation and light painting to a War of the Worlds radio play and an advertising campaign.
New Media
New Media Culture and Communication.
This was the advanced course, and the one I built for students who already had the tools and needed something to aim them at. It examines media and culture under globalization and the way culture travels between places, and students work through historical, political, technological, sociological, textual, and ethnographic methods. They learn to read print, film, photography, and online communication as forms with their own grammar. The course states its aim plainly: to give students what they need to resist, rethink, and remix their own culture.
The production side runs at a professional standard. Students shoot high definition video, edit and grade in Premiere and After Effects, record in the studio and in the field, and compose original music in Pro Tools and Reason. The first unit follows storytelling from the oral tradition through broadcast into the digital era, and students make narrative and documentary films, audio pieces, and original compositions. The second unit breaks the line: hypertext, transmedia, branching and ergodic narrative, and stories built to be navigated. They finish with a portfolio of original work and show it publicly.
I put working practitioners and critics on the reading list, among them Nao Bustamante, Michael Mandiberg, and Geert Lovink, so the theory arrives attached to people who make this work and argue about it in public.
Composition · Co-authored
Fundamentals of Composition
I co-authored the core humanities course, which carries the literacies everything else in the department depends on: oral, written, visual, and digital communication, critical reading, collaboration, and habits of mind that include global engagement, curiosity, and innovation. We opened each of its three units with a question about the student, so the reading arrives attached to something they are already working out for themselves.
The Self and The Home asks where a student is coming from and how a person builds an identity tied to a place. They work on writing craft and Harkness discussion, produce a Right Now in the World project and a self-portrait photo project, and read Orwell's Shooting an Elephant alongside The Box Man and The Santa Ana.
Passion and Failure asks how we define success and failure. Students build visual presentations, practise literary analysis and citation with evidence, and research a Portraits of Failure presentation, reading The Natural, The Confidence Man, and Jhumpa Lahiri's A Temporary Matter.
Creativity and Originality asks how a student finds an individual voice and honours other people's. They record a StoryCorps style interview, produce mash-up music, and debate who owns a piece of music, working from This American Life, Radio Lab, Shepard Fairey, Banksy, and Exit Through the Gift Shop.
Beyond My Own Classroom
Coaching, Committees, and Makerspaces.
Most of my work now happens in other people's rooms. I coach faculty in science, humanities, math, and the arts: we plan a project together, I model it, then I teach alongside them while they run it. The measure of that work is whether the lesson still works the year after I stop showing up, so I write the documentation while we build it.
The same applies further out from the classroom. I have served on a school technology committee, helped write a school's technology plan, led faculty workshops, and run information sessions for parents who want to understand what their children are using and why.
I have also built the rooms. Beyond the studios I ran with the media arts program, I supported the launch of a new innovation and fabrication facility at another school, coordinating equipment purchasing, installation, commissioning, safety, and faculty onboarding. When my own school relocated, I kept the hands-on programme running by setting up an off-site makerspace with outside partners.
I received the Laurence McMillin Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015.
The Documents
Where the Curriculum Lives.
I wrote these courses for the schools that employed me, and the curriculum documents belong to those schools. What is on this page is my own account of designing and teaching them.
The documents themselves sit on my art portfolio, behind a password, alongside the rest of my teaching documentation. I give out access on request, and to anyone reviewing an application.
Curricula on jonathancapone.art