Circle
This post is part of a course on geometric modeling at the Summer Liberal Arts Institute for Computer Science held at Carleton College in 2021. Here’s your next exercise. Add a shape generator function for this shape and render it: How would you do it? Perhaps this seems impossible. Earlier I said that all shapes […]
Refactor
This post is part of a course on geometric modeling at the Summer Liberal Arts Institute for Computer Science held at Carleton College in 2021. Reorganizing your code to make it easier to understand and easier to update is called refactoring. Let’s refactor your code by organizing it into two separate files: one to hold […]
Cube
This post is part of a course on geometric modeling at the Summer Liberal Arts Institute for Computer Science held at Carleton College in 2021. In this exercise, you will break into the third dimension and model a cube. We start on paper, progress to a disappointing rendering, and iterate toward a satisfactory rendering with […]
Triangulation
This post is part of a course on geometric modeling at the Summer Liberal Arts Institute for Computer Science held at Carleton College in 2021. You’ve made a triangle. The logical next step is to make more complex shapes. You may not believe me, but more complex shapes are just made out of triangles. Any […]
First Shape
This post is part of a course on geometric modeling at the Summer Liberal Arts Institute for Computer Science held at Carleton College in 2021. Throughout this course, we will be making 3D shapes with code and displaying them. Probably we should start with a simple shape. What’s the simplest shape you can think of? […]
Fabrication Summer Camp: Day 1
Welcome to summer camp! My name is Chris. Scattered throughout the room are some of my friends that you will meet soon. For the next week, all of us will be making things with technology. The tools we’ll be using to make things include computers, a vinyl cutter, a laser cutter, and a pen plotter. […]
Setup
This post is part of a course on geometric modeling at the Summer Liberal Arts Institute for Computer Science held at Carleton College in 2021. In a normal year, you attend SLAI on campus at Carleton, and we provide you with food and computers. Since we’re online this summer, it’s BYO. Nonetheless, by the end […]
SLAI 2021: Geometric Modeling
Welcome to Geometric Modeling, one of the courses at the Summer Liberal Arts Institute for Computer Science held in 2021 at Carleton College. This page contains all the course notes and exercises that you will need throughout the week. Session 1: 2D Setup First Shape Triangulation Refactor Wrapped Addition Circle Dots Session 2: 3D and […]
CS 430: Lecture 11 – History
Dear students, We’ve spent the semester lifting up the hood on programming languages to see their technical details. Today we do something different: we look at the languages through a more historical lens. Mechanical Computers The earliest computers used machinery like gears and springs to perform mathematical calculations. The most famous of these was the […]
CS 488: Lecture 25 – THREE.js
Dear students: Managers and experts like to tell their juniors not to reinvent the wheel. That’s because they are more interested in getting a product to market than in your learning. In an educational setting, our goals are very different. In a classroom, the product is you. If an activity helps you learn, then we […]