Programming talks different language to me.

Saturday I attended the workshop about computerized textiles. I was amazed by people’s creativity to use special tread and paint to computerize textiles and paper. Seeing Leah’s and her students’ projects made me feel so WOW to them. For my personal project, it was very interesting to use the special thread (which is a wire but looks and touches like a thread) to make a light on the fabric. I made a Christmas tree with the light on the top. However, my light was dim because I used long thread for sawing the pattern of the tree, and this caused just little power could transmit to my light. So far, I felt satisfied except the dim light.

After that, we started working on Lilypad, which surprised but also frustrated me. I worked with my partner, Julie, and we did have a great time in tinkering with Mac system and Arduino, the program we gave codes to the Lilypad. When we uploaded our codes to our Lilypad, and it did respond to us, we had a great achievement. We did it! However, when we were required to do some creativity in giving commands, we were lost! We did not speak the same language with Arduino. I think some basic rules or knowledge about programming was missing such as “int”, “digitalWrite”, etc. Therefore, I did not have clues what I should write and why I should write in that way. I am illiterate in this programming language. Most of the steps, I just copied what my neighbor wrote on her screen. At the end, the motivation was not as high as before. Even though copying what others wrote brought success, I did not learn much in this programming. I think if there are some basic instructions or formats of those command provided, maybe I can have some basic ideas and play with. With some tinkerability, I learned the function of “{ }” and some possible formula. Hannah, one of Leah’s student, helped our group a lot in explaining why our programming did not work out. Through the whole process with Lilypad, I still did not program well and did not know how to apply it much creatively. But I did have some sense about what was going on and possibly what I could play with. This reminds me the notion, “literacy is a set of social practices.” With different literacy events and social interaction with Hannah and my partner, Julie, I started becoming very little understanding about Arduino. Still need more efforts in it if I would like to be literate in that discouse.