Creating with Code: Critical Thinking and Digital Foundations

While students are often attracted to opportunities to learn how to use software applications commonly employed by digital artists and designers, the fact remains that time spent on purely software-based instruction in the classroom is time that could arguably be better spent on exploring the broader conceptual issues of making digital work. This presentation begins to frame an argument for the comprehensive integration of code-based technologies, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Processing/Java, openFrameworks/C++, and Objective-C, into digital art and design foundation curricula. This integration holds the potential to position code-based technologies as new media for teaching art and design alongside relevant critical and analytical thinking skills, and not solely as media through which art and design work can be executed. In addition, a focus on promoting engagement with the tools used to create software, rather than simply on the use of software applications themselves, serves to empower students as they develop critical awareness of their individual processes