[PD] teaching PD to newbies [WAS: Re: [GEM] GEM users request ]

chris clepper cclepper at artic.edu
Fri Apr 25 20:09:58 CEST 2003


>On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, derek holzer wrote:
>>  ... i.e. they want to know about
>>  signal processing, making big noises and pretty pictures. an approach
>>  which goes backwards from said pretty pictures and big noises could
>>  teach them the very powerful message-handling side of PD "retroactively"
>>  so-to-speak. sneak in the data-stuff without them even realizing it,
>>  instead of slamming them up against all these abstract numbers and
>>  symbols first thing.
>
>If something like this would exist, I would definitely use it if I
>have to give presentations.
>
>Most people actually learn pd this way. They start out from something
>that already exists and learn by changing things. The danger of this
>approach is of course to miss some fundamental feature, but a tutorial
>designed top-down, could take care of this and cover everything.

Yeah, this was sort of my thinking with the request for GEM patches, 
pick one that did something very nice and then build a tutorial out 
of it.  I think this would be the 'advanced' section of the tutorial 
with the one I'm working on right now being the 'basic' one.  My 
thinking was that there should be a very simple set of tutorials for 
those who prefer to start with 'how do I turn the thing on?', and 
build from there.

Here's a link to the current online tutorial:
http://taproot.dyndns.org/~cgc/tutorial_gem/index.html


>Learning is much more efficient if it makes fun....

I agree, which is why having a few different approaches to the 
tutorial would be nice.

cgc

>Guenter





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