what i learned first semester
back in school after a long time away
Hi! I’m Alanna Okun, a writer, crafter, and amateur programmer living in New York City. I recently left a twelve-year career in journalism to pursue a master’s degree in creative technology. I’ve been teaching myself to make games and other interactive work for a few years now; I document that process in this newsletter.
For the entire fourteen-week span of the first semester of my graduate program, I never got over the novelty of being back at school.
“Sorry, I can’t, I have homework,” I’d say to friends, setting off the word with a dash of irony to try and disguise my glee.
I’ve spent the past few months in classrooms, remembering how to be in one and how to pace myself when out. Starting to form patterns and habits, trying to break others, acutely aware each day that, to paraphrase a friend I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, it’s all so beautiful and so short.
The first semester here is mostly introductory courses: coding, electronics, software and hardware usage. I came in with a pretty cursory understanding of most topics (I’d encountered a breadboard before but could not have told you how or why they worked), and now I have a much stronger lay of the land in all directions. I have a sense of how to start honing my knowledge and practice in a few given areas, and of what I’m definitely not interested in pursuing (sorry to VR). I just made a bunch of stuff, tried to pick up a new and useful lesson each time, and then made something else
I know how to do a lot of things now that I couldn’t before classes began. How to wire and program buttons to control lights and motors and speakers; how to make gears and pulleys; how to prototype what can really only be called gizmos. How to build a 3D game world and the objects that go into one. I can talk through every line of a piece of code I wrote and explain why I made each of the choices that I did, even if those choices were silly or inefficient or totally off the cuff. I can solder!
It’s all been so fun, and so humbling and frustrating and exhausting. I’m only just now back on my feet after a wave of sickness hit me when I was too busy, between finals (I had finals) and the holidays, to see it coming. I felt everything so strongly this semester: the headiness of meeting new people, the tug to be on campus as much as possible, the sense that there was never enough time so I had better spend it well. It was a little like being transported back to a version of myself from a decade ago, in ways both welcome and decidedly not.
I’ve spent winter break recovering, reconnecting with my people, and making sense of what I learned last semester before beginning the next one. Here are, from where I stand now, the most important lessons, which I imagine I’ll be relearning, reexamining and reconfiguring throughout next term and beyond.
Descope, then descope again, then probably again for good measure.
In a certain light, everything I made this semester was a failure: a much smaller, simpler version than what I’d initially envisioned, with far less functionality. The poem-art-Gameboy my classmate Yafira and I built for a midterm, for example, originally had about five times the features and number of inputs. (Here’s in-depth documentation on that project.) Without exception, every attempt of every project fell short due to my own limitations of time, resources, technical skills, or focus.
From another angle, though, each piece was a success, because I finished them, and I wouldn’t have if I’d forced myself to stay the course. Much of this had to do with prototyping — accepting that the first version I made of a given thing would almost certainly not be the last, and that I can and should use each iteration as important data for the next attempt. The bulk of the work was in the discovery and fine-tuning of how to do the work, in the ineffable balance between discipline and flexibility.
Do what you can with what you have.
I had a sort of running dare with myself where I tried to make all of my physical prototypes this semester, and the bulk of my final work, with materials I already had on hand or could scavenge from the campus junk shelf. This was, frankly, less about environmental magnanimity than it was about tight-fistedness, the creative push that comes from limiting factors, and how much easier I found it to envision a given project when I had even the roughest sense of scale.
This principle is an exhortation to myself to just start — not to wait for ideal conditions or fret over materials, but to get a draft of something as soon as I can so I can tweak and iterate. Trash has the enormous benefit of already existing, unlike whatever idea might be floating around amorphously in my mind. It provides a clear if clunky bridge to reality.
Everything is just organization.
This idea arose in my Physical Computing class, taught by Tom Igoe (if you’ve ever used an Arduino, you have him to thank). We were talking about methods you can use to exchange information between devices, and why you might choose to use one over another. It comes down, Tom said, to style and use case, to how you choose to organize the system you’re building. This applies, I think, to all programming, all instructions we inscribe for a computer, or fellow human, to follow.
Put another way, it’s all description: how do you break down the pattern, the recipe, the choreography to its most component parts, and indicate how they should work? What do you include, and when, and what do you omit, and why? It’s a series of choices — artistic ones, even — although the process might seem opaque or rote.
I’ve found it useful to consider all these new skills I’m picking up from this vantage point, especially when they’re particularly technically frustrating. I may be terrified of coding directly in the terminal, but I do know how to write a basic sock knitting pattern (for that matter, I know how to arrange a sock drawer) and they’re honestly not all that different.
You don’t have to go it alone.
My final project for the semester, which spanned both my Physical Computing and Fabricating Mechanical Automatons classes, was a solo endeavor. I spent around a hundred hours working on it, from conception to programming to digital and physical fabrication, and I’m extremely proud of the outcome: what I’ve been calling an IRL arcade machine, a semi-autobiographical little interactive world with lights and motion controlled by the user.
Still, I’m ambivalent about having done the project alone. In the last two weeks of the semester, when all of us were spending every waking moment working, I found myself missing having a creative partner, someone to troubleshoot technical problems with and bounce ideas off of, someone with as much of a stake in the thing as I had, someone who would push me and hold me accountable.
Working alone, I was able to get away with what I called in my project documentation “favoring my good leg” — I could sidestep some of the thorny technical aspects that I was less comfortable with, like writing a more complex program to animate the lights, and instead pour all of my time into what I was already fairly good at, like fabrication and decoration. This isn’t inherently bad, but it does run counter to why I am at school in the first place.
Next semester I’ll be focusing more deliberately on group work: the class I’m possibly the most excited and nervous for, called The New Arcade, is all about building a game and a dedicated cabinet for it from scratch, and requires a reportedly enormous amount of work spread across four groups of four students each. I want to figure out how I best function on a team like that, and what I still need to learn when it comes to collaboration.
And even in my lowest solo moments working this semester, I wasn’t actually alone. Again and again, I found myself buoyed by classmates: when my second Arduino blew up in as many minutes, when I couldn’t figure out a code problem, when it turns out I just really, really needed a snack. Being in an environment surrounded by people working on similarly creative and challenging projects reminded me that there’s no reason to turn inward, to preemptively refuse help and insist on solving problems solo.
“It’s dangerous to go alone,” as the poets say. “Take this.”
this was a delightful and inspirational read! please keep up the hard work. and the IRL arcade machine made me gasp, so hope you get an A+