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I am very pleased to announce that we are developing a course at Purchase College (aka SUNY Purchase) that will be based on Max and will start in the Spring of 2016. The course is called 

 and our intent is for this course to satisfy the math general education requirement of the State University of New York in common with our other introductory programming courses. We got a nice grant to cover licenses and auxiliary software/hardware for classroom machines.

SUNY Purchase is well known for its performing arts programs and so I've been pushing for this for the last couple of years

My concept is that students interested in pursuing a degree in the performing arts world either as artists (musicians, actors, dancers, etc) or on the production side (graphic design, theatre production/lighting, sound engineering etc) but who have to take a math/programming course as part of their general education requirement should, rather than learning a traditional language like Java or Python, instead learn an environment that they can continue to leverage throughout their college years (and hopefully beyond).

We also plan to teach a more advanced course in Max to students taking Comp Sci and one of our goals is to have those students work in teams with the performing arts students to implement more sophisticated special purpose objects for projects at SUNY.

I would absolutely welcome comments and suggestions on what aspects of Max to cover (either to confirm what we think is appropriate or to show us the error of our ways!).

I am very pleased to announce that we are developing a course at Purchase College (aka SUNY Purchase) that will be based on Max and will start in the Spring of 2016. The course is called  Max for the Liberal and Performing Arts and our intent is for this course to satisfy the math general education requirement of the State University of New York in common with our other introductory programming courses. We got a nice grant to cover licenses and auxiliary software/hardware for classroom machines.

My concept is that students interested in pursuing a degree in the performing arts world either as artists (musicians, actors, dancers, etc)  or on the production side (graphic design, theatre production/lighting, sound engineering etc) but who have to take a math/programming course as part of their general education requirement should, rather than learning a traditional language like Java or Python, instead learn an environment that they can continue to leverage throughout their college years (and hopefully beyond).

I would absolutely welcome comments and suggestions on what aspects of Max to cover (either to confirm what we think is appropriate or to show us the error of our ways!).


announcing-new-course-at-suny-purchase

given the generalist, or broad range of practises of the cohort you are drawing from for the course, i'd probably try to make the course as practical and project-oriented as possible, and then work backwards from that-- what does a dancer need to know in order to create simple interactive structures (sensing technologies/data parsing)? what does a musician need to know to create musical structures (timing, audio synthesis, pitch representations etc)? what does a visual artist need to know to create generative visual structures (matrix manipulation)? Maybe get students to work together in small teams (dancer,musician, visual artist) to create a single integrated work... given max is a modular environment this might work well if each student from their own individual distinct background can do a part of the patch which directly addresses their own areas of aesthetic and disciplinary expertise...it would be good if it was longer than a semester, you'd need two really, first as intro to max, second as project based work...

We are planning a more advanced course that will be more project oriented and that one will try to cater to the disparate needs of different performing areas.

For this initial course, though, the goal is to get students comfortable with the underlying concepts in programming where Max basically just plays the role of an "easy-to-use" test bed. So basic concepts of data types, messages, the various mechanisms for tests, routing messages and so forth. Concepts such as abstractions, reuse and so forth will be important ideas so as to avoid the spaghetti style coding that one tends to see sometimes. I'm expecting to leverage the graphics aspects as well and students will learn I/O, responsive programming and so forth.

I'm hoping to use Cipraini/Giri's book (Vol 1) as a reference, most likely avoiding the DSP stuff though.

There will also be a little bit of coaching in the use of Javascript and possibly Java to be exposed to traditional concepts but with application to Max. Those last two will be relevant for students who want to go into graphic arts/web design as well.

Great points, thank you.
We are planning a more advanced course that will be more project oriented and that one will try to cater to the disparate needs of different performing areas. 

For this initial course, though, the goal is to get students comfortable with the underlying concepts in programming where Max basically just plays the role of an "easy-to-use" test bed. So basic concepts of data types, messages, the various mechanisms for tests, routing messages and so forth. Concepts such as abstractions, reuse and so forth will be important ideas so as to avoid the spaghetti style coding that one tends to see sometimes. I'm expecting to leverage the graphics aspects as well and students will learn I/O, responsive programming and so forth.
I'm hoping to use Cipraini/Giri's book (Vol 1) as a reference, most likely avoiding the DSP stuff though.
There will also be a little bit of coaching in the use of Javascript and possibly Java to be exposed to traditional concepts but with application to Max. Those last two will be relevant for students who want to go into graphic arts/web design as well.


Announcing new course at SUNY Purchase