We live in an interesting time in terms of the evolution of art, design, and technology. With a camera on every smartphone and the enormous popularity of photo editing and sharing apps like Instagram, visual tastes are growing exponentially more sophisticated. What will this mean for future designs for software and hardware? Science, Technology, Engineering and Math offer the tools to help build the way the world will work in the future – and Art, while different in some ways than a STEM education, is no less important.

For kids who are familiar with popular apps and websites, but not with programming, learning to code can be intimidating since it can feel like there is such a disconnect between a bottom-up “Hello World” approach to programming and mastering the programming languages that come together to create the beautiful and complex apps and sites they use. Kids might have big ideas about what they want their website or app to look like, and do, but how do they get there?

In our classes we provide a birds-eye view of different programming languages and a “peek under the hood” of well-known apps and sites to provide greater context to the code that students will be learning to write. Students will also learn about graphics production and how to integrate graphics into their code. We hope that by providing a 360º view of the process of creating modern digital media, whether an app, a website, or a game, students will begin to become conversant in these technologies and feel more empowered to explore their creativity.