Teaching Turing with David A. Mellis
Walter and Britta's brief was deceptively simple: make a GUI to the Turing machine. A Turing machine? Yes, I too didn't really know what that was either, but Dave Mellis took me under his wing and together we created a game-like interface for the Turing machine, which introduces the concepts of a Turing machine through a series of challenges.
Working with Mellis was a great experience. I had never worked with an actual programmer before, and let me tell you, as a designer who had to learn a little bit of programming to survive and hated it, it's awesome. First, you come up with grand visions of GUI, tons of little on-screen interactions, animations galore. Then you peek out of your fantasy world and run them by the programmer who will give you one of two main responses. Either he groans a little, scratching his chin slightly while looking into deep into space, lost in thought and tells you,"I'll see what I can do." Or he looks at the design, then looks at you like you're crazy - do you have any idea how long this would take - and says, "No, I don't think we have time." And you go back to your fantasy world and with slightly more realistic expectations.
Mellis is a pretty modest guy. When we were in that first 'getting to know you' phase he would introduce himself as a Dave (no not that Dave) who studied math at MIT. So you know he's smart, right, but what he doesn't tell you is that he's been programming since the age of six. So when Mellis brings up the idea of coding the Turing project in Java rather than Processing (which, if you're not familiar with it, is akin to a nice candy shell wrapped around Java to make designers feel comfortable). I'm thinking, "What?" And he tells me Java will make things easier because it has all these nice libraries for classes available, and this and that other technical thing. Now I am nodding saying, "Hmmm, sounds interesting," but I am thinking, "Yeah! Get freaky with the cheese whiz!"
Meanwhile, Ralph was teaching us designers how to program, and Neil was giving us a crash course in Visual Design and the History of GUI.
Use the Teaching Turing program.
Download the PDF which describes the project.
See the project from Mellis' perspective.