This course is designed for Digital Narrative and Interactive Design (DNID) majors to
take midway through the major, after they’ve taken courses in English and Computer
Science or Information Science, and prior to entering a two-course Capstone sequence.
In concert with the objectives of the major, the DNID course will engage students in
project-based learning in order to synthesize narrative approaches with hands-on work
with digital technologies. It is designed to help students consolidate the interdisciplinary
knowledge they have obtained up to that point, introduce them to examples of interdisciplinary work that will inform their later capstone projects, and give them practice
in working on collaborative projects that span the humanities and information/computing
fields.
Each of the four units of the course culminates in one group project, a collectively
authored video documenting the design process for the project and an individual
reflection. The first two weeks (add-drop period) will introduce themes, goals, and tools
for the course, as well as build the classroom community as a collaborative space. Each
subsequent 3-week unit builds on that foundation and introduces students to a new
configuration of computational / narrative / interactive design, which they will work on in
groups. At the end of each unit, groups will have produced a computational artifact
based on the tools and themes for the unit. Individual students are expected to write 500
word “annotations” that describe one technical choice made in the group project, its
philosophical or historical influences in the field of computing, and the potential human
implications of this choice.* As a group, students will produce a 3-5 min video
documenting the production and characteristics of the artifact. A course blog will be a
public repository of these reflective texts and documentation videos.