Joseph Bergin‘s pedagogical patterns for computer science education returned my attention to teaching methods I’ve searching for almost five years. Here is a phrase from a paper submitted to pedagogical pattern language project: Most educators and trainers are not taught how to teach. Rather, they often find themselves teaching by accident. Typically, a person with a skill that is in demand, such as a particular programming language, will be asked to teach it. People assume that if the person is good in this…

We can model a musical composition using native Grasshopper components. After the experiments with the timer component (here and here), I managed to build a definition that allows us to produce outputs in various time intervals. I converted a small part of Bach’s Bouree in E-Minor into Grasshopper as a guitar tablature. I used Guitar Pro 5’s MusicXML export function to convert classical guitar tablature into XML data, then organized that file in Excel to suit my data tree design…

Here is today’s improvement on my metronome with the timer component, which started here. It’s straightforward to tell Grasshopper about seconds and organize it according to it. Using an interval smaller than 1 second, this small script catches every second and returns a different value. However, it’s much harder to implement smaller values than seconds. It seemed easy at first sight but getting accurate results smaller than seconds requires working with milliseconds. You can output the current millisecond’s value, but…

The logical structure of computer-aided architectural design tools is based on object orientation. New design methodologies named Building Information Modeling or Virtual Building aim to improve this structure by synchronizing the digital object classes with real architectural products. Therefore, CAD becomes smart and parametric. But from the design educator’s point of view, most commercial CAD tools are not useful and too complicated to implement basic spatial concepts. This is the introduction to the above conceptions using a short-term design exercise….

This was before Spherical Fantasies, while I was trying to update my surface equation definition. In between designerly intentions and mathematical facts, it’s hard to maintain a process, while keeping the definition yet simple and open to exploration. A little tired of mathematical definitions, I started to give names to the animate surfaces I develop. Like the Spherical one, this is also a trigonometric equation of z = cos(x) + sin(x-y2) / 2. The most boring part of these is…

This is about conforming distortions on surfaces and creating imperfect (say ugly) surfaces. I started with planar surfaces, however, I continued with spherical ones. There are interesting results when applying trigonometric functions to spherical surfaces. Example surface equations: Please be patient if animations are loading slowly. But they represent a way of creating free-form-looking surfaces, highly mathematical behind the scene. As you see, I used the UVW coordinate system of the sphere, subdivided into 20 pieces. W represents the amount…

This is probably the most simple definition on this site but I think it’s very useful. The timer is a special component of Grasshopper that is significant in terms of the real-time sketching paradigm. This basic use of a timer includes a 1-second update to a Vb script. Inside the script, the system date’s seconds are returned, so we see a real-time increasing number at output A. Beyond this point, It’s up to your imagination, how you can use that…

The Truncated Icosahedron (5,6,6) is an Archimedean Solid we often recognize as the iconic soccer ball. This geometric structure, also affectionately known as the “Buckyball” in honor of the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, has gained significant popularity and recognition both within the realms of mathematics and everyday life. It is composed of twelve regular pentagons and twenty regular hexagons. This symmetrical nature makes it an interesting object of study in geometry and various fields. This is a short Rhinoceros tutorial…

Here is an interesting six-year-old quote from Rivka Oxman, telling us about a potential class of designers. The particular character, type, class or whatever we call could be more sophisticated people than we imagine today. It tells me that, advances in design computing does make high-end techniques available for large communities, and re-define basics of architectural geometry for everyone in digital age, but always there seem to remain a small group of avant-garde. If Ms. Oxman is right, then the…

Truncated hexagonal tessellation (or named 3-12-12) is represented in hyperbolic space (as far as I understood it). The idea is simple if you don’t mix it with complex equations. Below is the 2-dimensional representation of hyperbolic projection. Paper space is defined by the thick line there. Projection is based on a two-sheet hyperboloid surface. Euclidean version of this tessellation is described here.