Rongshan Liu
I’ve never thought that looking at a small circle floating in front of my eyes can be this weirdly fulfilling. Despite this, learning a whole new system of drawing or making things move as you want can still drive you crazy.
Before, I assumed learning coding is like learning a new language, like learning French or English, couldn’t be too hard. But now I found it’s not entirely the same since the logic between coding and language is very different, so you have to somehow switch your mindset.
When I did tasks on the worksheet, I stuck at the 5th question. I was required to “move a circle towards the mouse”. My mind went blank when I read the question since I had no clue where to start. After five minutes of staring at the computer, I decided to start at how x changes when the circle moves towards the mouse. I drew with my finger on the table, and suddenly I realized it might be about the distance between the circle and the mouse. So I tried with x-mouseX and mouseX-x, and it moves as I want when I subtract x from mouseX. I was so thrilled that I solved this problem and made a circle move towards my mouse! But just when I tried to move the rectangle at the next question, I met another problem.
At first I thought it was easy, just making the four points move like the circle in the last task. However, when I did so, they didn’t move together since the distance between the mouse and their position is different. I took a long time to figure it out. In this process, I discovered a way to solve complicated problems, that is, to make it simple. When I found my rectangle was distorted by my code, I was completely clueless, a mess. To make things clear, I opened a new sketch and tried to have one line follow my mouse, and I failed. So I tried to figure this out and found it was easier to come up with a solution with this one-line problem. So I finally realized where the problem was and how to solve it.
Making my portrait is so much more fun! I like to see my cat turn to different shapes and colors. I felt like I was playing with her.
White pig cat
Blue pig cat
Fat cat
The first thing I wanted to do with my cat was to make her eyes look at my mouse all the time. I tried with mouseX/3. Of course it didn’t work. So I searched online, and found that the “map” function could help me with this problem. Although coding is very new to me, but I could find almost all the answers I want on the internet.