This tutorial for basic creative coding building blocks in three.js was written as a technical writing project for the UW Professional Technical Writing certificate program.
The goal for the project is to provide the audience with the experience of assembling an example of a graphical creative coding project that they can use as the basis for their own experimentation. With this, there is the explicit non-goal of teaching the audience how to program JavaScript. The conceptual areas of computer science and mathematics are not explicitly addressed as a core part of the tutorial.
I chose this topic because it fits a gap that I have noticed in tutorials online. Most tutorials focus on resumé-centric skills. Others, such as game-building tutorials, tend to be lengthy and have a disappointing mismatch between their implied and actual outcomes.
My target audience is people who are technically inclined and have some programming knowledge but who are likely not professional software engineers. They also have access to a web browser and a relatively recent (last 5 years) computer. The best overall fit from existing demographic models are the makerspace communities, and these will be used to model the audience for this project. Demographic data from the JavaScript community will be used as a secondary model.
- JavaScript
- three.js
- Markdown (MDX)
- Docusaurus
- git
- Visual Studio Code
The contents of this tutorial are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The source code used for the tutorial demos is licensed under the MIT License.
