Design By Numbers (DBN) was an influential experiment in teaching programming initiated at the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

during the 1990s. Led by

John Maeda John Maeda (born 1966) is a Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. He is an American technologist and designer whose work explores where business, design, and technology merge to make space for the "humanist technol ...

and his students they created software aimed at allowing designers, artists and other non-programmers to easily start

computer programming Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as anal ...

. The software itself could be run in a browser and published alongside the software was a book and

courseware Educational software is a term used for any computer software which is made for an educational purpose. It encompasses different ranges from language learning software to classroom management software to reference software. The purpose of all t ...

. Design By Numbers is no longer an active project but has gone on to influence many other projects aimed at making

more accessible to non-technical people. Its most public result is

Processing Processing is a free graphical library and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching non-programmers the fundamentals of computer programming ...

, created by Maeda's students

Casey Reas Casey Edwin Barker Reas (born 1972), also known as C. E. B. Reas or Casey Reas, is an American artist whose conceptual, procedural and minimal artworks explore ideas through the contemporary lens of software. Reas is perhaps best known for having ...

and

Ben Fry Benjamin Fry is an American designer who has expertise in data visualization. Early life and education Fry was born in 1975 in Ann Arbor, Michigan (born 1975)."Inside design now: National Design Triennial", by Ellen Lupton, Cooper-Hewitt Museu ...

, who built on the work of DBN and has gone on to international success.

External links

* Educational programming languages {{compsci-stub

See also

Further reading

External links