The Winter semester is running for already a month now, but only last week I got the "ok" from Archinect to start this blog.

As you can see from my profile, I am not a student anymore. I graduated last July, but this semester I am still around the school as I became an instructor to an elective, "Generative Scripting".

I am teaching (or trying to...) Python/MEL scripting in Maya, once a week, for around 30 master students from the first, second and third semester. I first learned about scripting in Maya in the same course, which at the time was being taught by Tobias Schwimm. My former professor Neil Leach was the biggest advocate of scripting in Architecture, and made everybody very interested on the possibilities that this tool provided the design process. As I had already some background in programming, I learned it very fast and already last semester gave a small workshop about it at the university. And now it turned into an elective.

I never though in my life I would become a teacher. But it is being completely satisfying to be able to transmit my knowledge on the subject to such interested students. It is, however, an enormous challenge. The subject is very complicated, and up to now the students are a bit confused by everything. I am trying my best to adapt to their requests, and I am a novice in this teaching thing, and I want to do my best.

Given the little time we have every week, and the amount of content I have to give the students, I am trying to create a mix of using existing complex scripts which can produce very complex results, with self-written code by the students in order to manipulate this result for their own needs.

I'll post more details soon about the course contents and about the experiences I am having with the students.

The course has also a Google Code page where the scripts given in class, as well as some tutorials, are uploaded.