going forward building out our documentation we want to follow this excellent guide What nobody tells you about documentation to structure all of it into four sections:
• tutorials
• how to’s
• reference
• explanations/discussions
first we’ll be creating a few video tutorials and this is where we’re asking for your help: please help us define what would be a good series of tutorials.
to understand what we mean by “tutorial” please make sure you read the article referenced above, or watch it as a recorded talk. you’ll notice the distinction to a “how to” doesn’t feel too clear in the beginning. it takes a while to sink in and see the value of how and why they differ.
then the challenge to you is to come up with titles for tutorials! i’d hope good titles speak for themselves and therefore don’t need any additional explanation of what you mean by them. so ideally titles should be enough.
to collect your ideas, i created 3 new topics where i’d like you to add your suggestions/requests for beginner, intermediate and advanced tutorials. add only one suggestion per reply, then everyone can use their likes to show appreciation for topics and we can prioritize accordingly.
and please use this thread for talking more generally about tutorials: hopes, expectations, wishes
thanks for your inputs so far! @baxtan you suggest “Kinematics” and “Transforms” where i am wondering if these are good catchy titles for people to go for… for my understanding tutorial titles should mostly not be just one word, but more describing an activity, like @bjoern suggests “Building a video player”. that to me sounds very specific and clear. @texttext same goes for “Loops” @readme your suggestion sounds quite big. to my understanding what the referred to article says about “tutorials” is that they should be very specific, with a clear goal in mind. also, have you watched these yet?
maybe good titles are answers to this question: what is the goal of the tutorial? e.g. we’re building a video player. see? “transformations” or “loops” don’t answer this question.
Wow, great!
I lack really basic skills in vvvv gamma that I would not even think of as obstacles in vvvv beta, so I really like the idea of a series of step-by-step tutorial videos! I am looking forward to building confidence in basic tasks and getting comfortable with vvvv gamma (which at this point is not the case at all :-) )
I also like the “four-dimensional” approach towards documentation and personally like the idea of having different tutorials that can be seen as “starting points” (with some redundance and repetition, which I don’t mind at all) instead of having a strict sequence of videos with the risk of getting lost if you get stuck in one video.
Hey @joreg
By “Transformations” i meant a similar set of practices which @motzi held as a workahop -same title, at node17.
And “kinematics” would be handling complex transformations. I’m afraid I don’t know the right vocabulary to wrap it in a title.
Please correct me.
Keywords could be:
Coordinates, rigging, Forward Kinematics, Inverse Kinematics, etc.
I presume these topics have immediate results, as well as being playfull.
With respect to @bjoern’s suggestion perhaps an series of Advanced tutorials: Exploring Programming Patterns which may build a player or other useful apps. The patterns would build upon the work of @sebescudie and @tonfilmhere.
Intermediate: Using Farseer physics (Importing Nuget/C#) for a top down fussball game (UI, logic), setting up a scoring system (accumulation). Posting high scores online (http and networking)
Hi, interesting topic. I’d like to share inspiration I got from a course on udemy. The fact that it’s teaching Adobe After Effects is not of much importance. Link
This course blew me away in the sense that it was an online course that I found more helpful than the majority of university courses I had teaching a software. The approach this guy takes is rather simple but smart:
He starts going step by step doing something fun you can do with the program without knowing too much about the background or what you are actually doing. For example doing a simple animation that looks fairly professional by being pointed out certain things one has to click on.
After he goes into what he calls “the boring stuff”, which is a breakdown what we were just doing and more thorough explanation. Needless to say one doesn’t find this boring anymore. Because one has seen the potential of what is possible with the program through the previous excercise one gets automatically interested in understanding the concepts behind.
After he goes into ways that could make the same animation even more interesting, through which one gets to know more and more new tools.
I’ve seen similar approaches in tutorials, but often it would start directly by explaining core concepts of the software. I remember being similarly confused when I tried to understand what “spreads” are doing a vvvv tutorial in 2007 (I had no programming knowledge at all back then).
I imagine a similar tutorial series for Gamma. Hope I could help with my thoughts :)
One more thing to add that also comes back in the previous posts: as a user I always find it great to get exercises. It’s easy to see someone program, but learning to program you do through programming yourself! An explanation of how one can do for example a simple animation. And what follows after is an exercise to make a different animation using the techniques shown in the example before.
Mutable data and execution order. What can go wrong (the explanation in the new tooltip may be a little bit cryptic for a new user.) A minimal but practical example of its side effect could be illuminating.
yep, this is exactly the point that is made in the document i referenced above. and exactly the kind of tutorials i’m hoping to collect specific titles for here.
@guest please use a name in this topic, so i can reference you properly. and please don’t put your specific ideas here, but in the respective other topics (see above)
at all: again i’m looking for suggestions of very specific titles, not vague ideas!
