Towards Improved Literacy in Computer Programming Among Artists

Artists are creative people who excel in creating very complex 3D images, animation and sound presentations but find it difficult and cumbersome to deal with low-level programming details. Visual programming techniques (also known as visual studios) are visual only to the coders with computer science backgrounds; to the artists, visual studios still look like a medical prescription and taste like medicine. Recent releases in visual game programming environments and game engines such as Unity, Unreal, and GameSalad appear to be promising to advance the art of programming to non-programmers. In this paper we share our plans and preliminary experience in those game engines to build a community college level course in programming for artists and other non-CS majors.