My idea for the homework is to start with something I recognize: a square. I liked what I saw Whitney doing in his Matrix I video, from 1971. At around 1:15, squares start moving across the screen. I thought "ok, I can probably make a square move across the screen." The square moves across the screen in a very specific way, almost according to a path. As it does so, it also changes in scale. It seemed like I could try and figure out how to put those things together, and after watching a bit of the asynchronous video by Zach, that seemed possible with something like sin and cosine. But I was never good at math and the prospect of those things feel very intimidating, and I wasn't even sure if I was correctly interpreting what I thought was happening, so I went to office hours/study room with Murilo and Egardo. I explained that I was not sure if I understood what I was seeing in the videos, and they confirmed that it was. This was very helpful!

Then, Murilo worked with me step by step to help show me how I could put all of those things together: move the square around the screen on a path, while changing the scale or size of the square. This involved a lesson on circles, sin, and cosign, and Egardo provided a fantastic video of the Lissajous curve, which is what Whitney seems to be using in that video. 

In the end, I could not recreate exactly what Whitney had done, so the piece is more of an inspired-by. To be honest there are some parts of the code that I don't fully understand....I know that when I change certain numbers, things like amplitude and speed change, along a path, but I don't always know what path or the mathematics responsible for it. I also know I probably should have been using more loops to draw the squares but didn't have the time to sort that out due to some various new work commitments and worsening carpal tunnel.

11/8/2021