University of London, Queen Mary

This course invites students to ways of reading London. Students read London literary texts from the early modern period to the present day and encounter the city through walking, travelling along its transport connections, listening to guides, looking around them and engaging self-reflexively with the meanings and imperatives found in the city. The course includes walking lectures, seminars, and workshops and develops skills of close reading, observation, critical thinking, and effective communication.

Interactive objects are physical devices controlled by microcontrollers using simple sensors and actuators. The course provides students with skills, knowledge, and experience of designing and prototyping interactive physical objects using contemporary microcontrollers. The course covers basic electronics, control circuits, sensors (analogue and digital), output (analogue and digital), microcontrollers, simple networking, and microcontroller programming using the popular Arduino open-source platform. It additionally touches on topics of interaction design and evaluation to provide a framework in which students can prototype and understand interactive objects.

Through practice-based workshops and seminars, the course explores the methodologies of writing fiction from a writer's perspective, and focuses on form, structure, and narrative technique. The course is delivered through weekly creative writing exercises and immersion in a process of peer critique, as well as the critical analysis of sample texts.