Let's build!

Let’s dive right in and build something cool in Grasshopper.

Learning new software can be a difficult and laborious process, especially with a more technical and analytical tool such as Grasshopper. The best way to stay motivated is to devote enough time during your training process to actually working with the tools and learning their capabilities first hand.

This course will alternate between two types of lessons:

1. Lecture-style lessons that describe high-level concepts in Grasshopper and computational design
2. Hands-on exercises that guide you through an actual project in Grasshopper and encourage you to take the work further through challenges

It can be tempting to just read through the lecture-style lessons and skip the exercises to finish the course quicker. But without doing the exercises and working on the challenges you will only get a high-level view of what Grasshopper has to offer. Learning how to solve design problems analytically using all the tools at your disposal is the true challenge of computational design, and it can be gained only through working in the software and learning to solve challenges first hand.

For the first exercise, let’s start with something simple that nevertheless shows some of the key concepts behind Grasshopper. We will create a 5-component definition that generates a series of circles based on one number slider.