The aim of this module is to provide students with the opportunity to broaden their cultural horizons and raise their international awareness and sensitivity to UK culture; enhance academic skills from innovative note-taking techniques to refined presentation skills and academic writing; and develop an understanding to recognise key employability skills (based on York Strengths Employability Skills Programme – https://www.york.ac.uk/students/work-volunteering-careers/skills/york-strengths/) and presenting them to future employers. It will include local excursions.

This module introduces students to the fundamentals of computer programming by teaching the key concepts and principles required to implement interactive systems. The module assumes no prior experience in computer programming by starting from the absolute basics of computer programming (e.g. how to declare variables) but by the end of the module students are working on more advanced programs that implement these concepts within more complex interactive programs. Students learn how to design programs that are well structured and get lots of experience in debugging and problem solving. Students also work on creating programs that use hardware peripherals including the Leap Motion, Game Pad controller and webcam to control interesting visual and auditory outputs. Lectures are used to introduce the key concepts and in practicals students work individually on exercises to get experience of implementing the different techniques and solving problems. Students who do have prior programming experience should not expect to be bored though, as stretch exercises and challenges can be provided in practical’s to retain your interest.

This module will provide you with a fundamental understanding of the media assets that comprise interactive media experiences and how they’re made. In lectures you’ll learn how digital images, videos, sounds and 3D models work from a scientific and technical perspective. You’ll also learn professional techniques and workflows for creating your own media assets. In practicals you’ll put this knowledge into practice, while creating your first media assets in industry standard software.

This module will introduce students to the centrality of story and story-telling to cinema and television. It will identify and explore certain dominant forms and traditions of cinematic and televisual story telling. It will examine how films and television programmes tell a story by introduce and examine key principles such as narrative premise, structure and development; the dynamics and interrelation of plot, character and dialogue; the relationship between audio visual text and audience; the function of key aesthetic properties including visual style, performance and sound design in relation to storytelling; and the key principles of literary adaptation. The module will also consider certain institutional factors that inform and constrain storytelling for specific audio-visual media.

When planning the design of the next generation of music technology devices and systems, it’s really helpful to know how they have developed so far, picking up technical principles along the way. Therefore this module introduces students to the history and development of music technology systems, and gives students practical experience in building software synthesisers, along with understanding the basics of sound, musical computing, and synthesis techniques.

The aim of this module is to explore the material nature of artworks and architecture. We commonly see art and buildings reproduced in photographs, but most artworks are three-dimensional physical objects constructed out of specific materials. Through a series of lectures and workshops, you will learn how to describe, analyse and interpret the visual and material qualities of a wide range of media, from stained glass, sculpture and buildings to oil painting, works on paper, photography and performance. We will examine the impact made by the choice of particular materials and techniques on the appearance and meaning of the work of art or architecture. We explore the history of looking and the reception of these material objects across a wide range of types and historical periods. The module also addresses ideas of materiality and how they inform our understanding and interpretation of works of art and architecture.

This module helps all students to engage with new ‘approaches’ to literary studies as they encounter a range of texts and topics. It specifically addresses the relationship between modernity, ‘the modern’, and literary culture, working out from the early eighteenth century and across the nineteenth century before arriving at the twentieth.

This module helps all students encounter classical literary texts and to read this in relation to a range of significant inter-texts. It explores how classical drama poses ethical questions still confronted with urgency today, such as the limits of the law and the role of the individual resisting injustice.