The teacher shares a starter sketch in the p5.js web editor that already fetches current local weather from a free forecast service every fifteen minutes and stores temperature, wind speed and cloud cover in variables. After looking at generative work by Vera Molnár and Refik Anadol, each student decides how each reading should drive their piece, for example wind speed setting the speed and angle of the marks and temperature shifting the palette from blues to reds. Over four lessons they code the piece, test it by typing in extreme values for a storm or a heatwave, and refine the mapping until the changes are clearly visible. The finished sketches run in rotation on a screen in the art corridor for a week, redrawing as each new reading arrives; students screenshot their piece at different times and write a 150-word artist's statement on how the weather shaped what viewers saw.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.