What’s the most challenging aspect of teaching Grasshopper to students, and what would actually help you succeed?
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Trees | most students do not grasp the concept of SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) if there is no programming background. Next problem is wrangling with tree structures.
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I do find the tree structure of the Param Viewer to be a good visual aid to understand what is happening. When I was still learning, I thought it would be nice if each of the nodes could have a visual of the actual data - like a number or a text or a basic viewport capture of geometry rather than addresses. Like an upgraded version of the Param Viewer (which could also be used to pick branches or something.
Students aren’t coming in to college with the kind of procedural thinking needed to understand how it works. And while I’ve had many before the pandemic who got interested in how it works and dove in themselves, it seems that since about then the students are generally a lot less self-motivated to try out something new. I don’t think it’s their fault, I think it’s environment and circumstance.
The thing that has helped the most is this great little program called Flowgorithm, which doesn’t allow you to write invalid programs. I run through some Flowgorithm exercises / mini-assignments first, then when they get in to Grasshopper they seem a lot more comfortable.
I would love to be part of longer form discussions on teaching Grasshopper, so I’m excited to see this thread continue!
I think there’s a few stages where students run into roadblocks.
The first stage is simply learning the components, sometimes it helps if they are already familiar with rhino, but sometimes it actually backfires, since rhino command and grasshopper commands aren’t 1:1.
The second stage is procedural thinking. Some students have difficulty describing how a shape is formed. They think about the shape visually and not logically. Usually these types of students model in rhino using boolean operations, and joining segments of surfaces (as if they’re modelling a mesh).
Then the next stage would be data trees. Usually at this stage student can model a single object perfectly fine, but once they want to apply the logic en mass, everything breaks and they’re confused on where and when they should graph/flatten/shift/simplify.
There’s also the issue @duanemclemore raised, student aren’t really motivated. I’ve seen students use non logical inputs on a sample file then complain that the file doesn’t work. Takes maybe 5 minutes to check components one by one to figure out where and why things break, but some students just can’t be bothered.
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In my process of design learning, the need of first learning basic modeling of Rhino is important.
And for the Grasshopper learning i keep my 3 steps process: Do what you do before, Do it better and faster, Then Do what you can do before (or maybe never imagine do it manually)…
Keeping this order I start learning single data by adding rhino objects in Grasshopper with simple opérations, like booleans, move rotate….and explain what a vector is 
Then Learning multiples datas by duplicating this single object ( multiples rotations like polars..) So i know emmbeed multiples datas a start learning lists, so it goes faster than manual way..
And finally learn advances management with trees and mathematical notions…
Always small definitions to avoid to be lost in the components, for the learning process.
And always a visual “clean” canvas by organize it, add labels text
A Nice exercise is to switch def from a student to another… everyone should understand the definition of an other student … or even its own def few days after
The theory of algorithms and how they connect to Rhino can be a challenge, especially for students who’ve never used software that interacts across different windows. Because of that, when I teach, I try to avoid trees at the start. I focus on baby steps to build confidence, and once students get that first success, the motivation follows and they run with it.
The two best texts I’ve used for teaching Grasshopper are:
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Grasshopper Primer (ModeLab) – great for beginners, clear and accessible.
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AAD: Algorithm-Aided Design by Arturo Tedeschi – for students who want to go deeper.
Beyond those, I recommend resources that align directly with the student’s interests and goals. Rhino and Grasshopper can feel overwhelming if taught too generally, but when you narrow the focus to what the learner is trying to achieve, the path forward becomes much clearer.
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Hi @carla.sologuren, for me, the biggest challenge when teaching Grasshopper comes even before talking about data flow or components : it’s the interface itself.
Before we start, I always need students to download and install Sunglasses, because Grasshopper is so much clearer when you can see both icons and components names. Without that, it’s really hard for beginners to navigate or remember where things are.
Judging by many screenshots on this forum, I think most of us teach or work this way. And since the icon + text display is already native in Grasshopper 2, it feels like a small but really important improvement that should also exist in Grasshopper 1.