Where else this is taught
How the four courses relate
Four separate courses, taught by the same person, none of them a prerequisite for another. Which one goes deepest on what, what is deliberately taught twice because one exposure is not enough, and what is deliberately not here at all.
Four courses, three different rooms, and no student who takes all four. This page exists so that each one earns its own hours, so that nothing is taught twice in the same words, and so that where a topic genuinely has to recur, it recurs from a different position and says something new.
Who is actually in each room#
| Course | Cohort | Year | Status | What they walk in with |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electronics for Theatre | Technical Direction | 1 | Core | Nothing technical. This is the first one |
| Computer Systems and Networking | Media Design and Technology | 1 | Core | Nothing technical. Audio, lighting and video artists |
| Computer Science for Theatre | Technical Direction | 2 | Core | Sixty four hours of Electronics, last year |
| Show Networking and Control Systems | Mixed | Any | Elective | Unknown. Possibly none of the above |
Read that table before anything else, because everything on this page follows from it.
There is one real progression, and it is inside Technical Direction. Electronics in year one, Computer Science in year two, taken by the same people in that order. This course can and does assume that year: it does not re-teach a pin, an ADC or a flyback diode, because you spent four hours on each of them with a meter in your hand.
There is no progression anywhere else. An MDT student takes Computer Systems and never sees Electronics. A TD student takes Electronics and Computer Science and never sees Computer Systems. The elective takes whoever turns up.
So this is not a programme with a spine. It is three separate curricula that happen to be taught by one person, plus an elective that has to work for a room containing all of them.
What that costs, and how each course pays it#
The obvious cost is duplication. Bits and bytes cannot be owned by one course when three cohorts each need them and only one cohort is in each room. The same is true of DMX, of fault-finding, and of what a byte does at 255.
The rule that resolves it:
Duplication in reference material is necessary. Duplication in taught minutes is waste.
Every course carries a complete foundations page for its own cohort, because a student who never meets the other three still has to be able to count in hex. Those pages agree with each other deliberately, word for word where they overlap, so a term never changes meaning between rooms.
What must not repeat is the hour in front of the class. When two courses reach the same object, each one reaches it from where it stands, asks a different question of it, and leaves with a different answer.
The same object, four angles#
This is the heart of the re-weighting. Each row is a thing that appears in more than one course, and each column says what that course does with it. No two cells in a row are the same lesson.
DMX512#
| Course | The question it asks | What the student leaves with |
|---|---|---|
| Electronics · TD1 | What is physically on the pair? | RS-485, differential signalling, termination and reflections, why 5-pin exists, and a scope trace of a real packet |
| Computer Systems · MDT1 | What is it as data? | 512 slots, one byte each, 44 refreshes a second, universes as a quantity of data rather than a cable, and the arithmetic for a rig |
| Computer Science · TD2 | What does my code do with it? | Bytes arriving at a UART inside a loop that has a deadline, and what the program does when they stop |
| Show Networking · elective | What did the two devices agree? | The standard itself, RDM, sACN and Art-Net, and the specified behaviour on loss |
A TD student meets rows one and three, a year apart, and they do not overlap: one is a scope, the other is a loop budget. An MDT student meets only row two. Somebody in the elective meets row four and may have met any of the others, which is why row four opens by naming what it assumes.
Finding a fault#
| Course | The instrument | The method it teaches |
|---|---|---|
| Electronics · TD1 | A meter and a scope | Establish the boundary, change one thing, prove the fix by reintroducing the fault |
| Computer Systems · MDT1 | A packet capture | The OSI ladder as a diagnostic order: which layer can answer this? |
| Computer Science · TD2 | A print statement and git log | Bisect, and the three questions: is it the code I think, the data I think, did it ever work |
| Show Networking · elective | The specification | Which of the twenty agreements between these two devices was never actually made |
Same discipline, four instruments. A TD student gets it twice, deliberately: once with a meter in year one and once with a debugger in year two, which is how it becomes a habit rather than a technique.
Numbers, bits and hex#
| Course | Why that cohort needs it | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Electronics · TD1 | Barely. It is arithmetic and prefixes, not bases | Foundations, and almost no class time |
| Computer Systems · MDT1 | Everything on a network is a number in a field | Foundations plus a taught class: it is the subject |
| Computer Science · TD2 | A value has a type, and 255 is not 256 | Foundations, read before Class 1. Class 2 teaches what a value <i>is</i>, not how to count |
| Show Networking · elective | Reading a packet by hand | Foundations, plus the session on how a bit crosses a gap |
This is the row where the reference pages genuinely repeat and the classes genuinely do not.
Safe states and what happens on loss#
| Course | The layer it answers at |
|---|---|
| Electronics · TD1 | The circuit: arrange the hardware so de-energised is safe, and wire the interlock |
| Computer Systems · MDT1 | Not covered. It is not what that cohort does |
| Computer Science · TD2 | The specification and the six lines: a timeout, a threshold, and a sentence saying why that number |
| Show Networking · elective | What each protocol specifies, department by department, and which of them tell you at all |
Pixels at scale#
| Course | The constraint it makes visible |
|---|---|
| Electronics · TD1 | Power, current and volt drop down a long run of tape |
| Computer Systems · MDT1 | Data rate on a shared network, and what that does to the other four flows |
| Computer Science · TD2 | The blocking write: 30 µs a pixel with interrupts off, and the frame rate ceiling that falls out |
| Show Networking · elective | Universes, multicast and whether the switch can carry it |
State machines#
| Course | What it does with the idea |
|---|---|
| Electronics · TD1 | Builds one, in C++, on a prop, in Class 12 |
| Computer Science · TD2 | Uses it as a <i>reading</i> tool: the missing transition is the fault, in code somebody else wrote |
| Show Networking · elective | Names it once, as the shape a cue system has |
The TD student builds one in year one and learns to read one in year two. That is the same object approached as a maker and then as an inspector, which is the actual shape of the career.
What each course owns outright#
Everything here is taught in exactly one place, because only one cohort needs it or only one course has the hours.
Electronics for Theatre owns everything below the connector: voltage, current and power as things that happen in a building; measurement as an argument; components and why the industry chose its connectors; soldering and strain relief; switching a load and isolating it; impedance, balanced lines and hum; the scope; emergency stop, interlocks, lock-off and risk assessment. Nothing else teaches any of it, and Computer Science leans on all of it.
Computer Systems and Networking owns the machine and the network for an artist: what a show computer is and why it is configured differently; the OSI ladder; subnet arithmetic; VLANs; multicast; media over IP; clock and PTP; the Four Flows. Nothing else teaches subnetting, and the elective assumes a reader may never have seen it.
Computer Science for Theatre owns the instructions: what a program is; types, references and floating point; notation, including patchers and ladder logic; data shapes and what they cost at scale; real exports and their mess; version control; a debugging method; working with a model and verifying what it produces; the architecture decision between a chip and a computer; a single board computer as installed show hardware; and a capstone that is assessed on failure behaviour and handover. Nothing else teaches any of that, and after this session nothing else needs to.
Show Networking and Control Systems owns the agreements: the Five Questions; DMX512-A, RDM, RDMnet and sACN as standards; MIDI, MSC and what replaced it; OSC properly; timecode and PTP; PosiStageNet and interchange; and the twenty seven chapters of the standard text, each claimed by exactly one session.
What this course changed when the cohorts were mapped#
The audit that produced this page changed three things here, and all three recovered time.
Class 5 stopped hedging about Electronics. It used to say "you do not need that course to take this one", which was written as though this were an elective. It is a second year core course and everybody in the room did sixty four hours of Electronics last year. It now assumes pins, the ADC, PWM, debounce and the driver board outright, names where each was taught, and spends the recovered minutes on the architecture decision and the loop budget, which are the parts nothing else covers.
The foundations page stopped apologising. It is reference for a cohort that met bits in Electronics only in passing, so it is complete, and it is read rather than taught.
Nothing was added to cover what Computer Systems teaches. A TD student never takes that course, and the temptation was to fill the gap with a networking primer. That would have been a worse version of somebody else's class. Instead Class 5 names the one thing a TD student actually needs from it, links to it, and moves on.
What is deliberately not in this course#
Each of these is real, and is either somebody else's hours or nobody's.
Subnetting, VLANs and switch configuration. Computer Systems' subject, for a cohort that is not this one. A TD who needs it should take it or read it; a class here would be a thin copy.
Protocol detail. The elective's subject, against the standard text. Class 5 gives the one table that helps you choose a cue transport and points at the course that does the rest.
Software engineering as a discipline. Object orientation, design patterns, architecture, concurrency beyond the loop deadline. Real, and not what twenty four hours with technical directors buys the most of.
Web development, databases, and training a model. Named in where to go next with a route to each, and taught in none of the four.