TNT Tool Time — Entry #1 — p5.js Creative Coding
Jackson’s Iris
A rainbow eye that pulses to the beat of “Iris” by Pastel Ghost.
Built with HSB color mode,
pulsating animation, and
modulo cycling —
this is your canvas now. What will you make it?
An Eye That Breathes
Jackson wrote this sketch in CS Innovations Studio on October 16, 2026 — his original challenge: animate a song. He chose “Iris” by Pastel Ghost, a dream-wave track with a hypnotic, floating quality. His solution: draw an eye. A living eye with a light blue iris, a pupil that pulses slowly in and out, a rainbow spectrum cycling through it frame by frame, and the lyric “I’m lost in your iris” floating below it all.
The code is 79 lines of honest, first-draft p5.js — which means it works,
it does the thing it set out to do, and it is full of room to grow. There is commented-out
blinking code that “failed but looked cool.” There is a scale(scaleamount)
call where scaleamount never changes from 1. There is a pupil brightness that
increments past its max and keeps going. All of this is real novice code — and it
is exactly the kind of code that Tool Time is built to celebrate and improve.
We are not analyzing Jackson’s code here. We are showcasing it. Copy it, run it, study it — then bring your own ideas to the workbench. Tim had the drill. You have the code. Al — your AI sidekick — is standing by.
Live Animation
Runs at 30 fps — draw() loops continuously.
The pupil pulses between r=150 and r=250 via growing flag.
Your Turn — Vibe Code It Better
Hit the Copy button above, paste the code into editor.p5js.org, and run it. Then open your AI of choice and start improving. This is what Tool Time is about: working code made better through deliberate prompting. There are no wrong answers — every improvement direction is valid, and the bigger the creative swing, the better the conversation.
Some directions worth exploring — or ignore them all and go your own way:
See the full C.R.A.F.T. breakdown on Tool Time ↓
Bring your improved version to class. What did you change? Why? What did the AI suggest that you accepted, and what did you reject? The most important conversation is the one about your choices — not the AI’s output.