Film Posters for Lectures
Inf-Einf-B, winter semester 2026/27
This is a translation. View original (Deutsch)
For every lecture of Inf-Einf-B, the introduction to computer science at the University of Bamberg, a pen plotter draws a film poster. A pen plotter is a machine that moves felt-tip pens across the paper. How this came about is told in the opening post.
A new poster is added here after each lecture, the newest at the top. The video for each poster shows in time-lapse how the plotter draws it. The posters and the lectures are in German; each title is translated below it.
Film 003
DER VERSUCH
THE EXPERIMENT
THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Lecture 3 was about searching and about how long a program takes. A loop that asks for the length of a text with the function strlen before every pass counts the whole text again each time: with a million characters the laptop took 9.6 seconds. The poster shows a magnifying glass over a sheet full of strlen calls, and in the German title, DER VERSUCH (the experiment), the letters SUCH (search) dissolve into pixels.
Film 002
UNDEFINIERT
UNDEFINED
NOBODY KNOWS WHERE IT ENDS.
Lecture 2 was about arrays and strings, that is, rows of values of the same kind and text. Cards with the characters H I ! \0 B Y E ! hung on a clothesline. The output function printf reads a text up to the null byte \0, which marks its end. Without the null byte, printf keeps reading, and the programming language C does not define what happens next. On the poster the null byte is the only red card, falling out of the picture, and the title falls apart halfway through.
Film 001
VERSCHACHTELT
NESTED
BUILT FROM THE BOTTOM. DRAWN FROM THE TOP.
Lecture 1 introduced the programming language C and the first loops. A right-aligned half pyramid of ten cardboard blocks stood in the lecture hall, like the one at the end of a level in Super Mario. You build it from the bottom up, but a program prints it from the top down, line by line, with two nested loops. The German title, VERSCHACHTELT (nested), has a box (Schachtel) in the middle, and on the poster that box sits in a frame of its own.
Film 000
DER KASTEN
THE BOX
THIS SEMESTER, WE ARE GOING TO OPEN UP THIS BOX.
Lecture 0 was the introduction. A remote-controlled robot dog, a Unitree Go2, walked through the lecture hall. You can see what it does but not how: input at the joystick, output as movement, a program in between. That is why the poster shows the dog as a black silhouette, saying “miau” like the cat in Scratch, a programming language built from blocks.