Category Archives: teaching_

Teaching

Big Screens Show

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First, anyone in NYC, come and check out the ITP show this week!

In other news, there’s a nice write-up at Gizmodo about the Big Screens show at IAC. I should point out that three of the projects this year used openFrameworks (including “Caves of Wonder” by Matt Parker which was mistakenly attributed to Processing in the article). Six of the projects were indeed developed with Processing and three were pre-rendered videos. Here are some of the vimeo clips from Gizmodo. Hope to post more videos and photos soon. . .


Big Screens – Claptime by Vikram Tank from Gizmodo on Vimeo.


Big Screens – White Sun by Mooshir Vahanvati from Gizmodo on Vimeo.


Big Screens – Caves of Wonder by Matt Parker from Gizmodo on Vimeo.


Big Screens – In the Shadows by Alejandro Abreu Theresa Ling from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

PHP Tutorial

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I’ve finally posted something I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while, a quick PHP tutorial for Processing programmers. This probably should have been a chapter in Learning Processing, but hey, if it had made it in, then I wouldn’t be able to just put it online for free.

Tutorial: http://www.learningprocessing.com/tutorials/php/

There’s an example towards the end of the tutorial that demonstrates how to use PHP to save data to a server from a Processing sketch/applet. This could be particularly useful for a high score list, etc.

Persistence: http://www.learningprocessing.com/tutorials/php/php-persistence/

Oh, and while I’m at it, I’ve got three new examples up on the Processing site:

Learning Processing Available Now

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nyu bookstore

Just a quick note to let you know that my book, Learning Processing, is now available for purchase. If you are local to NYC, you can buy the book at the NYU bookstore.

Amazon says “out of stock”, but I’m told by the publisher that this is an error and they do, in fact, have copies. Also, at $37.00, this seems to be the cheapest option online that I can find.

All the example code will be available live online at learningprocessing.com by early next week. Feel free to contact me with comments, questions, feedback!

Who is this book for? Check out my earlier post.

Book Release: Learning Processing

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Learning Processing

I’m pleased to announce that my new programming with Processing book will be released this August (by the end of the month). You can pre-order the book from Amazon, download a sample chapter from the web site, and, yes, even become a fan of the book on facebook (since that’s what all the 35 year olds are doing these days.)

A few things I’d like to say about the book:

My goal for “Learning Processing” was to write something for the complete and total programming beginner. If you’ve never written a line of code before in your life, but want to get started creating your own digital media tools then I wrote this book for you. There are several other wonderful Processing books out there and I hope mine will complement them nicely. A special thanks to Casey, Ben, and Ira who kept encouraging and inspiring me as their books were being published.

The book is also geared towards the teacher. It’s not my belief that such a person will necessarily learn any new skills from the book (assuming they have a programming background), however, my hope is that the book will encourage and help facilitate the teaching of programming. It is structured with 10 lessons (complete with examples and exercises) and can act as a ready-made syllabus for a beginner interactive media / programming class. In fact, the book is modeled exactly on ITP’s Introduction to Computational Media course.

The first half of the book is all fundamentals: pixels, variables, conditionals, loops, functions, objects, arrays. The second half is an introduction to select advanced topics: 3D, images, video, data, sound, etc. (download full table of contents). And although the web site is currently just a splash page, it’s my intention to make available all the examples (and exercise answers) at the site. The full site should launch in the next few weeks (a big thanks to Rich Hauck who is helping to build the site.)

If anyone is interested in teaching with the book come this fall, please feel free to drop me a line and I’d be happy to answer any questions. It’s also my hope that this book can teach programming to high school students, however, I don’t have as much experience in this area. . . but if anyone is looking to try it out with younger students, please let me know and I would love to help.

Open Processing

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Open Processing!

Just wanted to give a quick plug to ITP student Sinan Ascioglu’s new site: www.openprocessing.org — a community “flickr-like” site for Processing sketches. It’s terrific work and I’m hoping students in my courses will find it helpful for organizing portfolios of their work. I’m hoping to be able to help Sinan by figuring out a way to auto-generate thumbnails from uploaded Processing sketches. Seems to be the one missing piece (it’s a pain in the neck to generate those screenshots yourself). Any ideas? Post here in the comments.

ITP Shows

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The ITP Show finished up with some nice write-ups on the internets: ny times blog and MAKE.

About a week or so before the ITP show, my Big Screens class had their own show at the IAC Building on their rather large video wall. I’m hoping we set the world record for largest Processing sketch ever. Some photos (video coming soon):

ITP Big Screens @ IAC  ITP Big Screens @ IAC
 

This, as far as I know, was the first public use of the Most Pixels Ever library, which admittedly needs quite a bit of work still.