Presentation | Notion

I want to start off with a little bit about me and what drew me to this project.
I am a creative Technologist based in New York City and I’ve spent the last 10 years of my career building web applications for large tech companies.
I discovered Processing more recently during my time at grad school at NYU and that was the first time I had seen:
1. coding used as an art practice, and
2. art used as a tool to learn coding.
I reflect back on my time while I was studying computer science in my undergrad when I struggled to learn how to code. And I think about how a creative based learning practice definitely would have helped me enjoy that process more
Now as I am deep into my career and now also teaching others how to code, I am drawn to those who also aspire to show different methodologies of teaching these kinds of technologies
When I saw the open call for this specific project, I found that perhaps it fate that a project would call for all the combined skills and experiences I had accumulated in the past 10 years and give me this opportunity to influence a tool that I could have personally benefited from the past

So a little bit more about the goals of this project
We wanted to create a proof-of-concept or prototype of a desktop editor that could run Processing sketches and accomplishes these three things:
1. To use modern web technologies so that people could contribute to the editor easily, and also be able to expand its features, similar to how VSCode allows other developers to create extensions, like my fellow pr05 grantee Diya created the Processing VSCode extension
2. Design an editor specifically for students and beginners, where we could create a simplified version of a code editor, which takes away complexities of things like the filesystem and gets students working with code faster
3. And then finally, in this ever-increasing online world, the meat of this project was to create a way for people to collaborate with each other in real-time, similar to how tools like Google Docs or Figma allow multiple users to watch others as they edit their files.

So the final outcome of this project was the Processing Collaborative Editor—a desktop app that you could install on Mac or Windows computers
I’m going to show a quick demo on how the app works
After you install the app on your computer, you can open it and it brings you to the main editor
Immediately, you can start running a sketch by click the play button
Then you can start writing the code to make your sketch, so I’m going to make a quick sketch that draws a circle wherever my mouse is
Once i’m ready to test my sketch, I can click the play button again, or press CMD-R (for mac) as a shortcut
At this point, let’s say I’m in a classroom setting where I wanted students to join my sketch and co-create this sketch together. For this demo, I’ve actually planted some people in the audience who also have the app install and they are going to join my sketch
So I’ll go to the dropdown right by the sketch’s name and click “Collaborate”