k-12 presentation

I know it’s been a month now that I haven’t blog! Too much is happening here – from wordpress moving to version 3, to my come back to school (in information technology) to all my project moving forward, and summer kicking in ~ there wasn’t much time left. I also prepared a introduction to processing and opensource technology for computational art for a k-12 school, and that was really fun, read more below!

Last week I went to do a presentation to a k-12 school here in Crawford Bay. Since I started learning processing I realized how helpful that could be for the new generation to learn an easy way to program. Learning processing (and programming in general) also merge all the mathematical knowledge you have, with a solid foundation in problem solving and computer usage. I feel that if programing was re-introduce in school, it should build on processing.

I started programming on vic-20 and never really wanted to learn programming language until I discovered Processing. So I tough that giving a presentation to a k12 school would be really interesting. Like many k-12 school in small villages, there is not many students, and keeping the school alive becomes quite a problem compare to urban schools. To remedy this, the director of the school, Dan Rude, and the teachers there decided to open up the doors for Mentors to come and help inspire the kids. I grabbed that opportunity to present Processing and Arduino, with a quick overview of pure:dyne and how can kids benefit from open source technologies.

I presented most of my project that I posted here on ponnuki, from the fish pond, to the spaceship game, to the video cam project to controling processing with a Nintendo DS (upcoming post about that) and creating a video animation with processing and using the arduino to do a laser show. I wanted to give an example of all the inputs that can be used in processing to give a solid foundation about all the possibilities that opens up when learning a programming language.

The video you see here is an integration of audio in processing using the minin library. As you can see the music is not too much in sync with the sketch ~ it’s probably due in part because of my computer power (yes I will get a more powerfull machine for your eyes pleasure in the spring) and also processing is not optimized for audio.

In the future for project that binds audio with visual I will research more about pureData feeding osc into processing, for that presentation I didn’t have much time to come up with something visually appealing. You can see that I added some Penrose system and snowflake (the green structure growing from the center), two example that are part of the main processing installation.

audio – processing integration from Geoffroy Tremblay on Vimeo.

It was great to see the kids enjoying the presentation, and I hope I will be able to mentor one or 2 of them in a video game/ multimedia creation next year! Meanwhile I continue my Processing quest!