virtual CC Fest - Creative Coding Fest

CC Fest is an opportunity for students and teachers to engage in creative coding. Come spend a few hours making interactive and engaging digital art, animation, games. We will be offering multiple sessions in creative coding, a chance to meet other students and teachers, and an amazing keynote. Tickets proceeds and donations will be shared between the presenters and donated to Processing Foundations. We have paid and free tickets available along with an option to donate.

You can buy tickets to gain access to the recordings and slides via these tickets at this link or via the button below.

Activities

Rising daydreams

with Marie LeBlanc Flanagan (they), is an artist working in the playful spaces between people, especially related to connection and community. Marie co-created the Imaginary Residency, an artist-run online residency; Wyrd Arts Initiatives, a nationwide nonprofit dedicated to encouraging, documenting, and connecting creative expression across Canada; and Drone Day, an international day for the celebration of experimental drone music and communities.

Session details - Join us for a daydream session where we’ll take a vivid journey into our imaginations. What are we dreaming about? What feels good? How does it feel when we let ourselves daydream? Part radical daydreams, part conversation, this session is perfect for people who want to find inspiration by going on an imaginary journey together. Resource

Teacher Hangout

We will be using Arium to facilitate the teacher hangout.

About Arium - Meet friends or strangers and explore the world of Arium together. 3D virtual space and positional audio foster a serendipitous, organic social experience. If you want to talk to someone in Arium, simply walk over to them - making even the largest virtual events feel fun and natural. Experience art together and connect with your community - no matter where you are in the world.

Workshops

(schedules will be emailed to ticket holders a day before the event)

The Reluctant Coder - How to stop worrying and create with code

with Akanksha Vyas (she/her), who has been working in technology for over 10 years, leading technology and design teams. She loves building things. She is also visiting faculty at the NMIMS Design School and Director at the Mumbai Women Who Code chapter. Akanksha is passionate about the intersection of technology, art, and stories, and loves to solve challenging problems that will make our future more liveable. In her free time she works at a bookshop.

and Jesal Mehta (he/him), a designer, educator and maker working at the intersection of design, art and code. With a background in Industrial Design, he currently works with and teaches Product and Interaction Design at NMIMS School of Design, Mumbai. He has also wandered into New Media, and teaches Creative Coding, Physical Computing and Data Visualization. He is an active member of the local maker community, and has taken workshops on digital fabrication techniques at Maker’s Asylum. His current personal interest is bringing generative art into the physical realm as objects, interactions and experiences. Apart from design and making, he is a student of history, occasional poet, and sometime cyclist.

Session details - Year after year we encounter design students who come in with a huge mind block against coding, convinced from past experiences that they will fail at anything mathematical. One of the most interesting challenges for us is bringing down the barrier and creating an environment where they can explore and play. Join us in a conversation about our experiences in tackling fear of math and code while teaching Creative Coding and Physical Computing to design students. Resource

CS Projects for Social Justice

with Layla Quinones (she/her), a Curriculum Implementation Specialist and Computer Science Teacher for the NYC DOE CS4ALL initiative. She has been teaching Computer Science to secondary school and college students for the past 8 years, and training teachers to teach computer science for 4 years. She is passionate about integrating social emotional learning, culturally relevant pedagogy and social justice in her CS teaching practices. In her free time Layla can be found in a skatepark on her inline or quad skates, or creating art and drinking tea.

Session details - How do we integrate Social Justice into our CS projects? In this workshop we will explore the characteristics of and differences between Multicultural Projects and Social Justice Projects in Computer Science. After brainstorming project topics, we will create our very own Social Justice project using a platform of our choosing. Resource

Pixel Art Basics Workshop

with MeeNa Ko (moaw!) (they/them), a game developer based in Virginia in the United States. They’ve worked with Newgrounds, Microsoft, and various indie teams as a freelance pixel artist and game designer.

They work to build creative communities through game development, bridging dialogues between STEM and art. They design open-source game development assets and organize workshops to make education more accessible. You can see some of their artwork in educational resources such as Microsoft’s MakeCode Arcade. They also provided community resources as Operations Chair for Richmond-based game development community, RVA Game Jams.

Session details - The origins of pixel art were to efficiently illustrate within extremely tight limits-- limits that have been sloughed away with explosive technological advancements in recent years. Modern pixel artists are now able to pick and choose the constraints they put upon themselves, instead of simply following the limits of their hardware.

This introductory workshop will cover pixel-art basics, including an overview of basic pixel-art terminology, techniques, and tools. Resource

p5.js Editor Feedback Session

with Cassie Tarakajian (they/them), an Armenian-American educator, technologist, musician, and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. After receiving a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, they focused their work on creative tools, working on the software Max/MSP at Cycling '74 and joining Processing Foundation as the p5.js Editor lead in 2016. They also teach creative coding workshops and classes, and serve as an adjunct professor at NYU ITP. Past artistic projects range from generating sonnets from Wikipedia contributions to teaching computers how to love as a member of the band Lullabies for AI.

Session details - Have you ever wanted to become a contributor to p5.js and the p5.js Editor? You can do this by offering your experience, struggles, and joys using these tools, and help shape their development. In this session we will document these experiences and translate them into priorities and GitHub issues. Resource

p5.js COCODING + Classroom

with Ted Davis (he/they), a media artist / designer / educator originally from the United States and based in Basel, Switzerland. Since 2010 he teaches interaction design and coordinates the UIC/HGK International Master of Design program within the Institute Digital Communication Environments IDCE, The Basel School of Design HGK FHNW. His work and teachings explore the volatility of digital media through glitch and reactivating older ‘new media’ through newer programming means. His open source projects (basil.js, XYscope, P5LIVE) enable designers to program within Adobe InDesign, render vector graphics on vector displays, and collaboratively create live coded visuals.

Session details - This workshop is designed for educators who have struggled to teach creative code during remote teaching times. We'll explore using P5LIVE's COCODING feature for working with your students as a class and in programming pairs. We'll also take a hands-on sneak peek at COCODING Classroom, a brand new tool (currently in development) which introduces a side-by-side teacher/student view with breakout sessions, offering an emphasis on making it easier to ask questions, get help, and learn programming with a single monitor. Resource, 2

Using Classes in p5js

with Greg Benedis-Grab (he/him), the director of academic technology and computing at The Packer Collegiate Institute. He received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching in 2011. He has presented on science, technology, computing, and innovation at national conferences and leads workshops globally.

Session details - Learn how to use classes and see how you can use them to make scientific models. This will be a code along with opportunities to tinker and share. Resource

Generate SVG for Pen Plotters using Python

with Tristan Bunn (he/him), a researcher, practitioner, and lecturer whose work explores the intersection of code, interaction, interface design, and creativity. He's especially interested in open-source projects that explore Python as a language for creative coding; he has presented on this topic at various events (PyCon, LibreGraphics, CC Fest), and written a book on Processing.py (publisher No Starch Press).

Session details - An introduction to creating generative SVG artwork for pen plotters using different Python tools, with a focus on combining Processing and Python using py5. I'll present my workflow(s), some Blender SVG tricks, vpype, and even a code-less tool (UJI). Resources

Sustainable Design with p5.js

with Nick McIntyre (he/him), is a teacher and creative technologist. He's run a K–8 makerspace, taught high school math and computer science, mentored undergrads through Google Summer of Code, co-taught university courses in sustainable design, and consulted for education startups.

A native Texan, Nick earned a BS in Engineering with Honors and MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. He loves hanging out on the beach when he isn't tinkering with projects.

Session details - Everybody's favorite software sketchbook provides all of the primitives that STEAM teachers need to craft lessons with an impact. Attendees will choose their own adventure as they sketch a future powered by wind, water, or sunlight. Resource

Joke Generators, Soundboards, and Audio Interactions in Scratch (+ p5.js)

with Shawn Patrick Higgins (he/him), a Middle School Computer Science Teacher with 10 years experience working with youth in creative technology; specializing in project-based curriculum that focuses on digital art, animation, audio, social media, and games as creative pathway to student success!

Session details - Adding your voice and touch interactivity is one of the best ways to get students engaged with Coding! In this session we will be going over fun and easy interaction and audio projects from across the spectrum of complexities, from a basic one button joke generator that an elementary student can make in just a few minutes to fully narrated choose your own adventure story a team of highschoolers can spend weeks working on! Resource

Hack your webcam with friends

with Aidan Nelson (he/him), an artist and researcher based in New York City whose most recent interests include CT-scanning butterflies, making flexible silicone lenses, performing photogrammetry (3D scans) on historic masks, teaching reinforcement-learning (AI) agents and building electrostatic headphones. He is currently a researcher in residence at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU Tisch.

Session details - Over the past few years, we have seen our social lives thrust online: holidays with family, parties with friends and live performances have all been arranged (with varying degrees of success) into 2D grids of video feeds through platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet. What happens when we break out of this grid and explore new forms of real-time social interactions online using webcam video and audio? Attendees will be introduced to the tools required to create their own functional video-chat applications in less than 50 lines of code in the p5 web editor. Resource

Do your own Data Science with p5.js

with Dr. Emily Thomforde (she/her), the Computer Science Coordinator at the California Department of Education. She previously served as the Maker Education and Computer Science Coordinator at the San Mateo County Office of Education. She advocates for equity in K-12 Computer Science and supports teachers and districts in building rigorous pathways to deliver the California K-12 CS Standards. Emily is a BAFTA-winning video game developer, and has eight years of experience teaching computer programming, software development and engineering at libraries, prisons, museums, and public schools locally and abroad. Her curriculum development credits include Vidcode, Hopscotch, Code.org, STEM from Dance, Code Combat, and BrainPOP. Emily holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK.

Session details - You're comfortable with shapes and variables in p5.js (or another variant of JavaScript). Now add a database and automate the drawing! We'll dissect a project that visualizes time series data (Warming Stripes!) and then hack to it display a dataset of your choice in an artistic style also of your choice. Resource

Sensors with P5JS, Scratch, and other languages

with Stephen Lewis (he/him), educator, inventor, software/hardware developer.

Session details - Sensors made easy. Using an Arduino "Leonardo" or FunKey board or similar you can send sensor data straight into Scratch, P5JS, ... with no drivers, installations or other nuisances. Make science instruments with speed sensors, heartbeat sensors or make contraptions of all kinds. Pipe sensor data directly into Scratch or P5JS as a stream of simulated keystrokes.