Talks

Times listed are Eastern Standard Time. Speakers will present 10 minute case studies and are listed in the order they will present.

Friday, 22 January 2021

Creative Coding (2.25-3.45pm)
  • Paolo Pedercini (Carnegie Mellon University, School of Art) – Experimental Game Design – Remote Work / Remote Play 

Experimental Game Design is a hands-on game design course focused on innovative and expressive forms of gameplay. The emphasis is placed on all aspects of remote play: online multiplayer games, streaming culture, MMORPG interventions, transnational gaming communities. The online component is deeply integrated in the coursework, and include workshops using collaboration tools, and field trips in online worlds. This talk will focus on workshopping and brainstorming with tools beyond Zoom: discord, google doc, github, glitch, task management tools. Surveillance and always-on work culture in online teaching.

  • Melanie Hoff (School for Poetic Computation / NYU ITP) – Digital Love Languages: Sharing Sessions

Digital Love Languages: Codes of Affirmation is a class based on the premise that there is a world where all the software we use is made by people who love us — and that this world is possible. Hosted at the School for Poetic Computation, Digital Love Languages was a 10-week series of online classes, gatherings, workshops, and communions with 30 people. We built small, personal software for affirming one another across physical distances. We engaged with code as a craft capable of expressing a full range of feelings and desires. Through a series of educational encounters, we built poetic tools for online communion through a re-examination of computers. Code can be explored and cultivated as a love language that can be gentle and healing, in resistance to technologies of surveillance and exploitation. This is a call to action for expanding computation’s capacity for fostering interdependence and feeling in a post COVID-19 world.

Over the past 10 weeks the students and stewards of Digital Love Languages: Codes of Affirmation studied together digitally across states and countries. The Sharing Sessions was a livestreamed event where 34 students shared their reflections and processes of coding to love through this pandemic summer. We asked how do we want to live & (un)learn in a post COVID-19 world and what role will we invite technology to play? The students and stewards also collaborated on the launch of a digital webzine as a kind of container for what we did together called Landscapes of Love, https://digitallovelanguages.github.io/

  • Ted Davis (The Basel School of Design HGK FHNW, Visual Communication Institute) – P5LIVE COCODING

P5LIVE is a tool I started developing in 2019 for Basel’s first PCD event. Soon after, I added the COCODING feature for remote/local collaboration (like Google Docs) because the technology made it possible (thanks Websockets!). Little did I know or expect it could be so useful once we all went remote last Spring due to Covid-19. In my courses this past Fall, we went from Hybrid teaching to fully Remote due to the uptick in cases. In my MDes Processing course on ALT-OUTPUTS (showing code on anything besides the laptop screen, specifically older media), a planned workshop input using split-flap displays from the SBB train station had to take place virtually. For this COCODING made it possible to not only control and talk to this unique display via Serial remotely, but we embedded a live-stream YouTube feed in the background of our code, so we could see the display change in real time! It was an amazing mixture of complete virtual/digital/analog. In my BA intro to interaction with p5.js, we never got to meet physically, as the course started after we moved back to fully remote classes. Here I could use COCODING to demonstrate features to the entire class of 26 students, as I had done the previous couple semesters since making the tool. However, with the partner project of Recoding a historical computer artwork no longer being possible in person, side-by-side, COCODING proved invaluable as they could work collaboratively in this virtual space. I setup predefined links to hash IDs for the sessions on our course website, so they could reuse the same room and I could easily join incase they needed help. This talk will cover these two case studies in more depth.

  • Golan Levin (Carnegie Mellon University, School of Art) – Interactivity and Computation for Creative Practice

I will present a brief overview of a wide variety of patterns and tricks that I use in teaching creative coding and computational new media arts at CMU, including techniques that proved helpful for me during an all-remote Fall 2020 course. Interactivity and Computation for Creative Practice (60-212) is a practical introduction to programming and computational media production within the context of the arts. In this “intromediate” level course, students develop the skills and confidence to produce interactive artworks, discuss their work in relation to current and historic praxes of digital art, and engage new technologies critically. This is a “studio art course in computer science”, in which our objective is art and design, but our medium is student-written software. Intended as a second course for students who have already had one semester of elementary programming (in any language), this class develops craft skills in text-based, imperative programming using a variety of creative coding toolkits, including p5.js (JavaScript) and Unity3D (JavaScript/C#). Through rigorous programming exercises in these environments, students will develop mastery over the basic vocabulary of constructs that govern static, dynamic, and interactive form, with the aim of applying these skills to problems in interactive art, computational design, and other creative explorations of transmediality, connectivity, generativity, and immersivity.

Critical Computation Lecture and Lab is a required course in MFA Design + Technology at Parsons School of Design. We would like to present this class as a case study for teaching an entry-level creative coding course through an intersectional, feminist, and anti-racist lens. We plan to share the design of the class, an overview of the implementation of the remote course through the Fall 2020 semester, and reflection on the outcomes achieved. Critical Computation Lecture + Lab (CC Lecture + CC Lab) are co-requisites that work hand-in-hand to introduce computation and code as an expressive medium for artists, designers, and technologists.

CC Lecture provides an introduction to computation through a series of critical inquiries and technical fundamentals, while CC Lab serves as a continuum of CC Lecture by applying theories to practice through a series of experimentations and play. Together, the three learning pillars for CC Lecture + CC Lab are code, critique, and design. 

Fostering student and/or colleague engagement (5.15 – 6.45pm)
  • Nerd Nite International (Ashley Lewis, Tom Igoe, Steve Daniels, Simone Jones, Kate Hartman, Tess Sutherland, & Emily Green) – Creating a Physical Computation Community Remotely

In summer 2020 Ryerson, ITP and OCAD came together to plan a weekly virtual help session for students. We planned for this to be a place where students get project support and debugging advice from international profs and each other. What we learned was that, instead of technical support, what our students were really interested in was community. We will present a series of strategies for creating rapid meaningful communities for the physical computation student body, no matter where you’re located.

  • Jaycee Hermida Holmes (Spelman Innovation Lab, Spelman College) – Virtual safe-spaces: How HBCU students find community in each other amidst a virtual pandemic and an ongoing civil rights movement.

The Spelman College Innovation Lab is a campus-wide resource for creative inquiry, unconventional research, experimental pedagogy, and exploratory play. The lab is a maker-space that engages the intersections of art, science, technology, and engineering. AVC 109: Creative Coding is the CS Requirement for all students in the Arts and Visual Culture Department at Spelman College.  This ten minute presentation will explore:  The creation of culturally relevant pedagogy to address current events; Assignments created to foster digital collaboration and interaction amongst students; The utilization of collaboration hubs like Teams and Discord and Zoom Chat to establish community; especially for students who did not want to turn their camera on; Restructuring of grading and assignment policies to meet the very unique needs of students during this academic year. 

“Hey Evan, when quarantine ends can we keep our classes online? I have always freaking hated language classes, but this has just been so much fun!” “Many people have told me that your AI art workshop was their favorite of the ART+TECH Festival! Thank you so much for creating the interactive material so students could make beautiful/nightmarish things together!” Don’t revert to a monotonous lecture on regurgitations of your class’s textbook!! Many studies show that the lecture format is widely ineffective in achieving student learning outcomes[1]– not to mention that it’s mind-numbing to sit through someone’s hour-long Zoom sermon. Instead, focus on having students do their book learnin’ at home, and focus on interactive activities to build applied knowledge during class. Effective learning happens between students as they share, explore, and create together —— and when students enjoy class, they tend to learn more. We will share the lessons we learned transitioning online and show you how we won the hearts of our students. After this talk, you’ll hate the lecture format as much as we do, and walk away with resources and inspiration to remodel your online class into a fun, interactive experience. Our key takeaways include: – Use a flipped classroom format. – Maximize interaction and goal-based activities during class. – Facilitate peer-to-peer learning rather than teacher-to-student. – During class, use an interaction medium (we use Google Slides). – Explicitly scaffold interactive activities for zoom breakouts (multiply yourself).  [1] Akçayır, G., & Akçayır, M. (2018). The flipped classroom: A review of its advantages and challenges. Computers & Education, 126, 334-345.

  • Gary Goldsmith  (Facebook, Design Operations) – Owning your Virtual Presence through Improv

Owning your Virtual Presence is a workshop that provides participants with a framework for how to engage and interact with one another in this shifting landscape of communication through a tiny rectangle on a computer screen. The workshop enables individuals and cohesive groups to practice the core virtual presence behaviors (support, engage, and listening for understanding) in a fun and interactive way, while providing them with tactics they can bring back and model with their teams and colleagues – allowing for deeper connection, inclusion and smoother collaboration while communicating virtually.

In this talk, we will dive deeper into the Virtual Presence behaviors that are derived from the core principles of improv comedy and provide the audience with actionable tactics they can utilize in their virtual meetings/classes to practice these behaviors. This workshop, and the talk about it, aims to prove that virtual engagement, team/colleague connections and (dare I say) better virtual meetings & classes are feasible with intentional behavior shifts that we can uphold in all of our interactions through a tiny rectangle on a computer screen.

Hand Coding Round Robin participants learn how to hand code web pages by working on each other’s computers. In 2020 the workshop shifted from the physical act of moving to another person’s computer to the solely digital act of entering someone else’s code. The workshop starts with a brief lecture on the significance of coding slowly and by hand. Participants learn how to do this kind of coding by example and with care. By adding and styling the content of each other’s web pages, participants learn the basic building blocks of web development and what it feels like to code with and for each other. Initially taught offline, this workshop ensured the participants would be working on each other computers. But what was always most important was the silence in the room, the written forms of communication through code between them. By coding collectively, which I see as the most valuable aspect of coding, it is possible to feel connected to one another in a workshop without saying anything out loud. Through code, we can say a lot of one another simultaneously without having to stay on mute, allowing the sounds of the room and the typing of keys to take up as much space as they did before we were all online all the time.

  • Andrew Burrell (University of Technology Sydney, School of Design) – Chance & Choice

Chance & Choice is a brief presented to the first-year cohort of the Visual Communication Degree at the University of Technology Sydney. It is designed to introduce the students to a number of key concepts including generative design, interaction design, world building and designing for virtual environments. Using simple analogue and digital computational techniques, along with traditional design skills, they build a small narrative world, which they then visualise in a zine. They then take this world and build an interactive virtual environment based on it and explore how their ideas translate to the affordances of these different materials and contexts. The Chance & Choice brief was written mid 2020 with the understanding that we wanted to present material that would be very new to many of our students. We knew we would have to do this online. We used a combination of Miro, Zoom and Mozilla Hubs to create a studio teaching environment, that also acted as the platforms the final work would be presented on. This presentation will outline the Chance & Choice brief, how we utilised these tools to teach the key concepts outlined above, and showcase a number of the final works and how these were presented online.

Beyond Zoom: Getting weird with teaching online (7.00 – 8.45pm)
  • Mindy Seu (Rutgers University / Yale University / Southland Institute) – more* (a workshop for Southland Institute)

I’d like to give an overview of the more* workshop. I would introduce the Southland Institute, an alt edu organization in Los Angeles that tries to create an open-ended, interdisciplinary, and sustainable education model. They invited me and Laura Coombs to give a 2-day workshop. We proposed an introduction, analysis, and amplification of the asterisk symbol, as a proxy for amendment, censorship, gender-hacking, and secondary layers of text. With a collaborator, we modified the annotation tool Hypothes.is and added it to our website multidimensional.link. Through a series of prompts, participants added asterisks and annotations and contributed to a collective publication: http://multidimensional.link/southland. An asterisk gives us more. It adds layers of information to a primary text. It encodes expletives, repairs mistakes, and inserts personal voice. It is an additive gesture. In this Southland Institute workshop, two instructors and 35 participants co-authored a group publication that amplifies the potential of this glyph.

  • Andrea Williams (VCU School of the Arts, Kinetic Imaging) – Anxiety and the Anthropocene: Taking Small Bites Through Multimedia Engagement

In my Anxiety and the Anthropocene class at VCU in Richmond, VA, a primarily sound art and environments course, the arc of the curriculum was: Listening to Ourselves, Listening to Each Other, and Listening to the Earth. Suddenly, as if on cue, the Earth could not have gotten any louder, yet we could no longer listen together in the same space. During Spring Break, the pandemic sent most of my students back home to different listening environments than the ones that they were used to, and some students were nomadic for quite some time. They no longer had the accessibility and economic equality that the VCU multimedia lab provided, and their fabulous group work on projects could have been lost. It was time to adapt quickly, without panic.

I would like to present various ways that I engaged students synchronously and asynchronously that creatively leveled the playing field when students had to leave the economic equality that the multimedia lab and equipment room provided. What many universities did not understand was that in rural places, like in Northern Virginia, high speed internet is unavailable and Zoom is inaccessible. Hot spots aren’t a long-term solution for synchronous rural learning, especially since cell service can be spotty or non-existent in rural areas. Also, some students remained in the city of Richmond, VA, but they were living in crowded homes or apartments with limited bandwidth and synchronous online learning was not reliable. I’d like to focus on creative asynchronous ways that digital art students can learn collaboratively besides utilizing Zoom.

  • Craig Fahner (York University Glendon College, Communications Program) – Doing Platform Studies Online: Maybe We Should Just Make Our Own Platform

I will outline my experience of running an online seminar entitled “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Cyberculture,” which focused on critical perspectives on algorithms and platforms and relied heavily on the use of… algorithms and platforms. The surveillant, commodifying practices and algorithmic biases of monopolistic platforms were a focal point in this class, and students inevitably questioned the ethics of totalizing platforms like Google and Office365. In order to resist the deleterious tendencies of these platforms from colouring our discussions in-class, we opted to collaboratively design our own platform. Using glitch.com as a live-coding tool, my students and I aimed to integrate the values of the classroom (creativity, criticality, discourse) into an experimental platform. The results were simple but presented a radically different model for collaboration in comparison to the standard tools provided by the university. I’ll briefly describe the workshop where my students and I collaboratively designed an experimental collaboration platform by live-coding it using glitch.com. I’ll expand on the possibilities of small-scale, purpose built platforms for teaching as a means of resisting the creep of monopolistic platforms into the classroom.

  • Nancy Mauro-Flude (RMIT University (Melbourne), College of Design and Social Context) – Writing the Feminist Internet

“writing the *feminist internet” was a 2-hour collaborative writing session, morphing, exploring, expanding upon 10 working points. Together we will overwrite, edit, correct, challenge, echo, duplicate, expand, solidify, summarise, nuance, incant these principles and lores. Performing a collaborative working definition of a *feminist internet in the context of the writing session folds in all the waves *waves* \0\ \0/ /0/ Performing our politics live, for each other, carving out online space away from systems of imperial fixity, and towards skill sharing, fluidity and multiplicity. Participants are enabled to embrace literary freedom: riffing off, imagining, rejecting or rephrasing the original text in this form of active poetry.

Working from the position of an *open feminism that embraces multiplicity, diversity, queerness, ephemeral becoming, transforming, shifting – making space for underrepresented voices and not privileging our voices in relation to others – nor doom scrolling but instead affirmative feeling through sentences, and dancing words with other people. Through this performative exploration we are seeding the ground of diverse feminist traditions of knowledge production. 10 working draft points – propositions – expand in each iteration, together with local and remote presences. Why? Carving out online space that is fluid and wayward, experimentally through deciphering, interpreting, trying, failing, and blossoming. Indeterminate writing is an act of care, mediation and healing, by deploying networked tools away from tactics of control, other kinds of knowledge exchange and voices to arise and intermingle in this space of possibility.

  • Jane Mi (Scripps College, Media Studies)- Introduction to Computational Media 

Introductory course in computation within context of media and art with a focus on two- dimensional graphics. The potential of computer as medium will be considered through exercises, assignments, readings, and critiques. Both procedural and object-oriented programming will be explored, as well as, using input and output of files, generative techniques, and image creation through data processing.Hands on experiments in computation.

In my Introduction to Computational Media, as an icebreaker I requested that curator Josh Tengan to lead a lau hala workshop. Generally, lau hala is taught in person, but an exception was made for him to lead our workshop. His group, Keanahala, is a community weaving program, which perpetuates the Native Hawaiian practice of ulana lauhala (weaving) and helps to bring Hawaiian lauhala moena (mats) back into the home. The classes in the Keanahala program offer the opportunity to acquire a new skill, share stories, and make connections through weaving and learning. The practice of working with lau hala is based on a deeper value system that respects our natural resources, kūpuna, kumu, and community. This Hawaiian process of inclusion and collaboration will empower you in unanticipated ways.

My students then studied the Para Site Art Space exhibition Koloa: Women, Art, and Technology curated by Tunakaimanu Fielakepa, the Dowager Lady Fielakepa, and co-curated with Cosmin Costinas and Vivian Ziherl, which includes the work of Tanya Edwards, Nikau Hindin, and Vaimaila Urale. Through this lens they work asked create a singular shape that can be repeated to make a pattern. From that shape create 3 patterns by varying the repetition of the design.

  • Ed Bear (Pioneer Works Tech Lab) – Chthonic Computing: Code for Your Roots

During this three-part workshop, former Tech Resident Ed Bear will guide inexperienced and skilled participants through the step by step process of coding a DIY peer-to-peer video (ex. Skype, Hangouts, or Facetime) with custom visuals, audio, and UI. Using corporate code and infrastructure, participants will build simple local and remote software. Then, the class will culminate in a discussion of the social, economic, environmental, and cultural ramifications of pervasive and invisible “cloud” computing infrastructure.

Saturday, 23 January 2021

Hosting Virtual Events (11.00 – 12.30pm)

In the workshop, we will show how this has led to some of our collaboration pieces in both musical, performative and literary arts come about by using the #pingpongsessions. By using tools such as Whatsapp, Hydra, Youtube and Zoom to name a few, we have and are using the network systems around us to enhance our collaborative efforts and produce content. Participants will see how improvised writing and coding can lead to various outcomes, musically, as well as, how to use network elements to your advantage, when writing or producing work. https://networkmusicfestival.org/programme/workshops/pingpongssession-kofi-oduro-mohamed-tarqui-jalloh/

  • Todd Anderson (RISD Film, Animation & Video) – Live Performance for Online Audiences

The Live Performance for Online Audiences course was created in response to the pandemic and the widespread closing of performance venues. The course focuses on using real-time web technologies to design innovative online performances for audiences to join from their home computers and devices. Topics covered included HTML/CSS, Websockets and signal passing, livestreaming, HitchHiker, performance theory and game design. In particular I would like to talk about the two public-facing events put on by the class, the midterm Online Haunted House and the Final Show.

  • Melody Loveless (NYU Tandon, Integrated Digital Media / Hunter College / Harvestworks) – Teaching Live Coding Online

Live coding is the act of manipulating algorithms in real time to manipulate an ongoing process, like music and visuals. It is a common feature of algoraves, performances featuring algorithms. This presentation will discuss experiences teaching live coding online this past Fall 2020, highlighting the class’s final live streamed algorave. More specifically, I’m interested in discussing, subjects and technologies learned over the course of the semester (artistic, historical, software, etc), technical logistics for the algorave, challenges and successes teaching this course, and results from final presentations.

Exploring Technology is a learning repository and course where 100 students join for a rollercoaster in creative tech (3D, ML, AR, WebGL, Electronics) while learning to learn and building interactive spaces and experiences. With four weeks and an all-remote situation, Miro & Zoom became pivotal, and Hubs became the exhibition area. The Virtual World Safari itself was a social adventure and performative lecture, where students moved between platforms such as Gather, Topia, High Fidelty and Hubs – discussing how the technical context challenged means of interaction.

  • Hugh McCabe (Technological University Dublin, Creative Digital Media) – Using Twitch for a Creative Digital Media Graduate Show

At the end of May 2020, faced with a situation where we were unable to run our graduate degree show in the normal manner, we designed, planned and delivered a virtual version of the show using the Twitch platform. We looked at how other degree programmes were delivering graduate shows and saw that most of them were using static websites for showcasing student work and then running a live social event delivered by means of a video-conferencing platform such as Zoom or a social platform such as Facebook. We decided that this approach did not constitute a show in any conventional sense of the word and so we committed to delivering something that would showcase the work of the students but simultaneously act as a celebratory event that would bring together students, staff, alumni and other stakeholders.

Physical Education (The Computing Edition) (12.45 – 2.15pm)

Creation & Computation is a first-year, first-semester foundational graduate level course in the Digital Futures Program at OCAD University that introduces students to physical computing, creative coding, and networks with specific topics tailored to current issues. This talk will present our findings from the Fall 2020 edition of this course which was taught entirely remotely and mostly asychronously with students situated in Canada, China, India, Ghana, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, and United States. Topics that will be addressed include material and parts acquisition across countries; assignment design for pandemic-related topics including physical engagement and co-presence; strategies for remote collaboration and critique; and co-teaching approaches for remote learning.

  • Jennifer Jacobs  (University of California Santa Barbara, Media Arts and Technology) – Computational Fabrication via At-Home Makerspaces

Computational Fabrication is a graduate course in an interdisciplinary art and technology department at UCSB. The course emphasizes computational fabrication; students use programming languages to design for and control digital fabrication machines. For the Spring 2020 quarter, I used my research funds and departmental resources to purchase low-cost 3D printers and PLA filament and ship them directly to students to conduct the course remotely. The total cost per student ranged from $250-350. Shipping printers to students’ homes created a situation where students were simultaneously living with printers and creating objects for personal use with them. The use of at-home printers also had unique opportunities when compared with how students access machines in a workshop. Unlike staff-managed workshop equipment, individual printers required students to learn about machine maintenance and repair. The at-home setup also allowed for constant access to the printers, which in turn translated to the possibility for students to iterate extensively on their designs. Repeated design iterations were common in both courses and went beyond simple optimizations. We also observed how students worked with hobbyist machines rather than industrial equipment in a university shop. The hobbyist printers imposed more severe constraints than machines we had used in prior courses but still enabled students to develop knowledge of how to design for digital fabrication constraints.

  • Taylor Levy (School for Poetic Computation) – Poetic Hardware

Poetic Hardware at SFPC is an introduction to electronics + hardware course for artists. For the electronics portion of this course, I developed a series of physical lecture notes, custom printed circuit boards (PCBs), designed to make physical some of the more abstract concepts covered when first learning about electronics. With a focus on digital electronics, the series weaves a narrative from a basic LED + switch circuit, to transistors (MOSFETs), logic gates (CMOS), integrated circuits or functional computational modules, time, memory and finally the programmable microcontroller. A goal is for students to be able to draw a physical, material inference between the single transistor and computers as we know them.

  • Allison Berkoy (CUNY’s New York City College of Technology, Emerging Media Technology (MTEC)) – From “Are You Prepared?” to “You are Prepared”: an R&D lab and a talking balloon move online

In Spring 2020, a research and development lab for the project “Are You Prepared?” learned to adapt. As part of an advanced undergraduate “Technical Production” course in the Emerging Media Technology (MTEC) program at CUNY’s New York City College of Technology, students incubate a complex technical project along with their instructor. In this case, my students and I were developing an interactive lecture on the subject of emergency preparedness and simulation, hosted by a machine-sculpture in the guise of a talking balloon. The project mixes physical computing, live performance, interactive installation, and simple body-controlled games for the audience to play; probing the potential of crisis simulation as a destabilizing force for change. When true crisis hit, it forced just that— change. With the move to fully remote learning, “Are You Prepared?” was renamed a more aspirational “You are Prepared.” And with the loss of equipment access, and with the impossibility of live-audience experience for the foreseeable future, project development pivoted to building a browser-based interactive performance between a single human participant and their computer. Our Zoom-based R&D lab trained up on new tools and platforms, developed new systems, and successfully drafted a body-controlled augmented reality “toilet paper hoarding” game. This presentation will present the overall arc of the project and course structure, focusing on the successes and challenges of the online switch. Some aspects of our former in-person structure lent themselves surprisingly well to virtual gatherings: student-led collaborative group activities to start off each morning session, a “gathering for tea” each afternoon, regular group meeting check-ins, and two focused time blocks for small-team work sessions. There was an impressive self-organizing happening amongst the students, which I am still trying to wrap my head around—the factors that may have encouraged this dynamic, how to encourage this dynamic in the future.

  • Carolin Clausnitzer (Technologiestiftung Berlin, Empowerment & Capacity Building) – IoT Field Kitchen 

In the framework of our multiplier training “IoT Field Kitchen,” we taught basic IoT skills to educators and students in order to create specific applications for the Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin, one of the largest urban open spaces in the world. After a mapping workshop conducted in collaboration with various local universities as part of the CityLAB Berlin’s summer school (conveniently located right next to the Tempelhofer Feld), we invited a group of educators and students to join us for a hands-on workshop during lockdown. Thanks to hardware delivered to their doorstep and our online training, participants were able to prototype their first application and generate more ideas, which will be tested on-location at the Tempelhofer Feld after the lockdown. I am presenting a hybrid concept for a physical computing workshop which covers the process of location mapping, remote hardware prototyping, and remote design thinking workshops, all happening during the pandemic. In my presentation, I’ll discuss the challenges of teaching hardware prototyping online, highlight stories from workshop participants, and offer a sneak peak of what they have been implementing in their own organizations since the training. Finally, I’ll address how this methodology contributes to our mission of empowering citizens to take part in shaping the future of the city.

K-12 Virtual Engagement (3.45 – 6.00pm)
  • Tess Sutherland (Royal Ontario Museum Learning Department) – Analog Code: Teaching computational thinking outside of the screen

It is easy when we teach code to allow course content to be entirely screen-based, and even more so when we work virtually. Now more than ever, as our students’ entire lives have been subsumed by their glowing screens, it is essential to get them involved in tactile learning. From paper-based activities to embodied games, some of the most significant learning about code and code-thinking happens away from the computer. This talk will focus on concrete examples that educators can bring into their classrooms and discuss the impact of non-screen based activities in student’s engagement with creative coding concepts. I have been teaching code over Zoom since 2017 with the Hack the ROM team at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Canada. Hack the ROM is an outreach program that empowers students across Ontario to develop creative coding projects that respectfully share Indigenous knowledges. Though we work with students from grade 4 up to high school, the teaching strategies and learning outcomes are relevant for all learners. I have delivered this program to over 500 young people and first time coders, and what always sticks with them most are hands-on, off-screen learning opportunities.

  • Julia Rich (Geffen Academy at UCLA’s iTrack program) – Art as Language: How Young People Translate Their Emotions

Mx. Julia Rich (they/them) is a 6th grade shop and computer programming teacher at UCLA’s Geffen Academy. Over the course of their class, students dive into the foundations of a multitude of different art forms and emerging technologies. During this talk, they will be sharing their findings in how computational art and design education has provided a fertile ground for community growth among students during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The talk will include feedback and lessons from students, what support young people need most, and how educators can better provide young people with resources and care.

  • Lluvia Nisaye (INDIGital) – INDIGital:: Healing Through Technology

In this session, I will share more about INDIGital, a critical technology & coding course, based on Ancestral Knowledge for Indigenous youth across the north of Turtle Island. A space of co-creation, where participants reconnect with their imagination, heal their relationship with learning, learn Ancestral Knowledge from Elders and Knowledge keepers, imagine new possibilities for technology, develop relationships and solidarity with youth from other nations, and learn coding fundamentals from an Indigenous perspective.

TKU Digital Agency is a work-based learning program for neurodiverse teens and young adults. Participants work on digital projects for clients and are paid a stipend for their contributions. Choosing tools and practice that allow for collaborative and independent remote work while fostering a team-oriented creative environment.

I’d like to present on how I’ve used storytelling + personal narrative exploration to break down barriers between participants, inspire closeness, increase engagement, and uncover unique ideas. At Black Girls Code, I came up with a brainstorming template (centered deeply on storytelling and personal narrative) that helped the youth i mentored come up with a Hackathon idea unique to them. They got 2nd place in their division. I also gave another talk on Remember Technologies // Imagining Futures at my job. Through the talk, I learned a lot about how personal narrative and community meditations (where I ask a reflective question to the group, and everyone answers in the chat vs just imagining to themselves) can be used as a tool to increase engagement, imagination, and idea creation. I usually do community meditations in person, and whenever someone speaks the group snaps for their contribution — I’m learning new ways that experience can be remodeled online. 

  • Chris Collins (School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) / University of Illinois at Chicago) – Magic Masks / Filter Fun

In this case study, I’ll discuss how to gain inspiration for remote learning by looking to live broadcast journalism, twitch streamers, live theater, and educational public television. Looking at these precedents and borrowing from their techniques was a lightbulb moment for me. Instead of viewing online learning as a poor stop-gap substitute for in-person learning, classes can be re-reframed more as live, interactive TV productions.

Viewing remote learning in this way opens up many new ways to engage, surprise, and connect with students. I’ll provide an overview of these ideas, then give some easy practical tips and technical starting points.

  • Yidan Zeng (Eyebeam) – Digital Day Camp: Rituals of Care

Digital Day Camp: Rituals of Care was Eyebeam’s first virtual summer intensive for high school youth. Over the course of five weeks, 30 students met on Google Hangouts and Discord to explore and create forms of care for themselves and their communities, focusing on digital self-care, physical self-care, and reimagining technological and non-technological forms of togetherness. In this short presentation, I will highlight successful icebreaker activities that fostered interpersonal connection, student-led documentation practice for archiving virtual events, and quietly profound student works from the program.