✿ A Recap of Summer CC FEST 2022 with Processing Foundation ✿
A look back on some memorable highlights with the Creative Coding Community!
✿ Article Contents ✿
- What is Creating Coding Fest (CC Fest)?
- Who can attend and participate?
- June 2022 CC Fest Guest Lineup and Highlights! :)
- Who are the organizers and how can I get involved as a future contributor and/or festival attendee?
- What was it like being a CC Fest volunteer contributor?
- Closing remarks and personal impact of CC Fest
Last June 2022, I decided to hang out with the creative coding community and volunteer for Processing Foundation to help organize CC Fest on zoom events. Here is my look back on the events and behind-the-scenes from the contributor’s side!
✿ What is Creative Coding Fest (CC Fest)? ✿
CC Fest is a free and all-inclusive event supported by Processing Foundation that brings together the creative coding (CC) community for a day of playful, interactive, and educational speeches or workshops related to all things code and tech! The festival explores a diverse range of topics including digital art,
accessibility, creative coding, interactive game making, and even AI/machine learning. The best part for me personally was that many of these topics were introduced and taught in a fun and beginner friendly way using interactive examples, so that people who are new or still exploring different technology rabbit holes (myself included) can just jump into things and follow the ride.
✿ Who can attend and participate? ✿
Anyone! — You don’t already have to be a coder, programmer, artist, or computer science nerd. You just have to be curious (and maybe have some free time available that day haha). In terms of hosting a workshop or delivering a speech, CC Fest is an event that actively welcomes a diverse range of educators, community organizers, and/or activists looking for a platform to inspire and share their ideas. If you know someone special in mind, you can even nominate them as a future workshop contributor by emailing in to ccfest@processing.org!
✿ June 2022 CC Fest Guest Lineup and Highlights! ✿
This year’s guest line up included a diverse range of speakers based all around the world made possible on zoom events!
❀ KEYNOTES ❀
We had some amazing keynote speakers from J. Khadijah Abdurahman on an Ode to Playfulness, as well as Frieda McAlear who spoke about Rematriating Tech! Both speakers hold a strong research background and are women in computing advocating for social justice and inclusivity in our technology, education, and social systems today.
❀ WORKSHOPS ❀
The workshops were divided into two parts and held simultaneously within the zoom events platform. This offered flexible options for attendees to drop in and out of zoom rooms, and freely explore different topics. Almost all were recorded and sent out afterwards for personal viewing within a set time. It was a diverse pool of workshop hosts with different expertise coming in from all over the world. Some even came in from places like South Korea and taught a creating coding class at 3 am in their own time zone!
Examples of featured workshops this summer included Portia Morrell (Fun with p5.js: Making Simple Apps by Reading Data), So Sun Park (Rotate and Animate Objects with Trigonometry in p5.js), Layla Quinones (Multiculturalism vs. Social Justice), and Miguel Nobrega (Data Visualization for Digital Products). There were also workshop volunteers supporting guest instructors in their zoom sessions with technical challenges or audience questions (which btw, is a way to get involved at future CC Fests).
Here is a full guest line up of the June CC Fest workshops!
- Emily Thomforde — AI Gesture Recognizers to Control Actions in p5.js
- Munus Shih and Iley Cao — GenZ(ine)
- Portia Morrell — Fun with p5.js: Making Simple Apps by Reading Data
- Aiyo — Exploring materiality: experiments w/ bio art
- So Sun Park — Rotate and Animate Objects with Trigonometry in p5.js
- Haoshu (Roy) Yang — Nested For Loop and Permutation Design
- MeeNa Ko — Pixel Art for Educators
- Liam Baum — Using Music with p5.js
- Joshua Davis — Working with Color
- Caleb Foss — Processing & Arduino: An introduction to communication between sketches and electronic components
- Layla Quinones — Multiculturalism vs. Social Justice
- Miguel Nobrega — Data Visualization for Digital Products
For a full detailed description of the workshops and keynote speakers, please click here!
✿ Who are the organizers and how can I get involved as a future contributor and/or festival attendee? ✿
Of course organizing and successfully executing a major virtual event requires a lot of prior planning, communication, and set up which is why I want to shoutout the amazingly talented CC Fest co-organizers Saber Khan and Marie LeBlanc Flanagan! Saber is the Education Community Director at Processing Foundation who collaborated with Marie to actively maintain CC Fest as an accessible and welcoming environment for current and future creative coders, students, educators, and hobbyists alike!
If you have any ideas or questions on CC Fest or are looking to get involved as a future contributor and/or volunteer for the next fest (Winter 2022), please don’t be shy and just send your ideas to ccfest@processing.org! All ideas, especially ways to improve the event from an audience perspective, are welcomed. This is also one example way you can start contributing, by literally sharing your feedback and asking questions! :)
✿ What was it like being a CC Fest volunteer contributor? ✿
As a CC Fest contributor, I got to hang out with Saber and Marie for a few weeks, learn more about CC Fest, and support them in some pre-event set up and planning! As an event running virtually this summer, it was important to try and make sure all platforms used would come equipped with proper tools and instructions on accessing the event, especially for folks new or unfamiliar with the zoom events platform. This led me to create a zoom events guide to help attendees use and navigate the platform just in case. Other things I did as a pre-event volunteer was to help polish and add onto the CC Fest website with updated information, and also support some of the workshop hosts on the day of.
I definitely learned that there are many different layers of consideration and details that go into designing accessibility into virtual events! For example, making sure closed captioning works in all forms, and testing various links sent out prior and during the event to ensure they are active — just to name a few.
✿ Closing remarks and personal impact from CC Fest ✿
Overall, my experience contributing for CC FEST was one that fun, serendipitous, but also very eye-opening in many ways. One takeaway I have from this experience is that there are just so. many. ways you can apply coding! It can be a playful medium to express your thoughts and feelings, or a cause bringing people all across the globe together in this post-pandemic, work-from-home era. I’ve also come to realize that digital literacy and expression is itself a form of having access to certain things, like educational materials or technology that requires it. CC Fest was one catalyst that motivated me to start learning about the importance of digital accessibility and how you can start designing inclusivity into your projects.
It truly is an event you wouldn’t want to miss! ❀❀❀
