Fellowships 2022

This fellowship project consists of support for the p5-serial project created by Shawn van Every, Jen Kagan, and Tom Igoe, which allows for serial communication from and to the browser with p5.js. Aarón will do repository maintenance, code refactoring, and tutorials and teaching materials writing.

During this Fellowship Aarón will focus on research and development of different alternatives to the underlying code of the project, to make the software easier to use and compatible with different desktop web browsers and mobile devices.

Since the project is currently being used for teaching at different educational institutions, Aarón hopes that their work will help expand the ease of use of p5-serial, and making it even more accessible to other educators and enthusiasts, by also writing more documentation for people who want to use this library and who want to contribute back to the project.

During Atilio’s fellowship, he will be working on an open-source web application in which instructors can easily visualize data science concepts and techniques, such as clustering, regression, etc. Instructors’ will have access to shortcuts and templates for common data and data transformation and analysis techniques.

Living in digital and urban worlds separates us from Earth’s abundant life and makes it easy to forget that we are nodes in a vast interspecies network. Bhavik looks towards indigenous teachers to find a way out of this forgetting. To begin building a relationship of reciprocal love with our ecology, we first need to choose to pay close attention.

P5 in the Park is Bhavik’s teaching fellowship project. It is a syllabus of “plein air” coding exercises that explore how programming can be used to pay attention to the many lifeforms around us. In each exercise learners are encouraged to step away from their computers and spend time with a houseplant, meet neighborhood birds, or visit a local park. Students then use P5.JS to represent and reflect on what they learnt from the natural world.

These exercises will range across skill levels, from drawing shapes to morphogensis approaches like L-Systems. Bhavik’s hope is that they not only bring learners closer to nature, but also are a relaxing, delightful experience in learning to code. He would love to develop this project in collaboration with the Processing community, so if you have ideas or suggestions please reach out.

Chrysalis Corpus begins by mailing skins Coralys wove, a movement score they wrote, and a sound score created by Cy X to friends. Each person lives with the skins for some days, moves through the scores, emails a response back (in any form), then mails the skins to the next person.

With Processing Foundation, Coralys will create an evolving experiential website to house responses received and responses to come. This will serve as a collective space with a launch week guided by Coralys, inviting offerings from folks with common threads of stewarding more livingness, attention liberation, and eco-social repair. This series will include visual and physical ruminations, community activations, shared resources, and workshops.

Coralys’s research will draw connections between Processing as software and processing as a way to move through shared experience, time travel, coding, computers, looms, creation, birth, and life cycles fueled by curiosities including –

How do birth, death, and transition make space for intergenerational and interspecies imagination?

How are leaf venation systems related to human and nonhuman kin’s networks of care and how are these mimicked by computer networks?

Can an argument be made for computer as species? As companion? Looms as coding? Coding as creation?

The 24-week Design+Coding Club program runs over two school terms both in-person and online. The first term is geared towards developing digital literacy and computer science skills within an open learning environment. In the second term, we place a greater emphasis on allowing students to express themselves through a creative coding, 3-D design or robotics project.

An important aspect of the project is that of making computing relevant and accessible to Jakarta’s students. Therefore, our system-agnostic approach is compatible with learning via mobile phone, tablet or laptop/PC. Furthermore, we will integrate traditional Indonesian design elements as we hypothesize that these will be more engaging to learners. For example, traditional Wayang puppetry and Batik pattern design lend themselves well to animation and geometric pattern design respectively.

Jakarta is a large metropolis with a vibrant digital economy so we will engage industry support and volunteers to participate in both the design and translation of teaching materials, and in mentoring Design+Coding Club sessions and site visits. In this way, we will provide learners with a real-world context for coding along with approachable role models.

Joslenne’s project, “Developing a Creative Coding Syllabus for a First-Year Liberal Arts Computing Course” will focus on the development of a syllabus for freshman students at Macalester. Specifically, a first-year course (FYC) is a special course that allows students with various interests to explore many aspects of our school using the course as a vehicle. To take advantage of this exploration and curiosity, Joslenne will create a syllabus that centers engaging and innovative ideas from Processing while covering how technology and code may cause harm to vulnerable populations. This will be done by weaving in impactful topics on social justice, bias, and ethics. In addition, Joslenne will seek iterative feedback from colleagues at Macalester in Computing and across other disciplines in the school as well as her Processing fellows to access the most diverse voices. Overall, the goal is to create an illuminating experience for students that gives them the skills and voice to identify harm through learning basic programming foundations. As a result, Joslenne hopes this sparks a fruitful journey for students to stay in the Computing field and develop socially-responsible software and technology.

Although AI-based artistic processes, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and text-to-image algorithms hold great promise for enhancing teaching and learning in K-12 Art Education, they can be challenging to adopt for Art Teachers with little to no AI knowledge. This challenge is compounded by the lack of entry-level educational resources that address K-12 learning contexts.

To address this challenge, The Art Teachers’ Guide to Artificial Intelligence is designed to help K-12 Art teachers understand basic AI concepts, learn useful AI terminology, explore arts-based use cases, open source tools and understand ethical implications. By providing a framework for thinking about AI in the context of K-12 art classes, this guide will help Art teachers prepare students for an increasingly AI-augmented artistic ecosystem.

Between 1939 and 1942, the state of South Carolina dispossessed more than 2500 Black people and drowned hundreds of acres of farm and swampland through the creation of Lakes Marion and Moultrie, disappearing homes, community centers, and graves, and fragmenting lives in the process. In this project, Morgan will cartographically (re)map the houses, communities, and ecologies of these disappeared spaces in an effort to demonstrate the scale and consequences of material and social deluges. Morgan seeks to (re)map that which lies below the surface in order to honor those whose lives were destroyed a century ago. Following recent Black ecologies scholarship, Morgan’s project delves into a “wetter archive” (Bennett 2020), think through murky waters (Jue 2020), and undrown submerged Black towns (Gumbs 2020) using the Processing Foundation’s mapping technologies (p5.js) and critical fabulation (Hartman 2019). Morgan will create maps that document the transformation of space over time which will interrogate the question: progress for whom? Centering material environmental change in digital maps will allow individuals to visualize the change over time, and documenting the consequences of flood-based dispossession and government negligence will allow us to make plans as we look ahead to the impending threats of rising tides worldwide.

The project is an initial step for localizing P5.js references and relevant materials into the Kuna language. In the Kuna Indigenous community of Arquia, located in the Darién tropical rainforest, we want to use p5.js to build the first self-produced Kuna dictionary in a digital and visual format. This initial project would be a foundational exercise for our Digital dictionary; we envision the creation of the dictionary as a collaborative project with Kuna students and professors of the Centro Educativo Kuna using Processing tools. As the children’s first language is Kuna, and they usually learn Spanish in high school as a foreign language, it is crucial to produce educational materials in Kuna to foster digital accessibility in the educational Kuna context.

Sierra’s professional development workshops and resources are for pre-service teachers at Georgia State University who are beginning to teach or integrate computer science into their teaching. These workshops will also illustrate to teachers how to leverage personal data, particularly geospatial data, to provide more personally and culturally relevant CS experiences for students.

These workshops will use Processing as a medium to facilitate conversations about technology ethics and provide a more meaningful introduction for teachers to the widely used but challenging to learn open-source CS Awesome curriculum for AP Computer Science A. Sierra’s project will use a computer science course for pre-service teachers she is teaching with her advisor at Georgia State this summer to iteratively develop these workshops and resources. Project outcomes will be a set of resources and materials hosted on a website that could be used by education schools to provide a more meaningful and personally relevant introduction to computer science for teachers interested in teaching or integrating CS into their courses. Resources and materials will be organized into different workshops that can be run independently or sequentially.

Each workshop will have supporting videos, lesson guides, resources, code examples, and unplugged activities.

This is a portal web that imagines rural technological ecologies in Nahuatl and in Spanish. Centering kids and youth in rural and Indigenous areas in Mexico (& beyond). This web portal dreams and portrays the embodiment of the many ecologies around rural ecosystems. Taking from the definition of ecology [as the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level.] This isa space where we embrace these beautiful technologies that continue to be threatened but which are part of our ecosystems and are one with our rural and Indigenous cultures and communities. This project centers rural childhood and youth in the active participation at the intersection of ecology, our environment and technologies. As the portal materializes it will continually become a space of sharing knowledge and archiving our knowledge in our own ways.

As a collective and mutual project, workshops will be taking place as the portal develops — to ask for the children’s feedback, to share how the space works, where the documentation is and how it evolves so that everyone can access the material and be able to share whenever anyone wants.

This project hopes to open up Taiwanese middle-school underprivileged and indigenous students’ imagination of creative technology through more beginner-friendly and approachable technology education. Yen Ching and Munus’s project develops a non-institutional method for teaching college students how to reimagine Taiwanese Creative Technology Education through a critical, anti-colonial, and intersectional approach, as well as ideating other alternate possibilities.

The project will be divided into three stages, each about a month long. Yen Ching and Munus will interview practitioners in Taiwanese Creative Technology education, remote technology education, and the design and technology industry to map out a landscape of the current Taiwanese Creative Technology Education. They will work with a collective group of interested undergrad and grad students at National Tsing Hua University and National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University, introducing the students to various resources of creative technology education with critical, anti-colonial, and intersectional teaching philosophies. Yen Ching and Munus will also facilitate them in developing their own teaching tools and workshops, primarily using open-source tools like p5.js to reimagine alternate forms of knowledge sharing in a Taiwanese context.

In the last stage, Yen Ching and Munus will host an in-person practicum in Jianshi middle school and let these college students test-run their workshops for the indigenous and underprivileged students. All teaching materials and reflections will be archived to an open-source website to hopefully enrich the broader community of Taiwanese creative tech education.