Processing Workshop for CTIN

The workshop on PROCESSING will start tomorrow, Tuesday February 24th at 6:30pm in the Zemeckis media lab. The instructor will be Casey Reas and it will meet for 5 sessions: 24 Feb, 26 Feb, 4 March, 9 March, 11 March.

Processing is a tool for teaching basic concepts that will lead to the creation of future media and tools. The strength of Processing as a tool for learning and sketching lies in its simplicity, generality, and extensibility. Its simplicity makes it easy to use -- making it possible to create basic interaction within a short time period. Its generality makes it an ideal tool for conveying many concepts: vector and raster drawing, procedural and object oriented programming, image processing, parameterized form, interaction with standard input devices and custom hardware devices, 2D and 3D graphics. It is extensible in the sense that it may be used at multiple levels of difficulty and the basic software library may be expanded in time as people develop and share their programs.

Processing is not a commercial production tool, but was built specifically for learning and sketching. It will be possible to download it from the internet and will be free to use. Processing is written in Java and enables the creation of Java Applications and Applets within a carefully designed set of constraints. It uses a 2D/3D Java rendering API that is a cross between postscript-style imaging in 2D and 3D rendering with OpenGL (a 3D graphics library). Through developing Processing as a solid and general technical platform, we hope teaching the concepts of interaction and computer programming will focus more on the qualities and content of medium, rather than specific technologies.

Processing is free to download and use. We encourage people to distribute it widely and refer back to the site: http://processing.org.