Telepresence Workshop International Collaboration for Unravel The Code

In October 2020, I ran part of a workshop for classes across 3 institutions as part of an intensive 5 day program of international collaboration around art and making. A colleague in Belgium, Frederik De Bleser, and I worked on the code, and he did a section of the workshop. This workshop built on the preceding Part 1: CircuitPython and the Circuit Playground Express workshop, by my colleague in Baltimore, Paul Mirel.

My part of the workshop implemented a sketch of telepresence (remote touch) across the the internet. We used the Circuit Playground Express (CPE), bespoke software on the CPE, a Processing sketch to handle the actual internet communication, and an MQTT server. All the bespoke software is in a git repository.

I structure my workshops for non-programmers as a series of small exercises, and bits of professional programming practice expressed as humor. I try to pack several goals into my workshops, notably not trying to turn artists into programmers. I show them patterns in the structure of code, clues about where to customize code, comfort with experimenting and breaking code, and where more information can be found. The workshops tend to be quite long, 4-5 hours. We like to group students so they can learn from and support each other.

This workshop was the first I did that was entirely remote. It went surprisingly well, because I had a large support staff: at least 4 technical people patrolled the Discourse and Zoom to answer questions, as well, the instruction team provided a lot of preparation (distributing CPE's, infrastructure, etc). The students also could help each other via Discourse and Zoom.

In the culmination of 5-day collaboration, the students produced works around the idea of remote-touch. None of them used the code or mechanisms we taught in the workshops, but I hope the hands-on workshop inspired them in their actual projects (which were quite sophisticated).

I've extracted and re-used some pieces of the bespoke software, notably the "find an Arduino serial port" code from the Processing sketch.

You may find the presentation notes amusing.