Programming in Processing

Winsor School, Spring 2008
Wednesdays 3:30pm-4:30pm, Library Lab

Instructor: Mish Madsen (MIT '09, Winsor '05)
Assistants: Anika Huhn (MIT '09) and Lyla Fischer (MIT '11)


This term's Programming in Processing course, open to IIIs and IVs - as well as Is and IIs who took the beginners' course last term - will move slightly faster than the previous course and will cover different material. More information about Processing and the course instructor can be found at the bottom of this page.

Parents, you can check back during term to see what we're working on each week.

The class will meet on the following Wednesday afternoons:
2/6, 2/13, 2/20, 2/27, 3/5, 4/2, 4/9, 4/16, 4/30.


Week Material covered Slide presentation In-class handout
1 The basics: window size, background color,
drawing rectangles and ellipses		 week 1 slides week 1 handout
2 Using color (fill, stroke, and strokeWeight);
lines and custom shapes 		week 2 slides week 2 handout
3 Variable types; semi-transparent colors;
introduction to animation		 week 3 slides week 3 handout
4 Using conditional ("if") statements
 week 4 slides week 4 handout
5 Using the "fade" effect; writing text to the screen;
getting mouse input; random numbers 		week 5 slides week 5 handout
6 Coordinate transformations; inverting colors;
getting keyboard input; working on final projects 		week 6 slides week 6 handout
7 working on final projects week 7 slides week 7 handout
8 Working on Final Project
9 Final Project Presentations!




About Processing: The students will be learning Processing, a programming language heavily based on Java, in which many corporate programming environments operate. Processing was developed in the MIT Media Lab by graduate students of John Maeda, the new president of the Rhode Island School of Design. We will be using Processing to think about how to solve technical problems in user interfaces and digital art, while also giving the students a firm background in Java that will give them confidence and competence in computer programming.

For more information about Processing, you can visit the Processing homepage.


About the instructor: I am Mish Madsen, a junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I graduated from the Winsor School in 2005. My interests lie in the fields of medicine, teaching, and user interface design, and I am majoring in computer science. I taught an afterschool Processing course earlier this year at Winsor (class website here) and a for-credit class in it during MIT's winter session in January. I also use Processing to design user interfaces for my research with autistic and epileptic children.

I am excited to teach Processing at Winsor again this term and would very much like to hear any feedback about the course - you can contact me directly, mish@mit.edu, with any questions or comments.

This page last updated 3/31/08.