Monthly Archives: November 2014

Interactive Video

Hello fellow SIFers,

I know people have been wondering for a way to make videos more…fun? Yeah that’s the word. Because I don’t think many people want to sit through a video of someone talking about an event or idea. You also don’t want to make more work that is overtly complicated.

Sooooo I found a library that deals exactly with that. It’s called p5JS. It pretty much gives users the power to interact with video. You can view an example of it here.

p5JS is a spin off from Processing, which deals with accessing artists, coders, and other visual-relation fields together. It’s a broader scope than just dealing with interaction such as quizzes or tests. It encompasses a whole new idea of digital literacy by imploring the user to learn from mistakes and practice on skills they already learned in class.

So basically, it’s sort of returning to us 90s kids generation of primary learning. Video shows like Dora, or Sesame Street, or Blues Clues where learning through video meant waiting for user to make a suggested input and practice on that input throughout time with repetition.

I guess that method of learning through video got lost somewhere between elementary and middle school, but hey we can always do it with the next generation of kids.

On a related note, P5JS and Processing are both part of a wider gain of web technologies focusing on creating new ways for people to express things in the browser: HTML5.

I’ll talk about that in a later blog post, but for now I’m off to go play around with WebGL stuff.

Until next time, SIFers.