What Folk can do

Creative environments

Jessie Grosen made a SuperCollider-based audio system using Folk. Here, she’s pulling out an audio track, using ‘hands’ to carve subsections out of the track, then operating on those subsections:

Kids and computing

Vedran Budimcic has been building a Scratch-like environment in Folk. This month, he added support for multiple characters:

Vedran: I think I only need to do a few more things before I can let me kids try to break it: 1. Put the cards on something thicker like cardboard. Easier for little hands. Maybe laminate as well. 2. Consider character actions from left to right instead of order of appearance. Right now it only considers the actions on the right of the “play” pages, but doesn’t consider their order.

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Vedran also set up a Folk system on a toy train track. The train has a Folk tag on it, so the system knows its location, so it can play sounds as the train passes through different areas on the track:

Omar: I like the three-dimensionality and materiality of this. It’s no longer flat pieces of paper on a plane; it’s a train on a real track with landmarks.

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“My solar simulation was a way in to learn folk. The kids keep coming back to my office to play with it - hoping this increases the interest in actually doing something. A ‘kit’ sounds more versatile and ultimately something I want to collect a library of so they can start to build.”

(see below for more comments on folk2)

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Omar: I really liked this example of 4 buttons that play different songs on Spotify:

More specific and approachable and fun physical interface than pages, little kid can play with it like a normal toy, but Folk makes it easy to ‘rewire’ and get into reprogramming (and to cross with other sensors and actuators in novel ways) because it’s all Folk programs in the backend:

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General capabilities

Writes Hello box and outlines itself red with the code:

Wish $this is labelled "Hello box"
Wish $this is outlined red

Can point at each other (notice the RIGHT OF PROGRAM appear when the left program’s green pointer hits the right)

Draw all sorts of shapes:

Get a camera slice (the area the camera sees above a program):

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Teach math

Mason Jones has started working on a linear algebra tutorial:

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You can put these programs together and vary the programs slightly to create booklets:

You can combine multiple programs to make folders that:

Teach people how to make origami frogs:

Or that explore stop motion animation: