Sketchcasting: Next-generation screencasting for code

This post is drawn from a longer post on my twosigma blog.

Thanks to a flash grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation (via Philipp Schmidt of P2PU fame), I was able to take a few weeks off between my time at Grockit and the Minerva Project to build something brand new: sketchcasting. What I built — inspired by an experience I had running a P2PU course using Sketchpad in 2010, and enabled by the great Mozilla Popcorn project — functions a lot like the new interactive code-casts on Khan Academy. Watch the code being typed as you listen to an accompanying audio narration, pause playback to fork and experiment yourself with the code at any moment, then show and share what you create (an example). The best part is that anyone can record a sketchcast, not just me.

• Anyone can record a sketchcast. Open the normal code editor, press “record”, and talk as you code. You’ll get a unique URL to share with others.
• Sketchcasting is collaborative. Groups of people can code together while recording a sketchcast, and groups of people can code together while experimenting with forked versions of existing sketchcasts.
• All viewer comments and Q&A are automatically time-coded. While I’ve argued for and hand-built time-anchored Q&A learning tools in the past, I got it here for free as a part of the excellent Soundcloud audio player. Thanks, Soundcloud!

Here’s how you can make your own sketchcasts:

If you record a great sketchcast, tweet it a link to @studiosketchpad and I’ll share it with others!