Make:

Registration opens today for the Art and Code symposium -- it's a low-key conference teaching a variety of tools specially developed for use in the arts and education to artists, young people, and everyone else. Among the presenters will be many of the people behind these tools, including the creators of Processing -- the software environment used with the Arduino.

The organizer is Golan Levin - check out his TED talk, The Truly Soft Side of Software, from 2004.

From the Motivation:

Just as true literacy in English means being able to write as well as read, true literacy in software demands not only knowing how to use commercial software tools, but how to create new software for oneself and others.
...
Recently, a number of projects dedicated to democratizing the education of computational thinking have coalesced. Emerging primarily from the arts sector, a set of new programming environments (and accompanying pedagogic techniques) have been developed by artists, and for artists, that help regular folks and other non-computer-scientists learn to program. Using visual and musical expression as the "hook", thousands of people have not only learned to code using these new environments, but found new reasons to code in the first place. These environments - many of which are free, open-source initiatives - have made enormous inroads towards expanding the computational abilities and interests of hundreds of thousands of creative people worldwide. You too can join this movement!

This conference is for:

• Teens, undergraduates, and graduate students who wish to combine art, design and computer science;


• Middle-school and high-school teachers who want a more expressive way of teaching programming and computer arts;


• College educators and professional artists who want to learn the most cutting edge environments for interaction design;


• Anyone who has been wanting to learn how to program their own software, but hasn't known where to start!

(via waxy.org and hackety)