Parsons School of Design DEMOLAND

Context

Parsons School of Design is one of the world’s preeminent design institutions. To meet the demands of a changing industry, the school has gradually introduced both programming and interaction design into its core curriculum.

Challenge

With a major containing over 160 students per class year, the school required a new way to ensure baseline experience in programming. This would result in a new required course provided in the format of a full-major lecture series. The resulting challenge was how to facilitate an engaging coding lecture that focused on creativity and exploration, as opposed to traditional coding courses that focused on technical rigor.

Solution

To kickstart Parsons’ new course, No Replica developed DEMOLAND as a tool for distributing code demos with the goal of removing technical barriers for design students new to coding. DEMOLAND is a web-based platform that allows anyone to access and edit sequences of demos without the need to install any additional software or make a user account. The site features all the functionality contained in industry-standard coding software, as well as the option to include instructional text alongside each demo.

No Replica founder Gabriel Drozdov served as one of the instructors during the course’s first official section. Using DEMOLAND, we were able to eliminate the need for one-on-one technical troubleshooting with students, which would otherwise have been unfeasible due to the class size (160+ students total). Furthermore, Parsons continues to use DEMOLAND as their main platform for facilitating this course, building up an archive of publicly-available demos that students continue to learn from semester after semester.

DEMOLAND was developed as an open-source platform, so anyone can launch their own instance of the site. No Replica operates our own DEMOLAND through our sister organization, GD with GD.