Live demo for concurrency lecture

[jespiron]

Wrote a slide synchronizer using tokio-- the idea is that students open slides.html during lecture, and this connects to our presenter server. Our presenter can send commands to simultaneously change the slides of all students.

Then we talk through the code; I intentionally kept the code very short 😄

Source for toy version: https://github.com/jespiron/sync-slides

Demo:

Screen.Recording.2025-02-06.at.1.21.37.AM.mov

[connortsui20]

I completely missed this 💀

This seems pretty cool! I do worry that it feels a bit gimmicky though without a good reason to use this (for example, I can see this being super useful if we wanted to have students actually interact with the slides, otherwise this is not that different from just watching the slides).

One immediate use case though is that I have been writing much more detailed speaker notes that the students can see on the PDFs: this means if we blast this out to anyone who wants to follow it should be possible for students to read those at the same time? Though thinking about it more they can already follow along on the pdf anyways (and I think that is what most students do).

It does seem like this could open the door for a lot of other cool things! Though said cool things might require a lot more engineering work...

[connortsui20]

Oh I just reread this and I think I understand it a bit better (I thought this was something you wanted to do for all lectures). I'm planning on making the entire lecture about tokio and the ecosystem around it, so if there is time at the end you can definitely demo this (or even after lecture if there isn't time)