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okay wonderful my name is Linda Lucas I'm an author an illustrator a mediocre
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programmer and a business school dropout and there's like a well-known secret about Scandinavian people we tend to be
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the world's most self-deprecating people ever so the only identity that I actually feel proud about saying is that
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I'm a business school dropout everything else is kind of like in parentheses but we'll get to all of those during this
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talk so I'm the person who organized the first ever real skills I'm not the co-founder of rails cuz I'm the first
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person who ever organized it back in 2009 in Helsinki Finland where I wanted to find a group of like-minded women and
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men who were excited about learning software development and never ever in a
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million years would I imagine that I would end up being here in front of all of you that rails course would end up
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happening in in all over the world it all started as a small practical thing for for a group of friends in Helsinki
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but because Internet is amazing people started to tweet about rail skills and that over there is DHH in in 2009 and I
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remember printing out that like tweed I'm putting it on my wall this is the biggest moment in my life DHS is
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tweeting about our event and it led to other things happening for instance there was this guy called Jason on that
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might some of you might know about and he he called us and said that hey do you want to come to Singapore to organize a
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rail skills Hello Kitty Singapore fingy and me and coricidin and we had never
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been to Singapore before and we had no idea if this thing would ever work beyond like the group of friends that we
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had in Helsinki we had no budget for anything we had no plan but again we had never been to Singapore so we said like
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sure let's come over here and it is my amazing huge big pleasure to be back
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here after five years four years and my whole life has turned upside down since
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the last time I visited Singapore and so many other people's lives have changed and it's such a pleasure to free in
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front of you today well Scott has been in over 230 cities everywhere from Amman
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to Australia from Belo Horizonte to Berlin it's all the local ruby people the
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through its level organizations that want to drive the change to see a more diverse Ruby community and all of you
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coaches you do amazing important work by donating your time and your expertise to the beginners and giving people that
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magical first experience in building software thank you thank you so much for doing that
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my journey after starting rail skills I went to New York to work for a local
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startup over there I was the fifth employee of code Academy and grew to be 35 people it was a little less than a
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million users and a little over 24 million users when I left and you can imagine what happens in a company at
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that stage like things break and people break and company is Reagan it was one of the best but also one of the most
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exhilarating experiences in my life and I decided that I want to spend spend
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spend time with my family and and be closer to them I moved back to Helsinki but you know after New York Helsinki is
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very small there was not much happening over in Helsinki and I had a lot of that startup zeal inside of me still just
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like that let's change the world for the better and so forth but then I figured that maybe the most scalable change in
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the world doesn't happen inside of dating applications or or I don't know like food search applications or stuff
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like that but New York was building maybe the most scalable change in life happens when you're five years old that
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if we can change the way a five year old sees the world we can change the entire world and that's when I decided that
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I'll become a children's book author and this was all a very noble and big idea
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there was only three little problems at this point first of all I wasn't an author I had never written a book before
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I wasn't an illustrator I wasn't very good at drawing items and then finally I
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still considered myself to be a very mediocre programmer at this point I definitely didn't have a PhD in programming I had no idea about early
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childhood development or anything like that but I figured that okay I'm gonna go this Bru step by step and drawing is
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in some ways mechanical repetition that if you make a thousand circles eventually the circles are gonna get
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better and I started my quest towards those thousand circles and the first drawing
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that I found from our archives is this I'm four years old and I've in house and this is kind of the level
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where I start for him and then I keep on drawing this I like from four or five
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years ago not very good yet but I keep on drawing and the pictures are starting
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to get a little bit better and it helps tremendously that there's all these people around the world who send me back pictures of what they imagine will be
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looking like there's pictures from Taiwan and from Ukraine and all over the place and I even get plush toys from
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Belo Horizonte and and slowly the pictures start to get better also there's has to be more of a narrative of
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a little girl and lost gems and a hidden father and and all of the friends that
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she meets like Linux the Penguins who are really really damn efficient but really really hard to understand at
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times and and there's Snow Leopard who's beautiful but doesn't want to play with
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the other kids and there's androids who are really messy and and hard to understand but super friendly are when I
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like having friends with everyone else and and focuses who are really idealistic and so on and so on so I
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started to have an idea of like what kind of a narrative I would have and I figured that maybe I could also teach
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something through these stories like the basics of computational thinking like how to how to take a problem and chop it
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into smaller pieces but it was still a very much an idea until I did something
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that was probably like the best or the worst thing in my life I put this project on Kickstarter and this was
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January 2014 and I thought that I would have like the Ruby parents I had like
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the moms and dads who who had coached the rails girls like maybe they would support my project and this would be
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like a small side project I mean the 30 days but the Kickstarter campaign was live it ended up ended up gathering
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three hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth of pre-orders and
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if it's not enough flood it was like I was crying at this point because this
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was still an idea this was not a full-fledged beautiful product that the people were backing and this is gonna be
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a story about everything that happened after this so yeah for the past year
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I've been a children's book author illustrator without actually being those
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things and I've almost been like Alice in Wonderland I took the red peel and fell deep deep deep down inside of the
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computer and I'm trying to crawl my baby way back up and every one of you who thinks that ideas are born meaningful
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and resonant and beautiful no like ideas are born messy and sketchy and horrible and then the only way to like figure out
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what you're doing is by just keep doing it during those thousand circles one by one this is the first version of what
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Ruby looked like I had like and as I said like I I was getting better at the drawing and I had an inkling of an idea
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what I wanted to do this is the actual picture well that was on Kickstarter about the workbook session and there's like book pseudo who my first error
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message Firefox is made like some ideas but very like I'm embarrassed that that still exists today but what I've learned
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throughout this last year is that you can't go from here to here where you actually have a hundred and twenty pages
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of a book like like a tested curriculum like a real thing without having the courage to put something like messy and horrible out
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there at first you don't go from here to here unless you start from somewhere and
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I'm not gonna read this whole quote but it's from Ira Glass this wonderful Chicago Public Radio guy who says that
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nobody tells this to people who are beginners I wish wish someone told me all of us
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who do creative work we get into it because we have good taste but there is this gap for the first couple years you
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make stuff it's just not that good it's trying to be good it has potential but it's not and so on and so on and kind of
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this talk is about that gap about having an idea and coming to reality with it and sort of trying to yeah crawl your
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way out of the computer in literal and not so literal ways so last January my
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whole life turned upside down all of a sudden I wasn't doing a children's book for Ruby parents anymore I was doing a
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15 or like hundred or thousand books for my parents I was doing 15,000 books for
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non-developer parents who wanted to teach their kids about or change the way their kids feel about technology and
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change that their attitudes towards technology and I started needed to start from the very beginning so I started to
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organize playtesting sessions with kids and we started to figure out what do kids enjoy about computers what is
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exciting about technology for them and one of the sort of basic premises I
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started with was the idea that if Ruby or JavaScript or Python are that the lingua franca of the future we need more
00:09:11.660
poetry classes not grammar lessons because it's really funny the way we teach programming for for beginners at
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this point it's almost like we would teach program people to speak French only by asking them to conjugate French
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irregular verbs and say like there go ahead and do this is that the way you learn foreign languages is by using them
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you learn by writing your own poems really crappy at the beginning then better over time you write essays you
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write opinion pieces you read different things you read contemporary stuff you read classics and you learn to have a
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vocabulary and you learn different ways of expressing yourself and I figured that there's something about the way we
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learn natural languages that should apply or there at least should be like an opportunity to learn programming
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through these ways and I figured that I need some sort of principles to guide my
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product development like Here I am I have all these people waiting for a book and I need some sort of principles
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to guide me and I came up with free principles that I'm kind of going to use us as the red line of this whole talk
00:10:13.640
those are the principles of playfulness curiosity and rules and all of the
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exercises I'm showing here also available on hello Ruby comm so you can go there hello Ruby don't come / play
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you can find you can print out your first computers and you can see what other kids have done with the exercises
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here's a Danish little girl who password-protected her door with a computer so it's no it's really funny so
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when I was studying in school I thought that the world is very binary that
00:10:45.079
there's this group of people who are logical mathematical introverted and there's this group of people who are
00:10:51.290
creative colorful artsy and extra and that there's no overlap between these people and I like totally wanted
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to be on this side of the Grove like the people who wanted to change the world and I ended up studying social sciences
00:11:04.470
and French and philosophy and arts and crafts and it took me a long time to realize that no like actually there is
00:11:10.470
no binary world we can be multiple things and we as people contain multitude and it totally makes sense for
00:11:17.670
for like people to do different things and actually for me who loved Bern and Russell who loved studying philosophy
00:11:25.010
and like formal logic who loved conjugating the French verbs I actually really enjoyed French grammar who
00:11:32.550
enjoyed making socks so following like step by step symbolic instructions to
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complete a sock it totally made sense to enjoy programming and like it and the
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only difference was that as a little girl I thought that I was supposed to not like computers and the thing that
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the kids today have the modern little girls is that they don't know that they are not supposed to like computers they
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don't know it yet and that's the biggest asset they have because they can be curious about computers they are really
00:12:03.120
precise they concentrate well they are really good at coming up or coming up with imaginary worlds and and they don't
00:12:08.760
know that they are not supposed to like computers the only thing we as adults would need to do is figure out a
00:12:14.040
curriculum that suits them and that's the mission I set out to do so I listed different sort of basic components of
00:12:20.970
programming that you should master even before you write your first Ruby array or learn anything about I don't know
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like hashes or stuff like that these are the things that kids can learn already
00:12:33.690
before the age seven when you abstract them correctly so for instance algorithms are just like cupcake recipes
00:12:41.790
you follow a step-by-step instruction you need to be very exacting what kind of commands you give if you abstract
00:12:48.750
properly the cupcake recipe you can pretty easily make different kinds of cupcakes if you swap the blueberries to
00:12:53.880
the bananas you'll have different kinds of cupcakes and if you swap like do different amounts of cupcakes or
00:12:59.340
different amounts of quantities for the cupcakes you'll have a different amount of cupcakes in the end and rep
00:13:06.150
tation or the concept of a loop is we actually really easily explained for dancing so here's some favorite dance
00:13:13.529
moves Ruby the Snow Leopard in the penguin so Ruby loves this and the
00:13:19.800
Louvre she's gonna do is first he's gonna do that five times then she's gonna do that and while the parent is
00:13:26.940
holding their nose and then the final round is gonna be doing the loop and
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while until and yeah and repeats until
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the parent claps their hands together and that's as much as you need to know as a kid about a loop there's something
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that's that's the loop something that ends the lope and something that gets repeated in between or the idea of
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decomposition of like decomposing a problem into smaller pieces can be done with flowcharts it's almost like a spy
00:13:56.010
exercise where or like all sorts of misfortunes happen to Ruby's friends and you can follow with the flow chart where
00:14:02.730
it went wrong man and this is where the kids can recognize what an infinite loop looks like Ruby never gets gets to other
00:14:08.970
she stays hungry or see if she stays full and there's some wrong ordering in the sequences and and Android's forgets
00:14:16.110
to just stop the water from running nothing more complicated than that and I think this boils down to the idea
00:14:23.430
that there's two types of jars in programming there's the more intellectual pleasure of abstracting
00:14:29.339
something beautifully of like solving a really hard problem in in a beautiful manner and then there's the more or
00:14:35.370
almost like physical joy of getting the computer to obey your will and at least
00:14:40.890
every time I get the computer to do what I wanted to do I feel like yes I'm the top of the world and sort of tinkering
00:14:47.130
and not really knowing what you're doing but tinkering and twisting and toying around with the computer until it works the way you want it to work and I think
00:14:54.330
the latter is called play and play was what I was after
00:14:59.810
in order to understand what play was I need to go to the people who were best
00:15:05.040
at play and I figured that if there's someone who's really good at play it must be such a mystery because Sesame
00:15:10.080
Street is amazing they've crunched out content for 30 43 years every single
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week having educational fun content for kids and they actually a bit all of their content before there was even a name for a/b testing they had
00:15:21.870
like little groups of kids in front of TVs and they showed different kinds of content already in the 70s and they had
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researchers on board thinking about this and turns out that Sesame Street thinks
00:15:32.580
that plays paramount to our cognitive social physical and emotional well-being and then I went to another toy company
00:15:39.930
who might be even more familiar for many of you namely Lego and Legos is there's five types of play there's physical play
00:15:47.340
there's play with objects they're symbolic play there's pretense in social-democratic play and then there's
00:15:52.380
games with rules and for some reason we adults we think of play as games with rules in this era Lego they go even
00:16:00.060
further and they say that there's three types of motivations for play there's achievement place motivation their
00:16:05.220
social based motivation there's emergent play based motivation but for some reason whenever we're teaching
00:16:10.380
programming or whenever we're teaching actually anything in life we only use this side of play you see like the
00:16:16.470
progress power accumulation numbers optimization analysis challenging others
00:16:21.720
provocation domination and in reality everyone who's ever programmed or at least program in an open-source
00:16:27.510
community knows that there's so much more to it there's collaboration there's self disclosure there's funding and
00:16:33.540
giving support there's rules there's exploration finding hidden things
00:16:38.820
there's sometimes escape from real hype and avoiding real-life problems all of
00:16:44.280
these things exist but only we use one thing to teach programming so I figured
00:16:49.440
that okay these are the ways I like I want to use all of the aspects of playing in what I'm doing and many of
00:16:55.620
you have different kinds of customers so at this point I knew already okay like these are the things that I want to
00:17:01.200
teach these are the curriculum points this is the way that I want to teach things these are like the the principles
00:17:06.270
of play I have and these are the people who I want to be teaching these things with - and you all have different kinds
00:17:12.900
of customers I for instance I have the paying customers those are the Paras and then I have the users those are the kids
00:17:18.720
and sometimes these two groups don't really get along well because there's this thing called poop factor in in kids
00:17:24.870
kids development you can't have too many poop jokes in in your content otherwise if parents get
00:17:31.130
annoyed and then if you don't make the content like fun and engaging the kids get annoyed so there's balancing this side of things
00:17:36.890
but then there's also the production and product development side of things where the parent is actually a big nuisance so
00:17:42.020
I was in Japan doing some play testing over there and first I gave like a little lecture for the parents and
00:17:47.480
explain to them like this Nordic way of thinking about play and opening like exploring and making mistakes and trying
00:17:54.049
out new things and then we would do the play testing session and the parents would be like you know this let me show
00:18:00.740
you how to do this no no stay away like don't come I need to learn from the kids what is hard and what is easy so we made
00:18:07.130
a plan we created user experience journey map that we gave to the Paris
00:18:13.280
that asked them to make observations about their child and this data was it
00:18:18.470
was really useful but most of all it was good to keep the parents away from distracting the the project development
00:18:24.410
roses so I don't know what about the like the the tangible thing for you for your own work is but probably everyone
00:18:30.710
has those two types of customers so the principles where playfulness rules and
00:18:36.830
curiosity and we're gonna start with the principle number one the playfulness
00:18:42.860
principle that question what if asking always the question what if and you know
00:18:49.730
when you talk to normal people or laymen people who are not programmers they think programming is very silent the
00:18:56.540
programmer they sit in front of the computer and something happens and you never know if there's a break for or not like in sports you see that someone want
00:19:02.540
when a programmer cracks a really hard core algorithm they like might send an emoji but that's about it
00:19:07.820
so for a normal person like the culture and compassion and colourfulness that
00:19:12.950
does the existing programming is super well hidden in like this murky underground internet forums like Stack
00:19:18.440
Overflow and places like github repositories and so forth but normal people don't see it and I set out on a
00:19:24.740
mission to bring out those trolls and those like all of the colorfulness that
00:19:30.230
exists in the programming community and that happens through characters and and this is Ruby she's she's six years old
00:19:36.890
and she's completely fearless a little bit bossy she's my
00:19:42.169
at this point my best friend and and then when I tell Ruby in the morning that Ruby you need to dress up for
00:19:48.619
school really fast we're late she will dressed up for school but she will leave her pajamas on because I didn't tell her to take the pajamas of
00:19:55.279
explicitly and and when I tell Ruby that your room is such a mess like clean up
00:20:00.409
all the toys they are everywhere she will clean up the toys but she will leave the pins and papers on the floor
00:20:05.570
because pens and papers are really not toys and these are all things that my six-year-old goddaughter who is who is
00:20:12.499
like the person I mostly test this content with like her mother is gonna kill me because she has become this
00:20:17.600
obnoxious little six-year-old who who counter counter-arguments everything but
00:20:22.999
Sheela is something very fundamental about computer science that you need to give right orders in the right sequence
00:20:28.340
you need to be very exact in naming things and so on and so on and a little
00:20:34.669
Ruby she also has different kinds of rules for how she dresses up so for instance on Mondays she wears only
00:20:40.580
clothes that are red and green and on Fridays she wears clothes that are not yellow and this way you can teach
00:20:46.879
boolean algebra that otherwise wouldn't come for the kid until late late late in their lives already for like a six year
00:20:52.999
old easily and in a fun way but most importantly the kids learn to
00:20:58.779
understand that mostly a big problem such a small problem stuck together and
00:21:04.039
that computers are not magic and and they are not black boxes that someone else owns but you can actually break
00:21:09.470
apart problems and learn to get through them so the second principle is the
00:21:15.619
principle of logic it's always asking the question how its imposing a logic on
00:21:20.809
something otherwise hard to understand and this is one of my favorite things in the world one of the things that makes
00:21:26.659
me really sad was that that little girl I was home for that there is this binary world of the people who get to create
00:21:32.210
stuff and then there's the people who just consume them and for me every time I hear someone say oh like that's that's
00:21:39.080
magic that's a black box that's engineering work I got really disappointed and sad because technology
00:21:45.289
is meant to be tinkered with technology it's meant to be taken aboard and twisted and we shouldn't think that
00:21:50.899
everything is ready in the world everything is not ready in the world and that's why we teach kids how to see
00:21:57.770
impost logic on something that otherwise would seem just like a like a thing that has always been there so one of the
00:22:05.660
exercises I do with kids is is I give them this little sticker that has an on/off button to them put you it and I
00:22:13.370
tell them that adults they have this thing called Internet of Things but then this afternoon you guys have a special
00:22:20.150
skill you can make anything in this room into a computer if you just decide to do so and here's for instance a bicycle
00:22:27.350
lamp that one little boy made into a computer and when I asked him what the computer does he said that it projects
00:22:32.870
movies as well as access a bicycle lamp and and here's a couple of candles that you can automatically press to flick on
00:22:40.100
and off and here's a book that automatically like changes pages and this is a really stupid and silly
00:22:46.610
exercise privity helps the kids to see the world and have the imagination to see the world as something that they can
00:22:52.280
they can alter and change and it actually is really useful for adults too they also have this little cheat that
00:22:59.059
they do where they can think about like different different sensors like orientation and temperature and vibration and moisture and and the
00:23:05.720
internet and draw a picture of themselves using their new computers another exercise we do with kids is they
00:23:13.100
get like a keyboard and the first thing they do is Anna sticker sheet and they put the stickers on the computer and
00:23:19.220
then they write the numbers over there try explaining to six-year-old why computer numbers go like 1 2 3 4 5 voila
00:23:26.840
9 0 it's really complicated mathematical thing to explain then they get to design
00:23:33.440
their own buttons I'll get to that later on they get to type their own name with the keyboard the kids nowadays like they
00:23:39.290
don't they see a keyboard is the first thing they see of alphabets not the ABCD efg thing and then they get to plug
00:23:45.559
their keyboard to their parent and see if it actually works so the parent holds the keyboard and the
00:23:50.570
other at the end of the the power cord and the kid holds the keyboard and they tried pressing the different animals and
00:23:56.690
and see what happens when I press the gorillas button will that parent do this or so and it's the kids can do this for
00:24:03.110
hours and the buttons work also for your own computer so it's it's a fun thing the
00:24:10.570
third principle is the principle of curiosity always asking question why it's having an open mind about
00:24:16.960
exploration it's about finding hidden things and it's about imagination one of
00:24:23.380
the things that really really kills me is that computers used to be the children of poetry and mathematics the
00:24:31.270
first computer programmer in the world was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and the mathematician mother Ida
00:24:38.770
Lovelace who was the first person in the world to actually understand that computers were not fancy calculators but
00:24:44.530
actually that computers could calculate values that represented different kinds of things and that made a computer into
00:24:51.160
anything and for some reason we've forgotten about this beautiful past of computers and when I show people
00:24:58.150
pictures that or when I tell people that like I think the kids should understand what the general knowing mind model is
00:25:04.090
like they are like are you serious about this but think about it if you abstract
00:25:09.610
computer into the idea that a computer is always something that data goes in something happens and something else
00:25:16.420
comes out and in effect everything in computing is that when you press like on Facebook there's an instruction that
00:25:22.750
says that add one more like there's data that goes in an instruction tells to add one more like to the Facebook page and
00:25:29.140
up comes to lice or whatever and this is the beauty of computers that there is
00:25:35.490
data there is the processor and most importantly there's the memory and there's the two types of memory the
00:25:41.560
memory that I remember of the data and what happens to it and the memory that gives the instructions of what to do and
00:25:46.930
that is the thing that makes computer so special because a pinboard machine pinball machine is always a pinball
00:25:52.960
machine a tractor is always a tractor but a computer can be anything depending of what kind of software you're right
00:25:58.630
for it and the way we teach this to kids is by physical activities we've built
00:26:04.240
this like little cardboard computer they support toddlers they crawl inside of
00:26:09.940
the computer and there's a little card that shows them a picture of what they should do when they come out for instance like hop on one fee
00:26:16.360
come out backwards or or so and then the other kids need to guess what the code
00:26:21.429
was like and they learn about the principle of input/output CPUs and memory through play and I can tell you
00:26:28.720
that the cardboard looks like it breaks up every single time we do this it gets to be so much fun I also do exercises
00:26:37.090
where we talk about what computers are because the scary thing is that 67 year or five to seven year olds can be very
00:26:42.700
very conservative when I ask hits is this a computer for instance I'll show
00:26:47.860
them a picture of a car a grocery store a dog and a toy and I ask him which one
00:26:53.950
of these is a computer the kids unanimously say none of this is a computer like almost judgmental like
00:27:00.820
what are you talking about none of this is the computer and I ask them what is a
00:27:06.309
computer and they say oh that's the thing that like mom and dad spent too much time on like they don't even realize that iPads are computers or
00:27:12.580
mobile phones are computers but then we get to talk and we talk that actually a car is a computer and even
00:27:18.789
five-year-olds know pretty well what a navigation system is and and then we talked that like maybe in grocery stores
00:27:24.010
there's all kinds of computers like the computer that keeps the ice cream cold and the computer that is used when you
00:27:29.679
pay your pay your groceries and and you know what like when your parents were your age computers were so big that they
00:27:36.340
couldn't fit on this like this whole stage but when you grow up to be adults computers are gonna be so tiny that they
00:27:42.970
can fit into every single milk bottle in the store and that's when the kids get to be really excited well mmm what would
00:27:48.399
happen if a milk bottle had a computer inside of it and we talked about dogs and how dogs are not computers obviously
00:27:55.029
what I was saying but and maybe a like a dog's collar bone might have a computer inside of it or maybe in the future like
00:28:01.450
a dog will have a microchip inside of it and then we get into really interesting discussions of what is an animal and
00:28:06.610
what is the machine and what takes them apart like five-year-olds are so smart and then I tell them that in Japan
00:28:11.710
toilets are computers and that they get hacked and this is always like the best being six-year-old ever know
00:28:17.880
I think one of the things that we do nowadays is in school at least in
00:28:25.530
Finland we teach kids so many things we teach them how they can become astronauts and we teach them how a
00:28:31.320
combustion engine works and we teach them about the global like climate change and all these complicated things
00:28:36.750
but when our kids especially the kids of non-programmers come to their parents and ask what is a bubble sorting
00:28:43.230
algorithm or Linda what happens when I press YouTube like the play button your new tube like what happens who talks to
00:28:49.500
and how does the computer know like how the you video shows up or Linda is internet replace we we adults we've
00:28:56.760
become very silent we mutter something about it being very complicated or very magical well it's it's neither it's not
00:29:04.410
complicated and it's not magical it just happened really really really fast computer scientists are among the
00:29:10.650
biggest idols I have I we don't have a like Flag Day for leanest or abouts in Finland I think we showed here I think
00:29:17.130
here's the biggest like export hero we have the guy who came up with Linux and get ones like what we don't recognize
00:29:23.010
him at all as a society but now I feel s4 so yes so they've built up
00:29:32.970
abstraction levels on top of each other until we have as adults no idea what powers our computers and you are a
00:29:38.610
different crowd from him but here about like normal people they don't have any idea how their computers work they have
00:29:44.310
like more powerful computers in their like pockets than than the one the
00:29:49.830
mankind went to moon with but they still play like an reverse with this which is such a shame so what we do with kids is
00:29:56.130
we start by the very basics and we built a paper computer and we look at the
00:30:02.760
professor professor processor who's really good at bossing other people around and we look at the helpful ramen
00:30:08.880
ramen we look where your summer vacation photos or your game levels gets just change save that's the hard drive and we
00:30:15.510
look at like what kind of operating systems you can choose their computers kids are like I thought that they would choose like the cute penguin or the
00:30:22.380
omnipresent windows they always choose the Apple it's like magic and they get to design their own
00:30:29.760
computers here's a few examples of the computers kids would design one of the things they get to do they get to design
00:30:35.760
their own buttons and sometimes they design buttons to order ice cream or send a teacher to Saturn or their boy
00:30:43.950
actually he made a button to like send the teacher back from Saturn everything ended up okay and one of my favorites
00:30:50.669
there is this little boy called Arthur who designed first he was very proud about his paper computer and he designed
00:30:56.669
a button to print out LEGO coloring pages because his mom had printed him out Lego coloring pages before and he
00:31:03.840
was very proud about them but pretty soon he was like bored and felt that coloring pages are not very exciting so
00:31:10.440
he decided to print out real Legos and then he went completely wild and printed out with his paper computer a toothbrush
00:31:18.450
a TV and then breakfast for the entire family the next morning and Arthur's mom
00:31:24.929
was one of my best friends and very tech-savvy she was like Arthur you know that's not possible but the whole point
00:31:31.140
is that is possible Arthur is gonna grow up into a world where he's probably gonna freely print his like candies on
00:31:37.409
Saturday mornings and he's gonna free different his Legos that's not even the wildest thing out there so it's good
00:31:43.409
that we prepare him for that future one of my other favorite stories is of little odda she's six year old and she
00:31:50.909
wasn't very sure sure about this computer business in the beginning like any computer it's not really my thing and we got to talk with her and I asked
00:31:59.580
her what do you want to do when you grow up and odda says with a six year old determination that I want to be a
00:32:04.820
dolphin doctor a Dothan doctor and dolphin doctors don't need computers but
00:32:10.890
then we started to talk about it on and eventually she ended up designing a dolphin health application for her
00:32:16.830
patients that had little pictures of the dolphins and like their health stats and and all these like metadata and and she
00:32:23.039
was amazing UX designer and had such like an empathic view to us and Delphine's and i really hope that she
00:32:28.679
becomes a program or where she grows up but probably my favorite story of all time is of this little boy whose
00:32:35.039
favorite thing in the world was to be astronaut and the little boy he placed
00:32:40.210
this with his father he asked his huge headphones on and he sits on the opposite side of the room with his paper
00:32:46.540
compute computer absolutely totally immersed into the intergalactic
00:32:52.210
planetary navigation application that he has built because the father is the lone
00:32:58.510
astronaut he's on the other side of the room but in reality he's in another galaxy in the Martian atmosphere and the
00:33:04.390
little boy sole responsibility is to bring the father back safely to earth and these kids are going to have a
00:33:10.960
profoundly different experience of Technology they are going to think in a very different manner of what technology
00:33:16.480
is should be should feel like and they're gonna see coding as a tool of
00:33:21.640
creation much like Lego blocks or or crayons it's not as something esoteric and and belonging to a whole different
00:33:27.820
group of people bending is probably something like this there's nothing new
00:33:35.590
in what I was talking about the whole history of computers is full of luminary people who who have been talking about
00:33:42.040
this stuff already Alan Turing in in the in the 50s he talked about the child machine the idea that instead of
00:33:47.980
artificial intelligence being done the way it is today what if we like taught the computers to talk themselves what if
00:33:54.100
we modeled the the computers after the way kids learn about stuff and then Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon in
00:34:00.250
the seventies wrote this wonderful research paper if you haven't read it please do 20 things to do with a computer where they higher underlined
00:34:06.880
the idea that computer education should be about practice of producing practical things about doing something real in the
00:34:13.900
world instead of calculating the 21st prime route squares of like 21st prime numbers or so and then finally there's
00:34:20.470
Alan Kay who in the 70s and this is an amazing article personal computer for children of all ages
00:34:25.630
he basically imagines like a hackable ipad and he has pictures and everything that's an amazing article that really
00:34:31.600
outlines the creativity that computers have and so storytelling that's not new
00:34:37.120
either there's a bunch of people who have done this before in amazing ways there's Ruby wizardry by Eric Weinstein
00:34:42.910
there's computational fairy tales there's lorem ipsum and there's wise program guide to Ruby which was by the way the book that brought me into the
00:34:49.230
the community I most definitely didn't learn anything about programming from that book but it showed me into this
00:34:56.399
world where wit and wizardry and whimsical it was kind of appreciated and
00:35:01.410
showed me to this warm community of people and I felt that I could belong to this community as well and that's why we
00:35:09.510
need the storytellers we need the people to bridge the gap between the machines and the men and when you talk with
00:35:15.060
normal people again like I feel really real saying they're worth normal people when you pee it up and like layman it's
00:35:21.990
funny when they think that that I don't know that that computers write code and
00:35:27.270
but programming languages are written by computers and they don't realize that no like people write code and a code is
00:35:34.950
code is a language for people to talk to one another and only secondarily for the computer computer to execute and that
00:35:41.400
programming languages are designed by people for other people to understand that the whole DNA of technology is
00:35:47.490
humanity and in fact in the past a computer used to be a person who's really good at calculating things and
00:35:52.770
the Greek it always goes back to the Greek they they fought the technology it's not only the tools but also the
00:35:59.640
techniques and skills and competencies alongside the tools that make it possible to do something better and fast
00:36:04.830
so agriculture is technology democracy's technology and somehow we lost all of
00:36:10.680
this we all have childhood stories that
00:36:16.590
have shaped the way we grow up as adults and human beings they stay with us for
00:36:21.869
years to come we read them as little kids and then as adults we don't even remember how much they influenced the
00:36:27.270
way we see the world and when I was a small kid I wanted to be a world builder
00:36:33.390
when I grow up so I would wake up in the morning in Moomin Valley and that's how I learned about family values and in the
00:36:39.840
afternoons I would roam around Tatooine being The Fearless Jedi Knight Subba Sunrider and that's how I learned about
00:36:45.600
what's right and wrong and and the evenings I would go to sleep in Narnia I don't know what I learned about Narnia
00:36:52.200
it's something for me anyways you don't even sometimes you can't even confront the things that you learn from stories
00:36:58.020
but they stay with you and they influence your taste for years to come the surfing is that you can't really
00:37:03.810
graduate to become a world maker like there's no university degree that allows you to do that for a living
00:37:10.440
except the one that does the one exception and the one loophole and that
00:37:15.839
is you that is the programmers of the world imagine that you guys get to do that every single day you get to create
00:37:22.890
an entire universe with the pure power of your own words you get to design all
00:37:27.990
of the rules all of the vocabularies all of that everything that happens in that world and that power is yours thank you
00:37:35.730
so much
00:37:45.960
now I have zero idea how fast I was high
00:37:52.109
suspected so now if no one like gets me out of the pickle of speaking too fast
00:37:57.210
I'm just gonna be sad and cry here before the rest of it please one question yes ah I don't want to spoil it
00:38:10.410
so honey though the thing he said that he sleeps being me speak this like give this talk seven times so I need to do
00:38:17.910
something different so this was the reason why I did something different this time no Friday had yeah I think
00:38:23.040
someone else is gonna do is still the Friday hide so I won't steal this show for now but that's one example of like
00:38:29.580
when I show people pictures of the Ruby Friday Huck stay away are these programmers I thought that programmers
00:38:34.859
sit alone in like cubicles and never talk to other people I'm like nope this
00:38:41.010
happens it's are there any other questions or do we want to hear a joke
00:38:51.980
yes I can repeat the question so I think
00:39:12.510
one of the cool things about the Ruby community is that their shoes there's Hackett II hack there's a lot of like tools available for a parent who already
00:39:19.410
as a programmer who can sort of like paste out the curriculum in a way that makes sense for his or her like own kid
00:39:25.859
and that's a big plus in addition for the parents were not the technical
00:39:30.990
there's code.org which is really good it's this US nonprofit that I like brakes brake the whole like coding
00:39:38.700
curriculum into sequences of like small steps where you have like a scratch like environment and it's gamified and it's
00:39:45.210
very much like points and power and progress but it's really excellent for kids who are motivated by that stuff and
00:39:50.820
then this scratch which is like can be very when sometimes when I sit with kids down and try to like engage them with
00:39:57.270
scratch they need more in structions in the beginning to get going then when they get going they are like absolutely like on fire and way better
00:40:03.880
for groomers than I will ever be after two hours of work so it really depends
00:40:09.189
on what kind of a key do you have and what they sort of find exciting or yeah
00:40:14.789
meaningful there's also something called hopscotch that is an iPad application much like scratch what else my kids Ruby
00:40:22.959
comm which has a lot of like Ruby content but many of those things are very unapproachable for a parent who
00:40:29.199
isn't a programmer themselves so I think we have it good but then the rest of the population is kind of lost I guess
00:40:49.019
played around with many many keys for now do you feel that technology it's an
00:41:00.609
interesting question I think not all screen time is equal like you can do really horrible and passive things on
00:41:05.769
iPads if you use them as a babysitter for a kid like just watching videos and so forth but like all of us know like my
00:41:12.519
parents had no idea what I was doing on the computer when I was 13 year old and I was doing really awesome things and
00:41:17.679
like building actual worlds and and making cool things and websites and stuff like that and like we all know
00:41:24.400
that computers are not sort of passive and bad things for people so I think it's the same with tablets and stuff
00:41:30.969
like that that there's always like two sides that being said there was a reason why I chose to like the book is an
00:41:37.569
actual physical book which has been like a nightmare to produce because I come
00:41:42.640
from like the vibe industry where you deploy five times a day the publishing industry is like we can't do anything under a year
00:41:48.400
sorry it was like okay there's no but the idea is that you would have a parent and a kid read together a physical book
00:41:54.969
and kids before the age seven they learn so much about the world other than computers and computing they will have
00:42:01.569
like the rest of their lives to learn about sitting in front of a screen and interacting with the screen but if you learn about the concepts or
00:42:07.579
a younger age maybe it will make it easier for you to learn stuff at an older age and I suppose like I'm kind of
00:42:15.469
interested in curious to see what the mobile experience first say hello Ruby would look like but I don't think anyone
00:42:21.019
not even Sesame Street or those guys have nailed yet what like actually playing on a tablet
00:42:27.019
looks like or what actual digital toys look like instead of just games or or like books that are electronic so I
00:42:34.729
think there is so anyone who wants to work on this problem is like probably gonna face some really exciting
00:42:40.279
challenges and please do one more yes hi
00:42:47.630
Linda alright there's no question right what is the greatest challenge in teaching
00:42:52.789
children programming probably deciding what kind of kids they are because like
00:42:58.009
kids can be so I like my group of kids I I've worked with and there's been like a
00:43:04.849
bunch of different groups has been around five to seven year olds and between that age group like kids can be
00:43:09.920
so different from their like the cognitive their emotional skills their physical skills their like social skills
00:43:15.819
deciding what is the right level for a kid and not trying to push things down their throat the one thing I really like
00:43:23.119
hey like what the one thing that I feel really fearful about doing is like ruining some poor kids life for good
00:43:28.459
because when I was in so my my programming career actually starts when I was 13 years old and I was making
00:43:33.829
websites and I was like having these mad teenage girl crushes on different people and building like websites in honor of
00:43:40.219
them not creepy at all and then I went to like AP programming class and the
00:43:46.789
first thing we learned was Java and the thing that we were supposed to do was like to draw a picture of a cat with
00:43:54.079
Java and I felt it was a ridiculous exercise because I was so much better at drawing with my bare hands
00:44:00.199
a cat or I could draw like really awesome cat with Photoshop but like with the mathematical coordinations like
00:44:06.589
didn't make any sense and the thing that the teacher forgot to mention is that if you want to make one cat it's okay to do
00:44:11.749
it by hand or with Photoshop but if you want to make a thousand cats or if you want to make all the cats from there
00:44:16.910
like the colors of the rainbow or like did sighs that's it's really good to sort of abstract it and modularize it and make
00:44:22.740
it into a program code but like gross that cut in 40 and that connection ruined programming for me for like ten
00:44:29.970
years or so because I felt the programming is this stupid nerdy thing that like is about like putting dots on
00:44:35.880
like drawing burden and I'm so much better off with Photoshop and drawing by
00:44:41.310
hand so probably like answer to your question is figuring out what kind of a kid the kid is and giving the right context for the kid for the learning
00:44:48.000
stuff so that it doesn't become like a boring Oh like oh no I need to do the programming
00:44:53.369
exercises today yuck so you're saying that we should teach them programming
00:44:58.700
outside of computers maybe if that suits the kids some kids really like Excel
00:45:04.140
with actual physical computers because you you know like computer is like one of the best work companions I have
00:45:10.770
because it always tells you whether you did right or wrong like everything else in Word is so well there's so much murkier and sort of in between but
00:45:17.130
computer always tells you what is right or wrong so for some kids that definitely helps and works I suppose
00:45:22.589
yeah context for the kid and then like understanding what kind of kid they are
00:45:28.349
when you're teaching them empathy all right thank you thank you
00:45:37.960
you
