 Yeah, and wrap up at six, right? Okay. Okay, so if people want to talk, yeah. Okay. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Good. Okay. Okay. Nice place. I know this is where you're at. I'm here. Yeah. Good. Nice place. Good. Yeah, I don't need, no I don't, I've already got it saved. Okay, everybody. I guess we'll get started here. I'm going last here, so I'm sure everybody's heard a lot of great talks already. I'm basically going to repeat lots of things that people have already said here, but hopefully in a different context. I'm talking here about blended undergraduate technology education. I'm going to go through some formal stuff at the beginning and then rapidly lose any sense of structure and just randomly talk to people about stuff. So it'll all kind of crank through my deck of slides here and then stop doing that and have a real conversation after a little bit here. So I'm thinking there's a case study in the use of Blunder, S Cornerstone, Temple of Protection, yours is blah blah blah. So I'm in the emerging media technologies program inside of the entertainment technology department, inside of the College of Technology and Design, inside of New York City College of Technology that's inside of City University of New York. If that sounds like some sort of bureaucratic hellscape, it's a state school, so that's how it works. So it's a large complex place, so I also have a nice little summary of things. How we use free software to teach our students skills to make real money, or Blunder 3D equals money. My name's Damon Baker. I'm an assistant professor of interactive entertainment and emerging media technologies. There's a lot of contact information and stuff. Basically I teach in a technology program. We're not like a fine arts background or anything at all. We're designed to give students a bachelor's degree, they get a real education, but we're teaching them to be technologists. They're supposed to be hands-on with technology and supposed to be able to get a job when they graduate, unlike art school. So the idea is that students are going to learn real employable skills move out into industry. And part of the way that we try to do that, and this is just one of these randomly finding, I'm going to skip around inside my presentation here, I found a link somebody sent me earlier, if it will, there. To a random dumb story in Wired, but Wired's talking about American schools are training kids for a world that doesn't exist. I'm trying not to do that. There's this bit down here that I really liked. It says, you know, the way that basically people are doing it, it says that a lot of schools are doing it, is that we learn and then after this we do. We go to school, then we go to work. That doesn't work. You don't learn stuff and then go do it. You do stuff, break things, set stuff on fire, that sort of stuff. And then you figure out how to do it. You have to be doing it while you're learning it. Some sort of magical learning experience and then you go do it. So at least that's the approach we've taken. We have these technical production classes and I'll have to get back into my presentation here. And the skip board. So the technical production classes are basically just guided workshops. The students work on projects. We determine what they're going to work on. They're not just sort of free to work on stuff. They're given a task to do put into teams. And then we try to help them out with things as much as possible while they still do the work. And the work that they do, at least in my classes of it, have been Blender. We use Blender extensively for a variety of different purposes. Often for things that Blender's never really built to do. I end up doing a lot of my own researches in human computer interaction with virtual worlds. So we do a lot of software development adding integrating support for the Oculus Rift and Leap Motion and various other interfaces with Blender Game Engine. We'd done that for a while then we realized we were spending all of our time installing all these different libraries and stuff. So we started adding in integration using some other tools, the conda packaging system out of the Anaconda distribution, etc. So we start branching off into more software development projects and less of like making models of things. So we're working with the underlying technologies. So that's sort of what we do there. I'm going to give away the ending at the beginning in case I don't get to the things and then I've got the ending out of the way so I can move on. So you can view them as main themes of the presentation or spoiler alert. These are basically the things that I'm going to come back to. This has been stated in a couple other people's talks that I've seen here. There's some things that I think are real strong strengths of Blender that people are often apologetic about. There's often this like, you know, it's really good for free software. I'm like, no, it's really good because it's free software. That's amazing. The Blender's licensing lets students work with Blender. It's not the student licensed version of Blender, not the toy crippled version of Blender, not the version that you can't pick up a contract job over weekends and make real money doing version. It's just Blender. So there's one license and it makes it really great. My students are able to actually do real work while they're in school. This comes back to that not learn and then do, but then do and then do some more and do some more and learn while you're doing it. Blender's open development model gives students a window into an industry scale software development project. People end up learning how to make Hello World in like 40 languages and that's kind of useful, but that's not really what you'd really do in a real software environment. So being able to see how Blender has been developed, how we sometimes have version 2.72 comes out and then 2.72a and then 2.72b and be able to talk to my students about how that, you know, why that happens is a really useful thing. My students have been able to be sort of spying on the whole development process and it happens there. So they get a feeling for what the kind of environments they work in will be like and it provides unique opportunities for introducing students to technical fields beyond just 3D modeling, rendering, animation stuff, because it builds in so many other projects, particularly Python related projects. The previous talk kept boiling down to you should learn Python. That's what I tell my students all the time, you should learn Python. It's great. It's used in a lot of different other areas and so Blender not only has stuff that's built on its own, but it's built on top of other existing projects, all of these nice things coming from industry, open subdiv, things like that, but also just the fact that it's built on top of Python. I'll get some more into that, but a lot of students who come in originally thinking they want to be like some sort of 3D modeler and they're not really good at it and if you're not really good at being a 3D modeler, there's not really a job at being a mediocre 3D modeler, but when they get to working with Blender, I've been able to steer them into a variety of different programming areas because the same stuff that they're learning to make Blender do what they want can be made to make web servers do whatever they want in a variety of other things. Python's broad applications in lots of areas makes it a great starting point. Goal of this presentation, I had real world examples of how Blender's openness is a strength not a weakness and when it comes to preparing students for jobs in a variety of technical fields so that's what I'm wanting to do here. I'm going to do this then by referring back to three examples so we're in Amsterdam, you may have noticed this and while I was on the way over here I realized that the three things I'm going to talk about a lot are really got their start from Amsterdam so these things started in Amsterdam, Blender, of course I'm going to talk about Blender because we're at a Blender conference, but Python also, about me as well and then the other thing since I mentioned I'm from New York College of Technology inside of the City University of New York, New York City got its start here as well so we may have known this in Amsterdam. Press made a book about this, there's this island at the center of the world, Russell Shorto here's all the information, there's an interview that he gave that I'm pulling this stuff from basically saying that yes, actually it was New Amsterdam before and that happened basically about the same time the pilgrims showed up, the Dutch and the English were kind of competing with each other so when the English got control of it they just sort of ignored all that previous history but it still had its impact. The Dutch Republic was an open and tolerant society that brought together lots of people and when they formed a colony there they kept going with that. New York became a place that is generally open and open for trade and very, you know, accepting of multiple cultures didn't sort of wipe out everything there. I like this line here because you know, 20 years after New Amsterdam, there's a report of 18 different languages being spoken and this is a time when the population is no more than 500. I did a survey in one of my classes, we had 16 students and we had 17 different languages spoken so we're doing pretty good. One of my kids speaks five languages though so that was the one I sort of put over the top but this sort of tradition there has kind of kept going. I teach in a very you know, my students are all either recent immigrants themselves or children of recent immigrants, they're almost always the first person, their families went to college definitely the first generation that's went to college. They're wanting to be able to move into programming jobs and technology jobs and not like working with Donalds so I have a large, you know, this sort of culture of openness kind of makes sense for us here. In fact there's the official seal of New York City with the attribution here. The person on this side there is not actually playing with the yo-yo as I first assumed and that is not a television antenna sticking out up there over the left hand side. Those are tools for navigation. You may notice that the official seal in the middle does have a windmill of course and the barrels there are for flour that was milled with the windmill and the beavers are not attacking the windmill as I had originally hoped but were one of the major exports from New York City originally to when it was at Dutch colony was beaver pelts. There is also, notice the one of the Lanipa Indians being shown on there, you know, I'm going to say this really as clearly as possible, colonialism bad, bad idea, bad things, terrible or things happen but under the Dutch there was not as bad as a lot of other places like say the Plymouth colony. There's less wards of extermination, more of like you have beaver pelts will trade you things for them. That was the main interaction there. Now of course in the process bringing smallpox and not much of other things that wasn't great but it could have been a lot worse and it was a lot worse in other places. So the sort of culture of openness carries another something else. So now for something completely different, a obligatory Monty Python joke to talk about Python. Python is one of the core things that's in Blender. What makes Blender amazing and magical and good. In fact we saw from the last talk the main thing in that was learn Python. It's great. Python is used in a lot of other stuff though. Python gets used very heavily in scientific computing world. I've done a lot. I moved back and forth between kind of fine arts, visual arts world and scientific computing as far as my own background of things. So all these things build on top of Python. The various scientific computing distributions up there and then various interactive formats based around IPython. So there's the Beaker project and various other things. There's a lot of really good things out there that particularly kind of like the data science world has just all adopted Python. That's like the language there and they've moved away from a lot of other tools. I actually used to work from research at one point in time. I love Mathematica. Mathematica is awesome. It's amazing but you can do a lot of the stuff that used to be able to do a Mathematica in Python. So it's a great tool for my students to be able to move off into other areas. I had students who came in thinking they're going to be 3D models who are now making more money than I do because they work for some hedge fund. And they'll probably be bored with that but once they have enough money in the bank they can do whatever they want to. So the things that I've come back to here is that Blender is built on top of, it's an open system built on top of the obligatory links for all these things. I'm going to follow those up. It's an open system built on top of other open systems like they all penetrate and interwork with each other. It builds on a lot of other strengths and it's a great place for learning. It's a great tool to get started being able to move into a lot of different areas. And also it is a professional industry tool. You can make it do a lot of things. It's a great strength, not something we should be apologizing about, especially in education. It's been amazing to be able to have, you know, when something doesn't work the way someone wants it to, to be able to go through source code and find exactly the line of code that says that's why this button doesn't do what you think it does and be able to show it to them. Being able to teach all the way down, even going down the lower level C parts of it has been great. I don't have to do that all the time, but knowing that I can do it has been really useful. And for my students being able to sort of be able to see how a software project comes together as opposed to just sort of, it appears magically on the day that the releases come out has been really key and really useful. Special thanks here to my students and on my various classes, especially to Dave Alvarado who got me the image that I put out here at the beginning there. He's been working on a culmination project which is basically a game in blunder, so he got me a random screenshot of that. He's really good higher end. So that's the sort of formal part of my presentation here if I can get this to let go of the screen. Basically what it comes down to is we use blunder as kind of a starting point, a thing that we can build other stuff on as opposed to like a pre-packaged tool which is a key thing for as a teaching point, pedagogically for my students to be able to show them that you can change stuff. Code is a thing that you write and it's not just sort of a thing that you buy from someone and you can be one of those people that writes that really, really key. Not everybody in here was in for the previous talk but talking about the Pi menus and that they're just little very, very simple Python scripts and you can rework the environment really, really rapidly. I was working with one of my students and showing him things like you mouse over things in the blunder editor and it shows you exactly which function is being called when you click that button and then I was able to open up the script that runs that menu and edit it inside of blunder and save it and be able to make changes on the fly. That blows their minds and that's kind of my job. Being able to really change how they think about things is really key for being able to make stuff happen. They come in often with unrealistic ideas about their own skills, unrealistic ideas about what things will be compensated but they're teenagers. I think back to me at like 17 and I wouldn't have trusted me at 17 to butter toast. I think it's part of my job is to help be able to challenge some assumptions they may have about what software is and whether they can program or not. A lot of them come in convinced they can't do this programming thing because that's something that special people elsewhere or some other place do and I make them do it and then they learn that they can do it. It's a really, really powerful tool on multiple levels. Not just on it lets you make cool 3D stuff which it does. It makes amazingly cool stuff. It's a great way to lure students into more technical areas because those technical areas are open to you as opposed to other 3D environments made by say Autodesk. That stuff is sort of closed off underneath and you sort of reach a limit to what you can do. Blender has been just absolutely key not just as a thing that we teach. I'm actually not really teaching like Blender 3D modeling is not like a skill that I want them to be able to put on their resume necessarily it would be a great one but the other stuff that comes along with it is really, really empowering for the students on multiple levels so it's been a great great source for my kids. We're working on a variety of different projects. We've been playing around with a lot of scientific computing stuff particularly the Kanda build system out of Anaconda distribution is amazing for handling dependencies for sort of complex projects. If you depend on a pile of C in Fortran code or whatever and you want to have a nice friendly interface to it you don't want to mess with doing a bunch of installing a bunch of libraries and stuff. You can just Kanda take care of it for you assuming someone's written a Kanda recipe so my kids have been doing that for a variety of different things like adding Oculus Rift support to Blender. We've got that down to where you type in a command and it sort of appears, lead motion, things like that. We basically every semester pick a different interface and bolt it onto Blender Game Engine so we keep adding new ways to interact with it and each semester we build on the previous classes stuff so now we can use the connect with Blender Game Engine and we can use the lead motion with Blender Game Engine and we can use the Oculus Rift and we'll just keep adding things to it and students learn that the work that they've done in class matters because we can do that now because the previous semester you guys did that and they take ownership and pride in their own work. Being able to show that kind of stuff is probably I think the most important things they're going to get out of learning. I mean they'll learn how to make models do stuff. I mean that's also important too but the other stuff that comes along with it Blender has been an amazing tool for those kind of not necessarily soft skills but larger more complex elements there as part of their education. So it's been a key part of our education thing. I can take questions or I can continue high-speed babbling on. I kind of smooshed my presentation into the time a lot of there and I realize everybody's been here at the end of the long day. Has anybody gotten any questions about anything? Everybody doing it there? Yes. Yeah, our intro programming class is processing. We use processing to get them started with it. It's a great tool especially getting to understand like the text you type it's turned into programs. So we use that to introduce basic programming skills usually start them off doing that and then we show them like look it generates Java underneath the hood and they can start playing with that. That gets them started. It's definitely a good place to you know I wouldn't necessarily begin with like python scripting inside of Blender. There's a lot of stuff going on and you want to kind of start with something that's just the code that you write. We also have them since processing environment is so nice. The Arduino environment as well is 90% the same. So once they've taken the intro processing class we have them take a physical computing class that I teach and they build stuff on a microcontroller which is kind of nice because it's no operating system or anything. It's just the code that you wrote. So it's a really great thing for learning because you don't have to worry about like something else unrelated to your code is broken and that's why it's not going. It's your code is broken and you need to fix it. Yeah, usually they come through like we have a kind of housey and kind of you know core, you know, forecast kind of thing. When they come in everybody does a little bit of programming. Everybody has a little bit of basic media skills. Everybody has a little bit of electronics. Get them introduced to stuff and then once they go from that they go into focusing. They focus on their own specialties but everybody works together on these large team projects and with me those projects are usually done in Blender. So kids come in and they do like four semesters of these team projects and when they begin with it they don't understand the programming parts of it and they're kind of mystified and terrified of it. But since we've been doing this for several semesters now there are other classmates that aren't mystified and terrified of it. They've got to hang of it and they're able to kind of help teach them and move them along with it. So it's a really great way once they've kind of gotten their feet with the basic ideas of scripting and programming to put them in there. Mostly they start using the Blender interface to begin with. Like give them, you know, the beginners get given a lot of kind of chores to do with stuff and then after a while they start modifying that interface or adding things to it or doing other stuff with it. So by the time that they graduate they've made it into whatever they want to make it into. So a lot of our kids have started using sort of their fourth year. So they're like wrapping a bunch of, coming up to graduate. They're doing culmination projects of their own devising. Like that still was from Dave's game that he's working on and a couple other students are working on. They keep changing around. They're using the Oculus Rift, doing a two player game where each player has a different view and into the same world. So each student's able to then sort of shape it into what they do. But it does have to be guided along the way. If you throw them in and they're like good luck, they'll drown. There's a lot of mazes of twisty little passages you can get lost in there. But with help and guidance it's a great environment because they start exploring. The students constantly find things that I have no idea about. Like in Blunder, there's a ton of stuff in there that they'll just show up with some modeling or animation tricks. I'm like, could you teach me that? And that's a good moment. I feel like I've taught them something when they're starting to teach me stuff back. But yeah, definitely. Processing and Arduino environments and things like that are great beginner ones. But once you've got going since everything's not everything but most of the interface is all written in Python all the way through. It becomes a good environment to start customizing and I think that's really the thing that I want them to take away from it is that it's code. It's written by people. You can be one of those people. And in fact you're going to be one of those people if you want to pass my class. Any other questions or anything? My first time here at the Blunder conference I've been really excited to get to see everybody's first day or anything. I've been using Blunder for several years now. Yes. I don't think so. I'm not certain. I think I'm just supposed to repeat back what you say. Yeah. Can you hear me? I'm teaching Blunder for between 13 and 16. And I have absolutely no hope that they'll ever learn any code. I was actually very surprised when you told me here that you're actually it sounded like you're mostly concentrating on better code actually on better Python. That's what we try to get them up to. If they want to learn some of the basic concepts of stuff the Blunder game engine is also nice because of its use of like the logic brick system the sensor controller actuator models nice and sort of formalize and has of doing code like things without a lot of syntax so that's also been a good place to kind of get them to warm up to it and then they can start introducing more Python code as controllers once they get a little bit more skilled. Some of them don't get there. The guy who did the course before me said he was using the game engine with the students. All he did was he made the games the students played them and when the students got bored they went online. Yeah, that's probably not the best pedagogical magic. I came into a class that was supposed to learn computer games and then yeah, I'm definitely trying to go over modeling with them. Yeah, I think like those basic concepts like the idea that you can simulate something with the computer and you can modify that stuff. Yeah, that's the part they really like. Would you recommend to actually dismiss the modeling part? It depends upon the focus of it. I mean I do a little bit of teaching the modeling just so they can understand like a 3D coordinate space because they'll need that or they're going to do other things in it. But I'm not trying to primarily crank out 3D modelers just because there's not a lot of jobs for I can make a cube and I can duplicate it. It doesn't get you very far whereas I know a little bit of coding gets you, you can get jobs with that so relative employability kind of things. Just a question. So your students appear to be very technically interested and they actually wanted to coding. They all enrolled in a college of technology. It says so on the outside of the building. So I assume that they don't often know what that really means to be quite honest. At least some of them. I mean some of my kids come in are really brilliant but they're all self-selected for some sort of technology background. My English isn't the best. So undergraduate students, what age group is that? They would be about 18 to 22. They're getting bachelor's degrees. Most of my students are 18 to 58 or something. I mean there's some older students in there. Very few of our students graduate in 4 years. Often they take 5 or 6 if they graduate at all. We have high drop out rates and those are not related to class performance unfortunately. Some of my best students have just a family member has become ill and they had to go back to Ecuador and take care of their grandmother kind of thing. That kind of stuff happens a lot. So I can't really rubric my way. Like better course plans and work around that other than finding large amounts of money to give them. Which I still haven't figured out how to work that out. But they're college students 18, 22 and up. Most of them have had some... Most of them have seen a computer and used their cell phones a lot. Very few of them come in with any programming background except for like 1 or 2 out of any given class who have come in having done a lot of stuff. So there's a really wide audio kind of thing. There's like a high dynamic range in technical ability. And a lot of them come in sorely lacking in basic math or reading skills. So we often have to spend a lot of time working on like with the 3D modeling stuff. Like what are the x, y and z axes and what does that mean? That kind of stuff. So we ended up teaching a lot of basic applied 3D math as along with it even though they take other math classes just to kind of get them up to where they're at. That's really cool. I've heard about people discussing here in the Netherlands the introduction of programming classes at very young age. What we call low risk schools. And that's before the age of 12. What do you think about that? I think it's definitely a good idea to introduce everybody to programming. And I think that if somebody really wants to study it they should be able to. I think the idea that somehow that will turn everybody into a computer scientist who will make huge amounts of money is not true. And that's kind of how it gets framed in the US. There's often this idea that like if we just had 10 year olds to do some programming they'll all become millionaires. And that's not going to work. I think this is more from a perspective of computers become more and more important in our society. And on the other hand it becomes easier to use so you have to know less. And they try to counter that by introducing this knowledge about how this stuff actually works that is so important in our society. Yeah, I think that a lot of software becomes easier to use. You don't need to understand anything about how it works. You sort of take it as a given that you just sort of click on some stuff on your phone and things happen. And pictures get posted on the internet or whatever. And that people talk about digital natives versus people who have grown up with technologies. My students are not at any great advantage having had a cell phone that they can click on some stuff as far as programming goes or as far as making things. In fact sometimes they're kind of at disadvantage of that. So I think being able to actually get exposed to that earlier would help if they got exposed to it in a way that wasn't just and now you get bored and go play on the internet which is how a lot of those classes seem to happen for those. They're actually talking about learning them. At that age we teach them English. Well why not include Python? Yeah I think it's a sort of basic literacy idea that's useful. Also programming can be a great way to teach other students to be interested in other things. If you can be able to build models and manipulate those that can make it more of an active learning process. Being able to teach music and those sort of concepts through programming tools can be a way of reaching other students who might be turned off by just sort of I have to memorize a bunch of stuff. Like they can make a thing and tinker around with it. I know that was kind of the sort of kid that I was. I mean taking things apart and stuff. So like I didn't really pay attention to my math classes because they didn't really, I had to memorize how to do stuff and it was only like years later I'm like wait let's sign, co-sign stuff. I can make video games with that. That was never made clear to me when I was a kid. I would have paid a lot more attention if that would have helped. Yeah so I think if they could do that early on it would help. There was a question over. I'm teaching primary school Scratch from MIT which is a visual programming tool. It works perfectly just to give them the mindset to start to think like a programmer or a storyteller and whatever they can do a lot with it. Yeah that's a nice start up before you go into blender. Yeah there's definitely a lot of like project like Scratch. Trinket's another one. It has the code blocks things there's several things to make it easier to do. You're not memorizing a bunch of syntax but you're getting these ideas of like there are things that take inputs, perform processes and do outputs and maybe you should learn about those. Hi. I also use Scratch and Code of Dojos throughout Belgium and we also use Arduino and Makey Makey Lego Mindstorms and it's really cool to see those young kids really active with it. So do you use that also? Yeah I teach the physical computing class which uses Arduino and I really find that being able to make a thing you can touch that does stuff really reaches another set of kids that would be like there's a stuff on screen I want to pay attention to it which kind of was me also at that age so being able to like make things that move around and do stuff and respond to the physical environment I think is a great way of getting engagement there. Also they can be able to kind of understand what's going on so I really like moving from having physical objects like physical computing things to Blender is that kind of sensor controller actuator model carries through both areas so there's this high level abstract idea of we're going to read from some sensors make some decisions about it and then change the world with some actuators and it'll be a feedback loop that lets them both make their Arduino projects and make games in Blender so I've got a couple kids here in both of them by Interactive 3D Class and the physical computing classes semester and both of them come up to be like we have the same homework assignments in both classes way like it's the same stuff just presented through two radically different environments so that kind of repetition and being able to see this as a big idea is really key and really helpful. Have you been working with Blender and Arduino? We've gotten some students who've been working on some projects try to integrate them together like we'd be able to send some simple sensors and stuff. There's an exporter, a PIA exporter normally so that you can use the game engine and have the direction to the Arduino and do stuff make lights go on. I haven't gone that much I've mostly gone with like having Arduino projects that send data into like a Blender world and you turn knobs and they attach those to some parameters that way I haven't gone logic bricks back which would be kind of neat though because I really do like the sensor controller actuator model it's a nice formal engineering you know it goes back to control systems, theory, cybernetic stuff there's some serious thought that's been put into that and having students think rigorously about the design of objects and systems in that way is really key I think for them to be able to actually understand them so being able to use that in multiple classes is really paid off because the first time through if they're like I'll memorize it for the test and then I'll forget about it but the second time through and they start realizing that idea that they learned early on applies to a different domain than they take it more seriously so yeah I like the combination of virtual world but also world world you know like those are I think might as well make those things really real to them somebody else over that way possibly microphone wrangling I was actually just going to find out what other people's opinions were about sort of secondary level education because we're sort of experiencing the same thing in the UK at the moment it's a big push on computer science education and so my daughter's like 13 at the moment they'll be actually teaching Python with Blender at that age and I was curious to see how everybody else's experience was and the start out was scratch the same as somebody already mentioned and they're moving across to things like Python and Blender so at the moment I mean I work in university education as well and we're kind of a little bit it's going to become harder because obviously the kids were at that age now when they come through to university education that can be actually quite more advanced than our current students are so I think that could make quite a big impact on sort of education sector as a whole my question in a way was actually answered by everybody talking about it beforehand but yeah I think that like with my students my biggest regrets usually is that I didn't get to talk to them like when they were in junior high school and kind of steer them towards things that would have actually interested them like a lot of them come in with such deficits and like basic mathematical skills or basic just sort of quantized learning kinds of stuff and or reading skills for that matter so if they can be introduced to them earlier I think that will put them in a much better case to learn whatever the thing that will be there in you know whatever the Blender 5.0 or whatever I don't know whatever the thing in the future so but I think that they definitely if they can be taught basic things early on that helps yeah well I mean it's at the UK so it stems from the fact that sort of early computer education was really just word and excel and that was about it you know so this is a really big push on it now so actually you don't get kids in the programming and the sort of associated soft skills as well so yeah like we even had in my college there were still like these computer classes that were like learning to do like excel sheets and stuff like that was you know the extent of it and like they're coming up with like a bachelor's degree and that really makes part of my soul die thinking about that so I'm glad to see them getting steered towards more stuff. The big thing that I worry about with some of these is they still want them to kind of color inside the lines of whatever they're doing as opposed to view computation as a creative medium which they can express themselves in and even if they're learning cool tools like scratch and things like that at 13 if they're learning to type in the example as told to them and it runs without errors and that's all that they care about then they've learned basically nothing so they still have to be you know getting this idea of like codes a thing that people write and I can be one of those people and that would be a good thing so anyone else anyone looking around there I've been the end of a long day here but I'm really glad to get to come here and talk to people about education and learning and things like that which is one of the things I've liked about the Blender community from the beginning so thanks everybody I have no idea how to turn this mic off so