 My name is Joe Shockett and I'm a game developer and I've been working in Los Angeles for the past 25 years. And today I'm going to talk to you about a company that I co-founded six years ago with Grant Ostberg called Codesmark. And we develop a platform that helps kids learn how to code. I'm going to start with just a two minute kind of marketing video just to show what we do. And then I'm going to jump into some slides and talk to you about why we do what we do and how we do it. Here we go. Welcome to Codespark Academy, an award-winning app that introduces kids to coding. Kids can begin coding as young as four years old without the help of an adult. Kids love to play Codespark Academy and don't even realize that they're learning. Kids will encounter fun challenges as they help the foos find lost items, take care of pets, feed hungry diners, and sort candy. There are over 1,000 activities to keep your kids engaged and new challenges are added every month. Every activity teaches your child a fundamental coding concept. Coding skills will help your kids now with math and reading, and will even prepare them to succeed in our tech-driven future. Kids will learn how to approach problems using logic, discovering creative ways to solve a problem, and even build confidence testing new ideas. Watch their faces light up after finally squashing a code bug. Now they're ready to create. Your kids can bring their ideas to light as they design, build, and code interactive stories and games. This is where older and more advanced kid coders thrive with unlimited coding opportunities. And after creating their masterpiece, kids can't wait to play with their closest friends, swap projects with siblings, or share stories with their parents. They can even safely share their game and inspire millions of other kid coders. Continue learning on the go. Track progress. Any time, any place on any device. There are no ads and no in-game purchases. Join over 20 million kid coders on Codespark Academy, the award-winning app recommended by parents, teachers, and education experts. It only takes a few minutes to sign up. Try it completely free for seven days. Okay, so that's our product, Codespark Academy. And we've been working on it about six years. We're a small team in Pasadena, California. A little background on me. My background is in theme park design. I worked at Walt Disney Imagineering. And this is relevant because there I learned really how to create a world that has a story that engages an audience. And I went on to develop virtual world. But these are kids' communities. And this is relevant because with Codespark, from day one, we set out to build a community of kid coders. So how do you do that safely? How do you keep it positive? We'll dive into that. And then lastly, I've spent a lot of time in education, and especially coding education. I was on the original Alice team. Alice is a product out of University of Virginia and Carnegie Mellon that introduces students to computer science. And then Codespark is my current project. And I've also done quite a bit of teaching. So I'm teaching how to use Unity in college, at the college level. And coaching and mentoring and volunteering with groups like the First Lego League, which uses Lego Robotics to introduce STEM subjects. This is a little bit about me. I'm a child of the 80s. I started with toys that were creative and open-ended. And my approach to teaching is a very constructionist, kind of along the lines of Seymour Papert's writings. Very much a learn-by-doing, a learn-by-creating. And you'll see that kind of lead into everything that we've built at Codespark. But how do you get kids to create? How do you get them excited about learning how to code? Well, I think it's through game, and that's why we're all here today. And I don't just mean that Codespark is a game. It certainly has game-like elements to it. And I don't mean purely through gamification, like giving kids three stars, giving them chocolate for suffering through the broccoli. I mean by actually letting kids create games, creating their own video game. Let's take a little step back. Let's talk about why we should teach kids to code. Somebody may be wondering why I introduced... We go all the way down to kindergarten, and then we're going to talk about how to do that. And I think hopefully some of the lessons that we've learned in teaching kids to code can apply broadly to other forms of education and entertainment and even products that you may be working on. I grew up watching Bob Ross, the joy of painting on PBS, and found it very inspiring. He made it seem like painting was easy. It was fun. It was something that everybody could do. And his goal was not that everyone watching should become a professional painter. It was instead to say that painting is a form of self-expression. It can be part of your life. You can find joy in it. And I have the same goal with coding. I think that coding is a form of self-expression. It can be fun and anybody can do it. But why computer science? Why right now? We may have heard the quote, software is eating the world. And that is certainly true. Technology and software in particular have affected every industry out there. And when you look at the jobs of the future, they are certainly based on software. But that's not entirely our mission to create a job force. We see that by learning to code, you're actually learning creativity and problem solving. And this is going to be increasingly important in the world that kids are growing up in, even if they're not software engineers. 90% of parents want computer science for their kids as some research from Code.org. And that's great. But the problem is school systems are slow to change. They're doing a great job adopting curriculum. But they also need products to adopt. Quality, engaging computer science, education is still emerging. And so that's why we're here. And lastly, computer science is foundational. It can be used in so many other subjects, from biology to physics to math and the humanities certainly too. But there's this perception out there that computer science is kind of isolating. It's about hacking. It's only for a certain type of person. And that's not true. In my experience, computer science and being a software engineer is very collaborative. It's very creative. And it's something that anybody can do. And don't get me wrong, I enjoyed all these shows. These are great shows. But of course I did. If you look at the hero in each one, it looks like me. I can see myself in there. So representation matters. And so you can't talk about computer science education without talking about the gender app. There's a lot of great research that we follow from people like Allison Master at the University of Washington. And they're looking at this. They're studying it and they're finding some patterns. As a young boy, you saw the toys I played with. A lot of STEM toys are given to boys. They're marketed to boys. Also for parents and teachers, there's kind of an unintentional bias that emerges. Maybe it's things like I'm not a math person. And girls will see their often female teachers say that and identify with it and it kind of becomes part of them accidentally. We have to lean into this. These are our characters in Codespark. The first characters that you interact with are girls. They're powerful girls. They're interesting. They are diverse. And you can do really small things. Even the design of the computer lab that you walk into matters. If girls walk in and there's pictures of Star Trek or Star Wars or War to Warcraft, they will say, oh, maybe this space is not really for me. But if you take down those posters and replace them with things like nature posters, you know, mountains even, the gender bias goes away and the girls stay. But there's also an access gap. Not every kid can afford a STEM education. You tend to need a device. You might need an expensive robot. You might need a mentor or a coach or an expert to get you through some of the tricky things. And not everybody has that. And we'll talk about ways that we at Codespark have bridged that gap. Mostly through partners like these two. This is the Bertot Foundation where we actually drive a bus in and distribute laptops or tablets with pre-loaded apps like ours all over the world. And locally this is a group in Pasadena called the Encoders that runs summer camps essentially for underserved kids in the community. So our mission at Codespark is really to inspire a generation of creative problems owners. Let's look at how we do that. Hopefully I've come into you that this is now an important thing to do. Let's look at how we do it. Four main areas. The first is accessibility. So what this means is really making sure that every kid has access to the platform. Second is equity. Once you get in, make sure that everyone has an equal chance to succeed. Third is community. Again, going back to that virtual world experience, how do you get a community of kids together? And lastly is creativity. How can we get kids creating with code? So accessibility. The first thing is to realize that not everyone were a subscription-backed product. Not everyone's going to be able to afford the subscription. There are millions of kids out there that we would not reach if all we had was an at-home subscription. So we decided to make the app free for public schools. We have a picture of our teacher dashboard where teachers can go in and create a classroom. They can track progress. They can see all the projects their kids have created. And it also creates a walled garden for them to avoid some of the safety concerns that you might have with the school kids. And that's free all over the world and translated into many languages. We rely on partners for distribution. The two that I showed on the slide previously. Because even giving the product away free isn't enough, you often have to go one step further by distributing devices or making sure they have access and Wi-Fi. Third is we have to support old devices and many platforms. We spend a lot of time on this in our development team. We support all the way back to an iPad 2. We run on WebGL, so we run on any browser. We support Android, Amazon, of course, iOS. It's a lot of work. It means you can't use all the fancy new stuff like VR and the crazy new shaders that come out. But it's worth it. When you go into a classroom and open the device cabinet, you never quite know what you're going to see. And so it's really important that you run on the majority of devices out there. And last is the app is self-directed. So you do not need a coding expert or a computer science professor to get started. You can kind of hand it to the kids, air drop it, and off of there, off to the races. Once they're in the app, let's talk about equity. How do we make sure that every kid that opens the app will succeed and have a positive experience? The last thing we want to do is for kids to try computer science and something goes wrong or they get a bad signal and they say, oh, this confirms my fear that this is not for me or I'm not smart enough or a different type of kid. So what do we do for equity? First, like I've said, we lean into the gender bias. We start every one of our puzzles with a comic, with a story. So this is Val and the chapter is called Puppy Problems. And the kids are learning about events, so responding to events with code. But it's really important that they start with a story and they have some reason, they have some problem to solve. This was especially important for girls. We didn't used to have these little comics. And when we looked at our data, we saw that boys were completing the puzzles about 20% higher, that higher rate than girls. And it's not because they're smarter or better at coding or better at problem solving. It's just that intentionality that the girls were sort of, why am I here? And the boys were by and large happy to just kind of jump to the right and find the star. We added these story missions where we really put you in the role of a helper. You are trying to help a character solve a problem. In this case, Val, the astronaut, is on a mission to deliver space puppies. And the glitch character, which is the late blue monster there, is accidentally opened the airlock and the space puppies have been sucked out into space. Don't worry, they're fine. The kids have to program Val to rescue all the puppies. And so, when we release the stories, the girls completion rates equal the boys. And the boys were cool with the stories, too. But it evened the playing field again. Another big design constraint that we put on ourselves is that there's no reading required. So this bottom area here is showing our coding tray. This is where it's write code. It's all block based. So we don't, for instance, make them read a paragraph about what a loop is or make them type anything or put semicolons at the end of their line. None of that is age appropriate for, you know, a five to nine year old, the audience that we're targeting. Instead, we give them colorful animated icons and a visual language. So this in particular is a loop. It's looping an infinite number of times and it's building a crate and then jumping to the right. And we very slowly scaffold kids up to this point where they start with just one command and two, then we introduce a loop and we introduce more complicated commands. There's no reading requirement has actually had a lot of benefits for us. Number one, of course, learning to read is hard enough. So learning to code and learning to read at the same time is just a bad idea. But also it increases the equity for kids that maybe have developmental disorders or, you know, reading problems like dyslexia. Unfortunately, Joe is experiencing some local internet connection problems. This concludes his talk for the day. I'm sure he'll be back later. I hope you can meet up and talk to him personally in the public hub or during break times.