 I'm so glad I'm going first. I was so nervous. It's super nice to be back here. I actually, I grew up in Chester. I spent two and a half years there. So UK has such a special place for my heart. And I feel like I'm in Downton Abbey. It's amazing. So my name is Linda Leogas. I'm a children's book author and an illustrator and a super mediocre programmer and a business school dropout. And because Scandinavian people, that's where I come from, from Helsinki Finland, because Scandinavian people are such self-deprecating people. The only thing I feel really confident saying is this, that I'm a dropout. As Simon mentioned, I was one of the co-founders of Railskills, a first experience in software craftmanship back in 2009. And the thing spread like wildfire. Today Railskills has been in over 227 cities, all everywhere from Amant to Australia, from Bella Horizon to Berlin in Ukrainian cities that I can't even pronounce. It all started as a weekend thing in Helsinki. I never, ever imagined that it would spread. It was something that I wanted to do for me and my friends. And then there was the Ruby community, the amazingly warm and welcoming community of people who said that, yeah, let's do it everywhere in the world. And that's been an amazing, amazing ride. I worked for a few years at Codecademy in New York. And I had a lot of the startup ethos still going on when I decided to move back to Helsinki to be with my family. And I thought, huh, where does the most scalable change in the world happen? Surely it's not dating applications or like dinner applications. And ladies and gentlemen, the most scalable change in the world, it happens when you're four years old. It happens if we can change the perception a four-year-old has about the world. We can have a totally different kind of group of adults. And that's, that's when I decided to become a children's book author. There were only a few problems in this. First, I wasn't an author. I had never drawn before. And I still consider myself to be a pretty mediocre programmer, not someone with a PhD in early childhood pedagogy and at a PhD in computer science. But I belong to the Jeff Atwood School of thought where repetition is the king. And I started drawing and I figured that drawing is like any other skill, mechanical repetition, rough repetition. And if you draw a thousand circles, eventually your circles are going to get better. And these are some of the first sort of pictures from Hello Ruby from 2009, I think 2010. It was the time when I was teaching myself programming. And I would run into all of these words like object oriented programming and garbage collection. And I was like, oh, what is this thing? And, and I had this little guide on my tour. She was six years old. She was Ruby. She would explain all of these things to me. And, and you know, when there's people who, people who see numbers as colors, I started to see the world of technology as stories. And it really helped that I had the Rails Girls community around me. They sort of created this really weird reality distortion bubble for me where I felt that, yeah, sure, I could write a children's book about programming without really knowing how to program or really knowing how to draw. So they would send me pictures and I even got a plush toy from Belo Horizonte once and I figured like, yeah, maybe, maybe there's something here. And then the pictures started to get better too. And I had an idea of like the surrounding world of Ruby. So she would have the friend, the snow leopard who's beautiful, but doesn't want to play with the other kids. The other kids are so messy and, and the androids who are really friendly and the Linux, the penguin and, and she meets Cache there. And anyways, like wonderful whimsical adventures. And I decided that, okay, I'm going to make this. I have all these wonderful Ruby friends all around the world who will support me. And Kickstarter was picking up the time and, and I put the project on Kickstarter asking for $10,000 to get like first round of books published. And I was thinking about basically all of you, like people who are programmers who have kids who want to show all of the colorfulness and excitement of, of the world of programming. And then this happened. And $380,000 worth of pre-orders in a matter of a month. And during the first 24 hours, the project gathered over $100,000. And you, I still don't know if this was like the best day or the worst day in my life. I would like crawl under our bed and like cry. They're like, I don't know what I'm doing over here because, you know, this, this whole thing was still very messy. It was just an idea of what I had had, like a bunch of Tumblr pictures that I had made. And, and there was no structure and, and no sort of resonant big idea that this is what I'm going to do in the world. But I needed to pick up pretty fast in order to make this happen. And, and this is kind of a story of the, the last year, what I've been working on with, with them, with this whole project and sort of delivering on the promise of making a whimsical entryway to the world of programming. And I came up with three principles of programming that I kind of wanted to build my, the whole universe of little movie around, which I'm going to tell them pretty soon. But let's start. Oh, and all of the exercises I mentioned over here are also on the website. So they are free to download over there. And you can even see what the other kids have made. So here's a little girl who password protected her door with a tiny computer. I want you all to be Alice with me today. Take the red pill and fall deep, deep down inside the computer. So this is where I kind of started. I thought that, okay, if we all agree on the idea that the future important languages are going to be English and Chinese and JavaScript or Ruby or Python or whatever you take, maybe we shouldn't be teaching grammar lessons. Maybe we should be teaching poetry classes. And what I mean with that is the same way when I go to school and I learn Finnish, I don't only learn about the grammar, the different past tenses or future tenses. I learned to read other people's writings, different kinds of writings like essays and poems and everything. And then I learned to write my own stuff like newspaper articles and little columns and stuff like that. And in the same way, learning to program should be sort of this whole array of different things. And the thing is that little girls, they don't know that they are not supposed to like computers. When I was a little girl, I thought that I, like, I knew that I didn't like computers. I was the girl who loved philosophy and art and knitting and all of these like colorful, happy things. And I thought that computers, they are just sort of introverted and scary and boring and gray. And that couldn't be further away from the truth. But the little girls of today, they don't know that they are not supposed to like computers. They are really amazing at concentrating on things. They tell amazing stories. They are super precise and they are going to be really kick ass in this. The only thing is that we need to reinvent the curriculum of code, the way we teach programming for them. And I came up with a few different things I want to be teaching, like the concepts before you even learned to write a JavaScript array or Ruby hash. You need to learn to take a big problem and put it into smaller pieces. You know, me to learn about the concept of loops. Everyone who's ever done a free course meal has really done an algorithm in one way or another, has planned step by step instructions of getting through the problem of handling three different courses. Everyone who's ever had a dance competition has really done different kinds of loops, like dance until you hear the music stop or so forth. And anyone who's ever... Now I forgot the example I was having here, but we'll get to that later on. The point being that there's a wide variety of teaching these concepts. And when I talk to programmers, they almost always recognize these two types of joys in programming. The first of them is the more intellectual pleasure of having a beautiful abstraction, a wonderful function written down and feeling very, very idealistic and happy about your intellectual work. But then there's the other type of programming joy. That's when you bang the keyboard and you're like, I'm not sure if this is going to happen, but oh, I made the computer obey my will. It actually works what I was trying to do. And that's almost like a tangible joy. And that's play. And that's what I was after. But in order to understand all of this, I needed to go to the people who understand play best and understand what it is and how it works. And that says a mystery. I know says a mystery that is pretty big here. And it's unbelievable. They've produced 43 seasons of quality kids content that is both fun and educational. And they say that for our social and cognitive and even like our physical well being play is paramount. And then there's this other company called Lego that I think many of us loved growing up that says that there's actually five types of play. There's physical play. There's play with objects. There's symbolic play. There's pretence and sociodramatic play. And there's games with rules. But for some reason, when we think about programming and play, we only think about the last one games with rules. And Lego went further on and they listed all sorts of motivations for play. So they listed achievement based motivations, social motivations and immersion motivations. And again, when we teach programming, for some reason, we only use this side of the spectrum of play. We talk about progress and power and accumulation and numbers and optimization. And everyone who's ever programmed knows that there's a lot of self disclosure. There's a lot of collaboration. There's a lot of finding and giving support to one another in the open source community. There's a lot of exploration and joy of finding hidden things. And all of a sudden, I had this vocabulary like, okay, this is what I want to be doing. And I want to sort of have all of these slides present. So free principles, the principles of playfulness, rules and curiosity. And I'll give you a few examples of each of these. The first principle starts with asking the question, what if there's entire industries that have been founded around this very question like you had spreadsheets and then you ask the question, what if and then the modern finance world was born after that. But I think the most important thing here is to show the colorfulness and playfulness of computing. One of the things I hate when I talk to laymen about programmers is that they say that, oh, what programming is, people just sit in front of the computer and the breakthroughs are silent. Like you never know what's happening inside of the head of the programmer between the relationship of the computer and the programmer. And all of the culture and colorfulness that all of us know so well is hidden in this murky underground internet forums. And normal people don't see it. So I want to show like all of the happy, funny stuff that happens in the programming community. And little Ruby, she's a little girl, she's not a computer, but she sometimes thinks like a computer. So when I tell Ruby that, Ruby, you need to dress up for school today, she will dress up but she will leave her pajamas on because like I didn't tell her to take the pajamas off. And when I tell Ruby that Ruby, you really need to like clean the toys from your room. She's going to clean all of the toys from her room, but she's going to leave the pens and papers on the floor because hey, pens and papers are not really toys. And you can't imagine how relieved six year olds feel when they hear about the role model of Ruby and how angry the parents also are for me after introducing these concepts. And the tiniest, the atomic bits of computers, the Boolean logic, ands, ors and nots. Instead of making them into numbers, we can make them into a dress code. So Ruby is super particular about the clothes she wears. On Mondays, she wears clothes that are red and green. Can you point the right clothes for her? On Wednesday, she wears clothes that are not yellow. And on Fridays, you come up with the rule that Ruby uses to dress up. Most importantly, Ruby knows that sometimes big problems are small problems stuck together and you can really do anything if you start to solve problems one at a time. The second principle is that of rules, asking the question how something works. And here's another thing that people often sort of feel like computers are these black boxes and you're not supposed to take them apart and tinker and turn them around and twist them. And it's something just is, that is there and someone else creates. And I know there's stuff like Raspberry Pi and Kano and all of these amazing things coming from UK. And I think it's super important that we give the kids, again, back the gift of asking the question, how does this work? And coming up with rules, imposing a logic on something that is otherwise hard to understand. Because technology, it's not magic. It's never been magic. It's been real people building real things. But if you go to your neighbor and ask them, do you know how a computer works? They'll be like, really, not sure about that. And it's not like a given. We can't wait that Apple gives us a new watch or Google gives us a new car. We need to build those things ourselves and we need to have a generation of kids who believe that they can do these things themselves. So Ruby, when she cooks, she knows that she needs to break the problem into separate pieces. She needs to abstract correctly the act of making cupcakes. If she switches certain ingredients, she will have different kinds of cupcakes. If she adds more to the cupcakes, ingredients to the cupcakes, she will have more cupcakes. And when she helps the snow leopard decorate her beautiful house, she can sort of spot the right patterns from the wallpaper of that or the loops inside of the wallpaper. And she can learn Boolean logic with the icky little bugs over there. There's a few more exercises from the book. So the final principle, the principle of curiosity is asking the question, why? Why does something happen? Why, why, why, why? And it makes me really sad how we've lost the idea, the computers were born out of poems and practicality, like Ada Lovelace, the daughter of a mathematician and a poet. And we've lost that somewhere in the trenches. We've started to think that computers are these machines that don't have a soul in them. And when I work with kids, we start with the basic premise of, I show them a picture of a car and a grocery store, toilet and a dog and ask them, which one of these is a computer? And many of the kids, they start by projecting their parents' ideas of what a computer looks like. And they're like, none of this is a computer. And then we get to talk about it. And we talk that, maybe the dog would have a collarbone band that has a computer inside of it. Or maybe in a few years time, dogs will have chips inside of them that are computers. And actually, six-year-olds figure out pretty fast that all cars have navigation systems, cars really are computers. And then we talk about grocery stores and how there's different kinds of grocery stores, different kinds of computers inside of grocery stores. And you know what? When your parents were your age, computers were so big that they couldn't fit this whole. And when you're going to re-grown up, computers are going to be so tiny that they'll fit into each and every milk bottle. And then there's a spark in the kids' eyes and they start to think about, what, why, what if, how would happen if a computer fit inside of a milk bottle? And then I tell them, and it's hilarious for five years old, that in Japan toilets are also computers. And we do all this. We teach our kids, like, how, I don't know, how them, how the combustion engine works or how, how to become a spaceman or how the human body works. But when the kids come to us and ask us, what is a bubble sorting algorithm or, or Linda, Linda, what actually happens when I press play button on YouTube and like, what goes where and who talks to who? Or Linda, is internet a place? We adults, we grow oddly silent. We matter something about it being magic or it being really complicated. Well, well, it's neither. It's not magic and it's not complicated. It all just happened really, really, really fast. Computer scientists are among the biggest idols I have in my life. They've built like amazing things in the past 20 years, but they've also built abstraction layers on top of each other so that we, the consumers, we have iPhones, but we have no idea what happens inside of them. And that's why in these workshops, we build computers with kids and they get to know the bossy CPU and the helpful RAM and where their summer vacation pictures go to. And what happens if you drag a virus inside of the computer and they get to design their like keyboard and come up with different kinds of buttons? And I had this little boy, Arthur four years old, who first designed a button that allows him to print out Lego coloring pages that his mother had printed out the previous day. But pretty soon Arthur was like, this is boring. Like I want to print out real Legos and he printed out some Legos and then he got totally wild and printed out a microwave and breakfast for the whole family on the next day. And Arthur's mom, who's one of my best friends said, Arthur, that's not possible. You can't do that. I'm like, that's exactly possible. Like Arthur is going to grow up in a world where we will have Legos that are printed on computers. We will print breakfast on computers and he's going to be part of building that future and we should be sparking his imagination. And one of my other favorite stories is this little girl who wanted to be a dolphin doctor when she grows up and she was really uncertain about computers at first. She was like, I'm not sure about these things, but then we talked about it and we figured out that like maybe she'll design a dolphin health application and she did this exactly. She designed a dolphin health application where she could manage her little dolphin patients, her pictures of them and like the different stats of the of the dolphin patients. And one of my favorite stories is a story of a little boy, he's six years old and his favorite thing in the world is to be an astronaut or actually to be the mission control man for the astronaut. The astronaut is the father. So the father is on the opposite side of the room and the little boy sits these huge, huge headphones on and he's totally immersed in his paper computer because you know what, he's designed intergalactic planetary navigation application and his task, his role in life is to build, bring the father from the Martian atmosphere safely back to Earth. And these kids are going to have a profoundly different experience with technology and dream of different kinds of things and build a future that we all want to be a part of. So the ending is probably this. None of this is really new. I think computer science is an exciting field because we have all of these things from the past. Already Alan Turing in the 60s talked about a child machine, like how we could build artificial intelligence by modeling the behavior of kids and the way kids learn about things. And we have seen more Popford in the 70s saying that we shouldn't be teaching kids how to calculate the prime numbers from the root squares from the 21st prime numbers. We should be teaching kids to produce things and create stuff. And then we have Alan Kaye who basically, if you haven't read this article, please do in the 70s, imagine a hackable iPad and he has pictures and it's wonderful and beautiful. And storytelling. Storytelling is not new either. There's a few wonderful books. Ruby wizard with computational fairytales. Maybe for kids a little bit older. So if you have like seven to 12-year-old kids, these are wonderful things. And I think everyone of us knows why is Prygman guide to Ruby. That's the thing that got me excited. I learned no Ruby programming language from there. But I learned that there's people who have imagination and people who have passion. And that's why I wanted to be a part of the Ruby community. And that's why we need storytellers. Because computers are about people. And when I talk to programmers, non-programmers, they have a hard time grasping that code is written for humans and programming languages are written for humans, not the computers. And that the very DNA of technology is humanity. And a computer used to be a person who was really good at calculating things. And in the past, in the Greek time, technology meant not only the tools, but also the skills to make things happen. So it was interrelated. You couldn't take the human and the technology apart from one another. And that's why we need people with different kinds of stories to sort of spread this message and get the word out. And we all have stories from our childhood that stay for us with years to come. And they affect the way we see the world as adults. I've definitely had many of those Scandinavian stories, but also actually British Postman Pad and Paddington and all of these childhood stories that have shaped the way I became as an adult. And when I was small, I wanted to be a world builder. I would wake up in the morning in Moomin Valley and roam around Tatooines in the evening and then go to sleep in Alice in Wonderland's world. But the harsh reality is that you can't become a world builder. You can't graduate to become a world builder in university or in vocational schools. But you programmers, you found a little pole in all of this. You have graduated to become world builders. Programmers have the unique ability to build something out of nothing with only the power of your words. Create a whole entire universe with your own logic, your own rules. And that's why you are storytellers. Thank you.