 So excited during this computer science education week to talk to you a little bit about product design here at CESA and we are honored that you are spending time with us today. And I'm Angela, I lead community here at CESA. I was a kindergarten teacher for many years and used CESA in my classroom and I wanna introduce my colleague Emily today. Emily, tell us a little bit about what you do here at CESA. Hi everyone, my name is Emily and I'm a product manager at CESA. That means I get to show up to work every day trying to make CESA better for our students and our teachers and their families. So what do we design at CESA? Basically, we design the whole app and company. So we make new tools in CESA that you get to use to show your learning. We also design new ways to help teachers and students learn. We also make all kinds of videos and lessons for students. And also we design new ways to do things better on our team because when I first started working at CESA we had three people and now we have over 60. So that means we have to do things a little differently. And work together a lot. Yes, and work together a lot. So what is design thinking? Let's get into that. Let's get into it. So design thinking is a set of steps that you can use to solve hard problems. And there are a few things that make design thinking really special and make it so I love to use this process to solve problems with my friends at CESA. So it's very focused on people. So you're focused on people and their problems. You get to collaborate, which means you get to work a lot with other people in your group. It's very optimistic, which means you approach problems thinking that you can solve them and you'll be able to persevere and find a great answer. And it's also experimental, which means you get to do lots and lots and lots of drafts. So maybe you're wondering, that sounds pretty cool, but how do I do it? So we are gonna talk about the steps of design thinking and I'm gonna share an example from CESA, a project that we worked on recently so that you can get an idea. So we're gonna talk about how we use design thinking to build all of the new creation tools in CESA. So step one is discovery. So in this step, you're thinking, what problem do I wanna solve and who do I want to help? Then the next step is interpretation. So that means when you were doing your discovery step before and you were seeing who do I wanna help and what problems are they running into, you're gonna take down all those ideas and take all those notes and think with your friends, what did we find out? What was surprising? What did I learn that I didn't expect to learn? And you can see there's not just one right answer. No, at this part of the process, there's gonna be hundreds of different ideas and answers and that is pretty exciting. So the next step is to generate even more ideas. So this is the ideation step. So this is when you and your collaborators, your classmates or other people in your group are gonna get all your ideas out there. Gonna write them down, you're gonna share them with each other, you're gonna discuss them and it's just like all ideas are good ideas. Start there and then you're gonna choose a few of your favorite ideas to take to the next step. And the next step, step number four is experimentation. And this is the step that we love the most at SESA and we spend the most amount of time in this step. This is when we start to think about, okay, what idea do we have that we think is the best idea? Let's try to start to build it in a variety of different ways and see what we can learn from the people we're trying to help. So for example, when we're thinking about adding a new tool into SESA, we start with the quickest possible way of learning, do we like this idea? And that is by sketching it out. So to do this step, all you need is a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper and you're gonna just draw out your ideas. Then working with your friends, you're gonna think, okay, we like some parts of this idea, we don't like some parts of this idea, let's do another version. So that's where the experimentation comes in, right? Lots and lots and lots of different drafts. And so we, with our creation tools, we started with the sketching and then we started creating some prototypes in Google Slides and then we started to build it and actually write the code. And then once we had the code, we shared our prototype with students like you. We went to their classrooms and we visited with them and we had them play with the tools and give us their feedback. Another really fun part about the experimentation phase is that you get to talk with the people who you're trying to help and really see is this helping to solve their problem? Does this work for them? What ways can we make it better? And so that's what we did. So here you can see on one side of the screen, we have some examples of things that students were able to create with the tools and then also all of our notes that I took of their feedback. What did they like and what did they not like? And then we did tons of drafts, hundreds and hundreds of drafts and we shared our prototype with students and teachers and we got their feedback and we shared it again and we got their feedback and we did lots of drafts. So I see a number in this picture next to V4.06 and it says 13,255. What does that mean? That means that we had 13,255 drafts before we got to this point. Lots of testing and retesting and redesigning, right? That's right. And then the final step of your design thinking process is evolution and this is also a step that we love at CISA where we get to share our solution with the people we made it for and get their feedback because the project of designing is never done. That's what's so cool about design thinking is it's not about getting the right answer on the first try. It's about having the courage to come back and try again and again and again and keep getting better with each version that you do because you're never gonna get it perfect the first time. And we have a bunch of exciting resources that you can use to explore this design thinking process with your teacher and with your class because you don't need to use this process to design an app. You can use it to fix any problem that you see in your school. Like maybe there's a bunch of trash on the ground or maybe you're throwing away a lot of papers and maybe there's a better way to reuse those papers. You can think about and brainstorm with your classmates what's a problem that we see in our school and how can we use these steps to make it better? Yeah, there's lots of good resources there. And then I'll probably these are a couple of resources more geared towards teacher. So we're gonna kind of skip over that. But I wanna go here because we're gonna focus on questions right now. And for all of you listening live, this is a great time for you to talk to your teacher and share some questions that you might want to get answered here today. And my colleague in the other room, Emily, has been looking at questions coming in and I'm guessing there's probably some more coming that I'm gonna check in with her and see, do we have some questions we should jump into, Emily? Yes, one of the first questions I think might be nice for our student friends to understand is Joseph wanted to know, what is feedback? Oh, Joseph, that is such a great question, right? What is this word feedback and what does that mean? This is a word we use a lot at CSOP. And I think you might have experienced this when your teacher comes over to you and shares some information that they have about how you did on a project or if you're working with a classmate and they say something to you like, hey, I like it when you did this but I wish you wouldn't do this. That's feedback. So feedback is basically when you're telling another person how something that they did makes you feel. I see another question here actually from Ms. Harding's class. It says, what do you do when you feel like you wanna give up on your idea? Oh, yeah. That's a good one. That's a great question. Thank you for asking that. So this is something that is tricky about this process, right? Because when you're on the 13,000th draft and you're not sure you're gonna get it right, it does feel like giving up. So one thing I think that's really good about design thinking is that you're working in a group. So you're not working completely on your own. So if you feel like you're stuck or you don't know where to go or you're feeling like giving up, you can talk to your classmates and your partners on the project and say like, oh, I'm really having a hard time. I think I might wanna give up and they can help you. Another thing that's really helpful for me when I felt like giving up on this project was to go and visit my customers. Like what problem are you trying to solve? Maybe that's a problem that you're trying to solve for your school or maybe it's a problem you're trying to solve in your community. You can go and you can sort of reinvigorate, refresh yourself by getting close and talking to them and sort of remembering why you really wanna help them. Emily, do you have another question that you've picked out? We have so many great questions but one that keeps coming up is, how long did it take to build this amazing app CESA? And a lot of people also wanna know why it's called CESA. Oh, that is great. Those are two of my favorite questions. So we'll start with, why is it called CESA? So when we were coming up with the idea for CESA, we didn't have a name for it yet. We came up with the name right before we wanted to share it with all of you. So we got together, the five of us who were working on CESA at that time and we wrote down all of our favorite things about school because we knew we wanted a name for CESA that would remind us of school and having fun at school. And so we all wrote down all of our ideas and then we each picked our five favorites and we saw that a lot of people chose CESA, one, because it's super fun and two, because it sort of reflected what we were trying to do with the product which is giving students a way to share their learning with their family so their family can see their learning and then send it back and give that, share that feedback and communication, those comments and all that back to you as a student. So that you know that they saw it. So you know that they saw it. Yeah, exactly. I see a lot. Oh, the other one was how long did it take to build CESA? So the first version of CESA, which is not all of the tools that you get to use today took us about eight months to make the first version with four people working on it. Wow. To make all of those new creation tools that you get to use to show your learning, we worked on those for a year. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of time. Emily, what's next? I have a few students who are very interested in your job, Emily, and they wanted to know how they could get a job like yours and what you do on a day-to-day basis. That's a great question. So my job that I have here at CESA was a job that I did not know existed when I was in school. And I ended up getting this job by joining a two-person company, which is what happens when if you get offered an opportunity to work on something that doesn't even exist yet, it's kind of risky and pretty scary, but I'm really happy that I took the chance. If you're interested in a job like this, I think the perfect way to practice is thinking about what problems can you solve in your community and can you create a project or a solution that helps improve those? Because when you're thinking about a job, my job is basically all about understanding what problems are and what are the many different ways we can solve them and helping everyone on my team understand what part they can play in solving that problem. And Ava. This class is, oh, I'm so sorry. Go ahead, I'm gonna jump in with one and then we're gonna go to your next one. So Ava's wondering, why are we doing this webinar? She's in Mrs. Trebet's class. And I would say we're doing this because, number one, we want you to know that jobs like this exist and to be able to talk to some of the people that make the app that maybe you're using in your classroom every day. So we wanted you to have the opportunity to hear from us and learn a little bit more about CISA as well. So Emily, I know you had another question ready. I thought this question was really wonderful because as a former teacher myself, this was something that came up all the time. So Ms. Katz's class wanted to know, how do you deal with problems in your group when you're collaborating and you don't always get along? Yeah, I think that's the hardest part of, when you're working on a project on your own, the only person you can be mad at when it doesn't work out is yourself, which on one hand is good, but on the other hand is very lonely. So when we have trouble, when we don't see eye to eye on my team, typically what we'll do is we will first realize that that's what's happening. Sometimes you don't even realize that what the problem is is just that you're disagreeing and that's why the project isn't going very well. So it's like, okay, we don't agree, great. Now let's each take a little bit of time to write down what we think and why we think that. And then we share that with the other people. And usually as part of that process, we can see that we do have some shared things that we care about or that we both can agree on and we start with that and then think about, okay, where is one side willing to compromise and where is the other side willing to compromise to end up with solving the problem that we really wanna solve for our students and our teachers and our families. And sometimes that means giving something a try. That's right. And then we might have to change it later. Giving something a try and giving one person's idea a try and then maybe we have to change it later or maybe it works out better than the other people expected. I'm gonna do a couple of shout outs while Emily's in the other room is getting ready to ask her next question. So we have Ms. Hilties class with us, Ms. Neeson's class, Ms. Ozaki's class, Ms. Sandlin's class, Ms. Stevenson's class, so many classes with us here today. We're so excited that you are joining us and lots more that I'm not even mentioning yet, but what's our next question? Mr. Nakamoto's class was wondering, how do you think CESA benefits students? That is a great question. Okay, so when we've been thinking about making improvements to CESA, the thing that we always focus on is how can we help all different types of students show their learning and share what they're learning with their family in a way that works for them. Because maybe you know, like you don't, the way that you communicate, the way that you share information, the way that you like to express yourself is different than the person sitting next to you. And so what we're really focused on is making sure that all students who like to share what they know in all kinds of different ways are able to do that in CESA. And I know Ms. Vasquez's class is getting ready to, or yep, it could be even Mr. Nakamoto couldn't read the first thing clearly, but you're getting ready to head out. So thank you so much for joining us because your day is at school is over. What other question do we have coming in Emily? We have Ms. Patton's class wanted to know, what features are you thinking about adding to CESA? And what has recently been added? Ooh, all right, well, unfortunately, I can't give any sneak peek in this webinar today. But most recently we added a way for students to save a piece of work in progress and come back to it later. That was something that a lot of students asked us for is I'm not ready to send this to my teacher and my family, I'm not done yet and I wanna come back to it later, how can I do that? So that was one we just added. We also added some more fun backgrounds for you so that you can show math learning and writing learning and also different kinds of creative drawings in CESA. Awesome, so Ms. Patton's class wants to know when was CESA created? Ooh, that's a great question. We started working on CESA in 2014 and then it was available for our first set of students to use in January of 2015, so five years ago. Wow, it's good to know. Sandlin's class wanted to know what are the different types of jobs that people do at CESA? They were wondering if they were all coders. Oh, that's a great question. So it takes a lot of different people doing lots of different jobs to make CESA work. We do have people who are software engineers who are writing code every day, but we also have folks like me who are working with customers and doing like a lot of interviews and things like that to try and figure out what problems do we need to solve. We also have folks like Angela, who are working with teachers and chatting with teachers and helping create different materials that they can use to help become better teachers in their classrooms. We also have, let's see, folks that help our big schools get all of their students set up in CESA. And people to take care of all the people at CESA. Yeah, we have people whose job is to take care of all of, now we have 60 people at the company. So making sure that everybody has a computer that works, gets their paycheck on time. All of those are big, big jobs at CESA too. Exactly. Well, there's so many questions coming in, but I also know that our time is up and I want to thank you for coming today. And as a reminder, if you look on our website, web.csaw.me, backslash CESA coders, you are going to see some papers that will tell you a little bit more about design thinking and then maybe a couple of things that you can try out even within CESA or outside of CESA. And maybe use CESA to help you explain or reflect or share your work. So thanks everyone for coming today. Bye.