 Think Tech Away. Civil engagement lives here. Aloha and good morning ladies and gentlemen. I'm Pauline Schachmacher and your host for We Like the 1%. We Like the 1% is about individuals and entrepreneurs and today we're going to discuss coding and other tech related matters with Sumil Thapa from OceanIt. Good morning Sumil. Hi, thanks for having me. Great. Now, you have an interesting background. So before we get to this little car we have in front of us and what that's related to coding and your courses that you're doing at OceanIt. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself first of all. Yeah, so I'm a chemical engineer at OceanIt and I do a lot of science and tech R&D development of new technologies and new materials. In terms of my background I grew up here. My family is from Nepal but I'm a local boy. So I grew up in town, went to school here and now I work here in downtown at OceanIt. And how long have you been with OceanIt now? I've been with OceanIt for almost eight years now. So you must really love the company. It's a fantastic place to work I can see. It's really exciting. The breadth of topics and areas that we work in is really broad so it's always interesting and exciting. Okay, now OceanIt has a wide range of tech related items it covers and it's repertoire. But we're going to place our focus on the coding and you're very passionate about coding and we want to teach coding to as many people in Hawaii as possible. So you have a strategy to do this at OceanIt. So we want to tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so with OceanIt we're a technology company but we're a technology company in Hawaii. So our focus, our core values are centered around being curious and exploring technologies but also doing it with a sense of ohana and then a greater sense of community and integrating our work with the greater community. And so with the coding car our goal is to help bring coding and expose the students of Hawaii so that the future technology community can really grow and prosper here. And the method that you're deploying with OceanIt is to teach teachers first. So hopefully they can integrate coding into the curriculum of that particular school. So can you give us a little background of some of the schools that are participating with like Kamehameha schools? Yeah, so from the get go Kamehameha has been an essential partner for all of our work with this Altino coding car and they've really been willing to jump into this experiment that we're doing in education and helping spread this coding. And there are many people involved in the coding community in Hawaii and so we're just one other method of trying to get that exposure out there to the students. So there are 37 schools so far that have been affected by your... Yeah, so in the past year that we've launched this Altino coding effort we've taught about 73 teachers, 100 people over the total and they come from 37 different schools and a number of those schools have started implementing teaching programs or lessons that involve using Altino. And typically what is the age range that you try to cover when you go to these schools? So we work with teachers from elementary through high school. So we've had teachers using this car and we work with children as young as first grade all the way through high school. And you have a collaboration with the Koreans to do this. So there is a company called Altino? Yes, the Seon company makes this Altino car. And so in the course of our normal... So our main business is focused on technology development and we have Korean partners and so because they were aware that our company is involved with the design thinking movement in Hawaii and educating people about design thinking they thought they would be interested in this coding car that's being used in Korea to help them implement 100% implementation of coding in their curriculum, their standard curriculum in Korea. And for people who are unfamiliar with this concept of design thinking, can you give a rundown of what it is? Yeah, so design thinking is a process that we've been trying to kind of teach in Hawaii for about over eight years, almost a decade now. And it's a process that helps people be creative in their design process and it helps combine the technical elements of designing a product with the human elements. So being really focused about the motion and effects on the user and how what you're designing impacts them and using that collaboration between the designer and the user. Now, the way you teach the teachers is you have these four sessions, it used to be six sessions that you run on Saturdays at the headquarters at Oceanette just down the road from there. So we do a four day session to cover the bulk material and then two additional days to help teachers develop curriculum. And I followed your first session that you did and it's pretty straightforward. I mean it's not technically complicated. A lot of people are frightened about coding because they think it's something you have to have a lot of background in mathematics or be good at a particular science or something. It's really not that hard. The way you describe it and Ian does at Oceanette is like learning a language. So coding is just like a language. There's a big misconception that it's very, very intensively mathematical and only a really smart genius can learn coding. But I mean it's like any language and it's really ultimately what it boils down to is a language that helps people communicate with computers and technology. It's actually quite logical. So there are just basic instructions you have to give the computer to tell the car, for example, to start going, to make it stop, to turn to the right, to turn to the left. So it's just logic as opposed to harsh mathematics. Yeah, it's almost... I mean you can think of it as if you're giving instructions to a five-year-old and you have to tell a five-year-old, okay, you know, you gotta go here and when you get here, do this thing and you have to be very specific because the kids, you know, they need clear directions. So the car is very similar to that where you give it precise instruction step-by-step and it'll do exactly. Is this as simplistic with the teachers? Because I know, for example, if you're teaching writing, how to ride a horse to a child, they just take the instructions at face value and do as they're told. Whereas when you get older, it becomes slightly more difficult to learn a skill, whether it's learning a language because somehow your personality interferes. It's not a blank slate like that of a child. So do you find, or is coding so simplistic and logical that the teacher doesn't have this issue? Or is it easier to teach a child? That's what I'm trying to... I think that the children take up the material very quickly. I mean, and that's the thing that we've noticed. We work predominantly with teachers but we've done workshops with children as well and we noticed that the kids pick up on it very fast. I mean, they're blazing through the materials and oftentimes... because they grew up with technology, right? So technology is second nature to them. There's a psychological block. And then with teachers, there's the preconceived notions of what they can do or what it should be and oftentimes in their mind they're expecting it to be more complicated than it is and so we have to break down those barriers a little bit with the teachers and adults. But, you know, our goal is to lower the bar so that everyone can do it. And so we broke down the material and we teach it in a way that it's accessible to anyone. And coding is very important to learn because it's going to be, if not already, the blue collar job of the future, right? Yeah, and for us, beyond just being a useful skill, it's really a way to unlock critical thinking and problem-solving abilities and really getting people to understand that mindset and helping them become critical thinkers and problem-solvers. Okay, now let's focus on the little car we have in front of us. So the collaboration we mentioned is between Oceanit and Altino for this design thinking to get the coders to understand something. It seems abstract if you're just dealing with instructions like algebra, but if you put it to use and try to make a car run, it all makes more sense. So how did the collaboration between Altino and Oceanit come about? Did the Koreans approach you or did you approach them or was there a personal connection? So through some of our technology partners, they connected us and when we saw the car, we thought, oh, wow, this is a really interesting technology that really makes it a lot easier to learn what coding is. And so in talking with them, we did a dry run where we invited a bunch of community stakeholders, teachers and students, and we just, you know, tested it out, brought the car, talked about it, helped them do a little one-day, one-and-a-half-day workshop to see if people would get excited and if they would understand what was going on. And, you know, people really got into it. They were super excited, so we thought, okay, maybe we have something here and from there we, you know, kind of took the curriculum that the Koreans have developed for teaching teachers and students and adapted their curriculum and modified it so that we could teach it here in Hawaii. And it's been going on for about a year now. That's wonderful. So the underlying software that is being used to make the car run, the Altino car run, is called Arduino. Yes. And this is not Korean. No. This is an open-source community, so one of the nice things that we like about this car is it's not just, you know, a proprietary software. It's running on an Arduino platform, which is an open-source community, and it's, you know, there's a greater community. So in learning the car, and we teach it in C language, but once you learn the basics of Arduino, not only can you program the car and, you know, drive the car around, but now you can access the Arduino open-source community and they have a whole list of projects and tutorials and they're very much a makerspace community where they experiment making electronic devices. And so once you have that basic understanding, it opens the door for people to explore that whole community and world. So the Koreans are fairly advanced in this. I had a show where we were discussing Japanese Korean and Chinese business culture. And the Koreans are kind of characterized as very emotional people, the poets of East Asia, but they're also very advanced in technology. So while we're here in Hawaii trying to make the car just go and stop, they're already having racing competitions with these cars among the very small children. Yeah, so they have annual competitions with middle school and even elementary students. And are we trying to get to that level eventually between the schools in Hawaii? Yeah, so actually last year, because of our collaboration, they invited two students from Hawaii to participate in their annual competition. So they've been doing this competition for six or seven years now. And so this is the first time that they invited any students from the U.S. And so we sent two of our student instructors to participate in the competition. So the Hawaiians were the first to be okay? Yeah, from the U.S., yeah. And so, I mean, it was really exciting. And we've actually, this past January, invited a group of middle school, and I mean, these are sixth and seventh and eighth graders from Korea, and they actually did workshops. So you can imagine having middle school students doing a workshop teaching adults how to use the car and use the advanced features of this car. Do you have some collaborative effort where the teachers from here also compete with the teachers in Korea? Not quite yet. So the Koreans are kind of a step ahead of us in that they've made it mandatory this year that all students get exposure to coding as part of their standard curriculum from first grade through twelfth grade. So they're a little bit ahead of us in terms of implementing the curriculum and having the teachers prepared and teaching coding material. And so we're kind of getting to the point where we want Hawaiians' teachers to be there. And we're trying to push to make Hawaiians the leader in this area. Yeah, that's brilliant. Now, Altino, besides the car, do they have any other gadgets that helps with the design thinking in terms of coding? Any other physical gadget besides the car concept? Or is the car the best example or the one that children have the most fun with? So the car is the concept that they have most developed. And around the car, they have different platforms in terms of doing competitions and different learning tools. And then the Altino is one line of products and Saeon, the company that designed the Altino car, they actually are working on different products. And their focus is really developing tools that help teach coding concepts and languages and curriculum. I'd imagine something like a dog or an animal might be entertaining for a child. Yeah, like a walking robot or something like that. Yeah, a humanoid or something like that. So I believe that they have other tools. It's just a car is really nice because it's very familiar to people. It's easy to explain the concepts of driving forward, turning left or right and turning on the lights. Just to explain the logic. Okay, wonderful, Sumil. We're going to continue our discussion with the car and coding and other things that ocean it delves into after we come back from this quick break. Thank you very much. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate and power and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 p.m. and we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. Aloha, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that just kind of scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on thinktecawaii.com 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons and then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up and please follow us. We're always giving you current relevant information to protect you. Keepin' you safe. Aloha. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We're speaking with Sumil Thapa from Oceanit and we're discussing coding and other tech-related matters at Oceanit. So I noticed on the Oceanit website, Sumil, that people can take tours of the headquarters at Oceanit. So people can just go on the website and sign up for a tour. I think you give them quarterly. Quarterly tours of our facility and I'm just a part of what we want to do at Oceanit is foster a tech community here in Hawaii. So we very much want people from the community and the public and we even have students come through where we share the kind of work we do what facilities we have and the tools that we have because a lot of people don't realize that this kind of work happens here in Hawaii and happens even right off Portsbury Mall in downtown. Yes, believe it or not because most people, especially visitors who come upon Fort Street Mall it says Central Business District in the bus stop but it actually looks like a perpetual filming of Night of the Living Dead. But there are a lot of tech companies based in downtown here so you've got Blue Planet with Hank in Harbor Court and you've got Oceanit. So these are the famous well-known ones but these are trying to foster the next generation in coding and other tech. We've got the public tours at Oceanit and you've also got these coding courses and they're limited at this moment to the teachers. So are you looking to expand in terms of your core values of curiosity, Ohana and community? Are you looking to expand in offering those courses at the headquarters to the public in general? Yeah, so for us we're kind of because this isn't our primary interest we're kind of bandwidth limited so we're going to invite as many people as we can and we so we have courses that are strictly for the teachers to help them with professional development. So those courses are kind of directly at teachers but then we also do occasionally do kind of more public courses that we will advertise publicly Like in the design thinking We have design thinking workshops we'll do workshops and this part we'll do it at our office and then with Commitment Schools we'll learn with them and use some of their facilities and teach at their Halaue Nana facilities. And are your partnerships always between teachers and pupils that kind of link or do you go to other professional places? We've worked with not just teachers but also business professionals community members and so our focus is the teachers because we think that we can maximize our reach by teaching teachers who touch so many students but you know we're not we don't want to limit the knowledge so we're open to teaching community members as well. Okay so for any teachers that are watching the show who have not participated in one of your coding classes the car is the mechanism by which you will learn the coding and before we leave this topic of the coding with OceanIt can you point to the audience what are the aspects of the car that they'll learn in terms of making it move and the other operation because it looks quite complex but it is actually quite simple. Yeah so the car kind of drives like a basic car you know it can go forward make left and right turns go backwards it has headlights kind of like a car you would you know your blinker your signal lights brake lights and it also has a buzzer so you can actually play music with the car so kind of like a piano keyboard you can play a whole bunch of notes there's kind of this dot matrix in the front that's scrolling text so you can draw a logo so you can display all sorts of things. I think people were having the most fun with the dot matrix because you were instructing people to make a heart you can have a lot of fun and be creative with it and that's the other thing that we're trying to let people know is coding isn't necessarily dry logic and math it can be a very creative endeavor and you know a lot of the creative media that people see today a lot of it relies on coding and technology to develop it is creative but you can't cut corners in coding you have to be very precise and you have to give the commands and the instruction list very carefully you do one thing wrong and the car won't move so it's for particular personality I think so that's good and for children it's great because they're a blank slate they don't have judgements or things like that so they just learn as they're told so let's move away from the car and there was this agricultural technology symposium that took place in January and Ocean it participated in the ag tech so you were in the paper for that so do you want to explain your involvement? yeah so HTDC and the Department of Agriculture sponsored an agriculture technology hackathon and so there's a handful of us from the ocean office who put together a team and we developed what we call the harvest vision and so this was an idea born out of working with these chips that take AI technology and put it on the chip level so a hardware AI device and we integrated with a raspberry pie and we used it to kind of help one of our partners at Kauai Coffee develop a system that could determine if coffee beans were ripe or unripe based on a visual image so over the course of a week during this hackathon we put together this device and we demonstrated that you could use this device on their mechanical harvesters to help give feedback to the drivers as well as the supervisors managing the field to determine whether their field was at the peak harvest ripeness or if they needed to make adjustments to how they're harvesting and by doing that could increase their yields and decrease the amount of waste crop that's very interesting because when we attended the east-west center conference in collaboration with Hank Rogers they were discussing there's a sort of an invention it's like a coin star for coffee beans because the coffee beans are graded according to A, B, C and you just put all the beans in this machine like you do to sort out pennies and it realizes the beans so people think agriculture and farming and things like that are boring but there's awful lot of technology that's being developed in these areas and that's a thing and that was one of the missions of that agathon was to really pair agriculture with technology and bring awareness to the fact that in order to sustain the agriculture needs that we have it does take a lot of innovative technology and innovative thinking through our efforts we want to find as many partnerships and kind of help our local agriculture community and give them tools and resources that can help them foster and really grow I was unable to attend the agathon but were there a lot of students there or was it more professional level it's a good mix for hackathons you have everything from students to professionals to hobbyists it's a great mix of people and I think one of the other great things is you get to see that community aspect and see who else is out there in the tech community in Hawaii and were there legislators there as well there's always a legislator hanging about like at the cannabis expo they had so there's always somebody well yeah and it's good to see the support of local government and because the department of ag was hosting it part of their mission is to bring technology and that partnership and I think for Hawaii as a state and for our economic development and growth it's really important that we you know fosters many cross industry collaborations to really grow the economy in as many ways as possible and ocean it is in a prime capacity to do that because you have such a wide range of activities so one of the things that struck me as a little bit unusual for tech companies such as yourself is that you've included fashion technology because everybody associates Pat and ocean it with you know ocean harness and something to do with the environment and energy things of that nature and now coding but you've also got this fashion technology angle that is relatively new yeah so I mean part of our core values of curiosity is you know we don't limit you know ourselves to a specific field and so we're always looking for new partnerships in different areas and one of the things that came up was you know we talking through to some folks in the fashion industry you know they're looking for new dyes and new trends and we do a lot of work with quantum dots as a fluorescent coloring material and for various you know tech related technologies and we thought well you know maybe we can apply that material to hair and create a new like high fluorescence and so we've been exploring and you know we did a little test with some hair and you know we've gotten some pretty astounding results where you can get hair to basically just glow fluorescent colors is this for the millennial market that you're looking to yeah so our idea is you know the most successful youtubers have tapped into that female teenage market so they're the ones who are with the 17 million subscribers like Jenna Marbles so she dyes her hair regularly it's quite entertaining so is that the market that you're looking into I mean we're exploring our options and you know one of ideas is that you could have these quantum dots you know under normal lighting conditions look totally normal and then when you put them under a black light they can glow like outrageous colors and so the idea would be maybe you could have a dye that looks normal you know in your day to day activity you can let loose in the evening go to a party under a black light and you're all glowing so is this have a potential to extend into makeup like the Japanese girls the gong girls yeah so I mean we're willing to explore all the possibilities so we've kind of did a demonstration proof of concept and now we're talking with different folks in the fashion industry that hair design and seeing where and that's our mindset of always exploring new possibilities for things that we've worked with or things that we're developing okay so that's one of the more unusual aspects that you cover in the range of work you do at Oceanit any other more artistic ones that are coming up that merge art or color with technology I think you know the other thing that we try to do is incorporate other areas so through working with like fashion designers and stuff we try to bring that element and this goes along with design thing and try to bring that element into designing our technology so we have projects that involve like a cooling garment and for that you know we've talked to is that like a wearable or yeah so it's a wearable so it's like a vest that you can help cool your body with it circulates a cooling fluid yes there's the opposite problem in cooler climate where they have a body warmer it's a technology that warms it so you don't have to wear a coat yeah so traditionally you know you think okay you have an engineer that's designing this for maximum heat transfer and all of that but what gets lost a lot of times in technology development is the human element how wearable is it how comfortable does it look good and so our approach is okay we can handle the technology aspects but we work with different clothing designers and how can we design something that looks good feels good is wearable and also achieves the technical goals that we want to meet okay so wearables is something that you're going to delve further into baby yeah it's an exciting very interesting field but maybe not the contact lenses yet the contact lenses that have all your data not quite there yet that's a little bit too sophisticated in science fiction but maybe you'll get there eventually yeah so Sumil if anybody wants a tour of Oceanit you recommend that they just visit oceanit.com yep and look for the dates on the website and book a tour yep and is there a limit to the size if people want to bring a school or something like that so normally we have our quarterly tours that are open to the public so if you go on to our website you can log in and sign up and then also we do occasionally get requests for group tours and so again on our website you can submit a request I believe there's a contact form and so you can you know put in information about the group and when you would like to we'll get in touch with people okay wonderful Sumil thank you so much for joining me this morning thank you for having me and everybody please do try to take a tour of Oceanit's a fascinating company very very good core values I think you focus on in terms of the curiosity Ohana and community and we look forward to seeing you next Thursday at 11 a.m. for we like the 1% Aloha