 All right. How's everyone? Good. This is our last talk for the day and This is a great word camp. I enjoyed it thoroughly But we have a great session coming up with Nyon Kim. Nyon Kim is a senior software engineer at Penske Media Corporation Where she works on leading it to entertainment publications such as variety billboard in the Hollywood Republic reporter Previously a senior lecturer at University of Southern, California Nyon has taught web development To hundreds of students from elementary school age to adult learners. She's passionate about helping newcomers Break into and thrive in tech careers Her session today is empowering Afghan women through coding Challenges and opportunities. Please give a very warm welcome to Nyon Kim So I'll just hold the mic like this. Hi, everybody. Welcome. Thank you so much for Coming to my talk. I know it's the very last one So I know a lot of your energy levels are pretty low and so thank you so much for coming by I really expected like two people to show up like my husband and my boss and like that's it But thank you Thank you everyone for joining me. I'm so excited to talk about Afghanistan woman Afghan woman today. So again again as Caleb introduced nice to meet you. My name is Nyon It's pronounced like nylon without the L. I know it's kind of a weird spelling But anyway, that's that's my name. I currently work as a senior software engineer at PMC Really really great company to work for by the way Caleb talked about them earlier this morning If you're ever interested, please talk to me about PMC as well So many good. I have so many things I could share about Not too long ago. I was in the academia world. I was a professor At the University of Southern California USC But I decided to go back to industry. So I'm an industry working in the industry right now However I'm not here to talk about any of those things today. I am talk today. I'm here to talk about Afghanistan Specifically a program up a coding program. I got to work with women in Afghanistan I wanted to share to you today some lessons we learned And maybe even get some feedback from there's a lot of great people talking about teaching WordPress and the community here So love to hear your input And also, I hope that by sharing what we did if you ever are in you find yourself needing to teach Non-American students WordPress or coding in general. I'm hoping that this can help you spark some ideas as well So that's that's kind of what my goal is for today For the safety of the students in this talk, I'm gonna be kind of vague I'm purposely not going to be mentioning any individual names or Organizations But there's a lot of people involved in this actually. I'm just one person out of many people involved in this amazing project But I'm gonna be a little vague So if you're like if you put however, if you want to talk to me privately I Will spill all the beans and tell you what's who's doing what and what are what we're doing? so I'm very happy to talk about all that and Also, I gotta tell you I'm not an expert in Afghanistan. I'm not a politician not a journalist, you know, so Please don't come at me with all of your politics and what you think about the current situation there However, I do want to go over Just before I just jump into my talk just some really briefly about what is going on in Afghanistan and why I Care and why this is important to me. Just really really real quick Again, not it. I'm not a politician. I'm not a historian, but here are just some really quick facts So for about the last four decades, Afghanistan has faced a lot of civil wars and coups More most recently in 1973 the monarchy was overthrown and Then in 1978 a Communist Party led another coup that overthrew that government and then and then the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979 Leading to even more conflict and chaos So among there's there's been so so many civil wars famine droughts going on in this country for a minute for a long long time until nine around 1995 1996 the Taliban is as you've heard of in the news they took over Osama bin Laden became the leader and they started They started imposing very very extreme Islamic laws such as women cannot Go to school when women cannot go to work women have to be fully clothed They can't go out without a male escort a lot of human rights overall issues also have risen as well There's public executions. Just a lot of I won't go there but a lot of a lot of things happened and then as everyone is Aware of 9-11 happened and that was heartbreaking and the Taliban was involved was Involved in this and the United States then invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and since 2001 to 2021 the US has been The US has been in charge of government They've started steadily bringing back more and more human and women rights And there was a slow steady progression of more women going back to school universities getting jobs however as sadly as you've seen in the news in 20 August 2021 US troops left and It was a tragic day for the Afghanistan Afghan people This was the airport where the US troops were leaving and all the Afghan people were trying to leave with them It was such a heartbreaking news that we saw in on the news since then to Taliban Rose quickly took over again and they decide this Although they originally promised they were going to be bringing back women rights and all these things they slowly they totally reneged on their promises and As of right now and this is these are a lot of recent events as of right now women cannot go to school after Middle school so basic in our and in the United States standards. They can't go to high school. They can't go to college They can't hold jobs. They can't even teach Most of the women that we know are pretty much stuck at home. They're not allowed to go outside It's it's not a I can't believe that in 2023 These things are happening It's it's it's I think most of us already heard of all this on news and it's so heartbreaking to me that Girls can't go to school like that is such a fundamental thing like Anyway, my sister always tells me and teases me. She always makes fun of me. She says, you know, all you can do is All you know how to do is learn how to you only know how to code You don't know you don't cook you like you don't drive. Well, like, you know, like she's she's like four years younger than me She loves roast me all the time. She's like, man, like all you do is look at your computer all day You're always coding like well, guess what my Because of my coding skills, I found that I could actually help these women thanks to thanks to coding Which is all I know how to do So what happened was again gonna be a little vague here I I got some phone calls and About it was a very random phone call and they were working with these young women in Afghanistan who really want to They want to do something while they're home. They wanted to Whatever it was they want to get some kind of education so and one thing that kind of came up was Maybe we can teach these girls how to code because that's something they could do at home They could even find remote jobs. They could support themselves They could get potentially some income and these are and you know, you're just if they're home anyway And you're just on the internet. What is the Taliban gonna do about that? You know, you're like they're just on the on the internet, right? And there's so many in this and then there's so many more opportunities now so with coding technologies, so that's what they're kind of talking about and Eventually that came to me and they asked me are you like are there some good ideas we can do with these women? Can we do some kind of some kind of coding program some kind of you know something with these women? So we said, okay, let's try it Let's let's try and I see what happens So this is this this is this ended up becoming our plan and I gotta tell you I again don't know very much about Afghanistan I don't know about their culture or anything like that, but we got some cultural cultural training We talked about what's important to the girls and and we did find out they speak English I that was my number one question. I was like, did they even speak English? Like they have to read code is code is in English, right? So so we after a lot of discussions we came up with a very just we just want a trial pilot course And this is kind of what we came up with we did a 12 week course six weeks of just HTML CSS Just so that they can Just understand some basics and learn that's one thing I love about HTML CSS is it's very visual too So I do just start typing things and and things come up So it's a very quick, you know like very quick feedback And then they also start learning all these weird punctuation marks that they've never written before You know all those greater-than-signs less-than-signs periods like and they start to learn about syntax and What debugging means so we thought that was a good intro to start with and then we actually moved on to Python six Because Python and the reason we chose Python was because Python is also very intro friendly language It's very easy to get started It it's Indentations and stuff is all very it teaches you up front how to be good with your indentation and things like that and Python also opens up more doors even if the students don't want to do web development if they wanted to do Actually Python you could do web development back in as well It opens up some doors to analytics and you know machine learning and all that as well So we just thought it would be a good kind of pair And then we did we did do virtual live meetings Online so no we we didn't go to Afghanistan that would have been very scary. I don't think I'm that brave yet I don't know But so it was all all virtual three times a week We also had office hours outside of the regular class We have labs we had assignments basically a full university kind of type course, but crammed into 12 weeks and We also had ta's that were volunteered they help them outside We had ta's on site as well that helped the students and we had about 20 students So it's we actually we had like 50 students sign up, but we we Are actually we had some we had a lot of interest, but we were this is our pilot We just wanted to keep it small. So we kept it at about 20 consistent 20 consistent students and I'm very very big from I've been teaching web development for a long time And I'm very very big on very interactive stuff. So we do do a lot of interactive Learning where we were going to use we decided to use an online editor to first start out with so this is It's kind of like code pen or JS fiddle if you've seen one of those so we use this program to do a lot of To so there students didn't have to install VS code or anything We just straight up use the online editors just to get started and With online editors like this you just type in the code and it shows up right away So the students get an immediate feedback and they're not so afraid of like their code breaking too easily and things like that And that's that's a mantu is actually one of a favorite street food in Afghanistan The students told me about so we made like a little website about that. That was a little fun So that was kind of the idea going we were gonna make it very hands-on very interactive Live we did a lot of we're gonna do live sessions Office hours we had a number of staff getting heavily involved in in this so How'd it go? The first day day one honestly it went really bad Won't kind of not gonna lie I mean, I None of us knew what what to expect a lot of it honestly looks something like this like I was like saying like how are I like hi everybody? How are you? You know what? What I just do like an icebreaker. I was like, you know, what is your like favorite food or what is your favorite TV show or something? like that I think I asked them and I would get like no response and like it was just dead silence and I really thought something was wrong with my end and like I was like, oh, maybe they don't understand or maybe my internet's bad and and Yeah, it was first thing was so so bad. It was so awkward We quickly found out That it is actually they're in a connection. They're in a connection. I knew it wasn't gonna be great going in but they're in a connection was less than one MBPS and The online video Platforms even though they are pretty good at compressing and things like that that was still too slow for them So there was this like three second delay. I would be like hello What's you know, what's your name and then three seconds later? They will respond they heard me and they would respond and it'll take probably another two seconds for their response to come back to me So It was very awkward. So what we made some changes right away We decided, you know what? I don't need to see everybody's faces. They don't need to see my face We're gonna save every kilobyte. We can so we turned off all the videos Only they only saw my screen share it does seem to improve a lot. I Didn't let nobody talk only me. I talked at least audio-wise And I did not put it in here, but the students are very active in the chat in the chat So we used as I encourage them to use the chat a lot more So don't if you have questions. Let's not waste time trying audio. Just put it in the chat And then a kind of a big change was instead of me live Talking the whole time and because the students have a hard time listening. I decided to pre-record a lot of videos And the pre-recording would cover some major concepts And I found that for some reason YouTube works really well in Afghanistan much better than just normal internet So they watching a video on YouTube was much better than watching. I don't know like a Vimeo video or something like that So I uploaded on YouTube. So and I made them promise me you have to watch these videos before you come to class And they were all over it. They loved it And so they start so they would watch a pre-recorded video About the topic before coming to class and then in class we did a we did just I just do a lot of review and more examples In the education world we call this like a flip classroom model Which I have a lot of opinions on actually I'm not a big fan of flip model But it actually worked for these girls because of the internet issues and all that so it actually worked really well And we did a lot more again more examples more show more tell we I Asked the students a lot of questions about their culture like the previous slide. I showed you I talked I was like, what's your favorite food? Let's make a website out of your favorite food like what kind of what kind of TV shows do you watch? They watch actually a lot of Indian stuff. I didn't know that so we watch like Bollywood so we like made some Bollywood examples and and To keep them engaged some reason the chat like I said they love chatting. They're so chatty. I love it So we would do after I covered a major concept Instead of just kind of moving on I re-typed it really fast in the chat like a summarize it really fast in the chat pasted in the chat and then and Just to recap what we just talked about All all good things and and last bullet like I said more show and more less tell just more demonstration Rather than me just talking ended up being being really great some observations. Oh my goodness you guys these are the best students I've ever had I taught a lot of American college students and after dealing with a pandemic and stuff. I was really burnt out honestly of teaching Students but these students were the more that some of the most motivated most appreciated students They told me they love me like every day Nobody tells me that like every not even you know not even my family tells me they love me every day like this But they would be like we love you and like, you know all these like this is just one snip But I wanted to show you guys all of everything, but I can't so we love you and like we're so grateful and and they Were so attentive very chatty in the chat. They love you. They're so good at using emojis It's it's not just you know Gen Z students in America like they were there they love using emojis They're hilarious. Okay, they're hilarious. They They're so funny. We were talking about like holidays coming up. I was like, oh, you know in America We have like President's Day coming up or something, you know What what kind of holidays do you have in Africa? What are some of your favorite holidays in Afghanistan and? and one student says oh every day is a holiday for us because we can't go to school or work and I was like Right, I was like, I didn't know how to respond to that But all the other students they were like all these cry laugh emojis in the chat and they were having a blast And they're like, yeah, we can't every day is a holiday for us. And like, yeah, we can't go we can't go outside and like so anyway, so again Very hilarious and they actually really I mean they really want to get to know They won't really wanted to get to know me and they knew I they they found that I was Korean So they were like, oh like we love kimchi too and like I don't it was it's I was like, yeah Okay, like and and oh we love K-pop like, you know BTS, you know something like that And it was great and the students just I could like they're so Their perspective on life really changed. They're saying how well, I feel like this is something like I have hope outside You know, this is something I can actually do and this there's a lot of opportunities outside of just I'm not locked into my the country I live in I can do more outside. So that look there's Their confidence their their hope just boosted which was great Now I just to finish up here I just want to show you and they made some amazing final projects out for our final projects They have to make a website from scratch They could pick the topic they want and they I told they can only use HTML CSS from scratch Because it is a coding class. So no WordPress or anything just yet just everything from scratch and not even bootstrap nothing just everything raw and They did such a beautiful job. I I'm just gonna flip through some of these And they have so many great interests that they have and they even one of them made their own like web developer portfolio amazing amazing job We got some great feedback as well We had students pretty much saying they a lot of one to ten 64% Love this out rated as a 10 and they want to recommend it blah blah They want to continue learning more. That's why we asked them if we had a second level Would you want to learn more? They most people most students said yes, and we got a lot I'm not gonna read all these to you, but we got a lot of really good Testimonials as well like a lot of students saying I didn't know what to expect I thought it was gonna be too hard, but it was actually really fun. I really loved making websites. I loved learning Python and I was Really great feedback. So some next steps some next steps that we want to do our Internet connection is huge. We're partnering with some organizations to get some better internet access for them. Internet is expensive over there, so Ways to provide more free and accessible internet is huge We also want to look into What's gonna be next and am I what I really want to do is even teach them a little bit of JavaScript PHP and then we want to go into WordPress and Met some fantastic people here today about talking about WordPress curriculum and stuff like that So I'm really looking forward to what you know, what are some best practices to teach WordPress? We're also thinking the third bullet there is Is there a path for maybe students to even learn data analytics because that's also another big growing area data science that kind of thing I'm not a data expert though. So I have no idea what to do with that But if any of you happen to know anything about data, please I'm happy to talk to you Also, I will lastly I want to get the students involved into a lot of the dev communities out here like WordPress meet-ups that could be online. I the students are very like they love meeting people They love they're very good at talking and engaging. So I think that'd be great great fit for them So as I close This is these are when you see Afghanistan in the news We always see like bombs and war going on But I learned through this program the Afghanistan is such a beautiful beautiful country. These are just some High-level drone shots of the country there. It's beautiful. They have such they're such a historic Land and they're very family-oriented very close knit. They have such a vibrant kind of culture and just wanted to share just a little bit of this because it's I Think we forget when all this chaos is going on we forget about the people Like that they're actually human beings most besides the you know the some of the really extreme crazy people there And on average, they're just everyday people that want to work. They want to they have families to take care of They have kids they're thinking about marriage. You know, they're they and they just want to live and they just want to Go to their ordinary life What and what saddens me is the most is a lot of these students the students I taught there are most of them about 20 year olds year olds they They did this this is like one of those things as they as growing up They always heard about from their parents like oh back when I was a kid, you know We had all this chaos and we couldn't go to school But they never actually all these 20 year olds They never lived that kind of life before when they were born the US was already Took over Afghanistan so they didn't have these kind of restrictions literally overnight They're they kicked out of school kicked out of work. So these students are so like what just happened I never like this is stuff. I heard from my grandparents and my parents, but now I'm living this so anyway, so um, yeah, I Thank you for letting me talk today everybody. Thank you for letting me share Thank you word camp on Claire for inviting me and letting me talk talk you're off and Thank you PMC My employer for letting me come and talk as well really think great job to our Tech staff back there Glenn and Amanda. I think yeah, I see them. They're awesome. I've never like this is cool I've never like never experiences kind of support. So that's that's awesome. So thank you everyone I have some contact info here. Feel free to reach out to me privately if you're interested at all and talking more about it I'm happy to talk to you offline about with more information Any any questions You mentioned keeping things vague. Yeah girls self educating and like working from home. What kind of risks are they taking? So that's a very good question. I also asked the same thing but so it It's more common in the bigger cities But it's I the Taliban have literally in some of the big the Capital of couple of the capital of Afghanistan's couple and they were the Taliban will literally march into the University with you know their machine guns and all that stuff and kick the girls out and And they regularly patrol the market plays the common areas to make sure any women are escorted with men They I've heard that these they randomly do do even house checks. They visit houses But I heard that's a little bit less common now, but definitely in the more public Places they do there's regular patrols that like just they're keeping What do you call it? They're just making they're just always patrolling and making sure things are things are going to the way They want it. So if they're found working from home, will they get in trouble with that? so They might yeah, I think so So that's why I want to be really really careful the girls keep telling me I don't know how much to believe them right there Like oh, no, they're not like you know Tell us not that like sophisticated to know what we're really doing and so they and then I do have other Government officials telling me the similar thing, but we always want to be a little bit more on the cautious side. So Yeah, yeah, I think there is a risk. Maybe not a humongous risk maybe if the friends start telling like Telling the people it might be a bigger problem, but So far they see they say it's an assumable risk that they want to do they want to learn so Yeah Thank you. I will connect with this working. I will connect with you for sure about Meetups and where did you mean your students those Afghan ladies to join the meetups? Yeah, they're so willing we had some like As long as it's online and I'm zone kind of works out They would love to join. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you You just mentioned the time zone you like you're in California and they're in Afghanistan. Yes, that that's a long time How did that work out? I? Woke up very early Before work. I have we had scrum at 9 30. So I would work. I will teach them 7 30 9 30 I jumped on scrum and 9 30 you guys didn't know So it'd be like 7 30 your time and like Our time was like 8 p.m. There are times and they prefer the night evening times when the internet bandwidth is all Not a lot more and less. It's less a little bit more discreet at night. They prefer the night time. Yeah Any other questions? Does the equipment to the girls get donated or do they have access to this type of equipment to Yeah, yeah, great question. So for this pilot at least we did say that you have to have some kind of laptop that could run the video conferencing and chrome and You know, luckily with web development, they don't need to have like a really fancy machine So most most of the students like 99 of them use when like a windows 7 machine actually Which is fine for our very basic uses. So we did Target those students It does it does turn out that most families at least have some Access to a laptop. So luckily the hard part was actually its internet rather than the Computer itself. Yeah Thank you You said the first day was really rough How long did it take for them to really get in a groove with you and like things start really? Yeah, great question. I think I think maybe I think it was like After I kind of figured out how the way they talk and things like that Maybe he actually was like maybe a third or fourth day It got much better and then I think I released the pre-recorded videos the second week and that really brought like That made an overnight difference. So the second week was like, yeah, yeah, any other questions? Nayan, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you