 We have an amazing panel discussion for you about CSN education, and now I'll not take any more of your time. I'll hand over the stage to our amazing panelists and our moderator, Nofil. Thanks, Nikhil. Hello, everyone. It's kind of weird for me to talk in front of a screen rather than a stage, but I guess this is where we're doing it. So I'll just say, Python's history involves an initiative called CP40, Computer Programming for Everyone. This was like back when Python was originally there. It was a DARPA funded project, and some of the early tools like IDLE and everything were developed as part of that effort. This project was discontinued, but Python's roots are intertwined with CS education. While the language has changed significantly since those days, it's still being used as a language to teach programming. It was a DARPA funded project, and some of the early tools like IDLE and everything were developed as part of that effort. So arguably, Python itself is an exercise in education, and Python itself is an exercise in education. We're the larger community gathers, Albert virtually now, and learns from each other. So this year, we're happy to be able to present four distinguished speakers who have been active in different ways in CS education and to get their perspectives on the topic. Hi, Nofil. I'm sorry for interrupting you. But I think someone has to stream open in the background. There is some echo. Is it gone now? I think it's clear now. Yeah, I think it's clear. Please cut. I think it's my bad. Sorry. Okay. All right. So I'm sorry about that. So I'll just start off by introducing the speakers first. First, I'll introduce Dr. Prabhu. He's an associate professor of aerospace engineering at IIT Bombay. He's a Python programmer and a big contributor in the scientific Python suite, developer of Mayawee and other projects. He's also been associated with PyCon since the first one, and he was our first keynote speaker in 2009 when we were a very small affair. Second, I'd like to introduce Professor Sri Ram Krishnamoorthy. He's a professor of computer science at Brown University, recipient of SIGPLAN's Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, SIGSOFT's Influential Educator Award, SIGPLAN's Software Award jointly, and Brown University's Wristen Fellowship, and he's joining us from across the globe. So special thanks for that. Third, I'd like to introduce Amdika Joshi. She's the co-founder of Ajay Bgar, a management and strategy consultancy for museums and culture projects. Under the moniker Computational Mama, she has been learning and teaching creative coding over the past three years. She's also a co-instigator of draw.ft, which explores emergent ideas of text and its future. And finally, I'd like to introduce Pramod, who's a computer programmer from Kerala, who's currently working as a developer with a company building a networking product. He has been providing training and consulting on GNU, Linux, and related technologies since 97. Pramod started blogging at the time when LiveJournal was still a thing. I don't know if anyone's even heard of it, but many of those posts back on the blog document the activity of the software community in open source and free software community in Kerala back in those days. And me myself, my name is Naufal. I've been involved with PyCon since the early days. I was the founder of the first edition of the conference and I'm still into programming. I've been running my own company now. That's basically about me. All right, so let's get started. The way I'm planning this is initially to ask a few general questions to the panelists as a whole, if anyone can pick them up and answer it. We'll do that for around 10 minutes. And then that should give us sufficient background for the audience questions. I want this to become more interactive. So more people can ask questions. I mean, I don't want to just interview everyone over here and say we're done. So these questions should hopefully give us some context. So that people can actually pitch in with their questions and then the panelists can answer them. So with that, I have the questions prepared so that we don't, it's somewhat structured. So the idea of programming and CS education has changed over the years, become from once when it was a specialist thing and something which only geeks and nerds did till now, it's become much more widespread. So the question I'd like to ask all of you from your own perspective is how important is the ability to code and perhaps also the ability to think like a programmer for a normal person and for a non-CS professional? Have the boundaries between programming and non-programming been blurred over the years? It's an open question, so anyone can pick it up. Sure, I'll lead off. Absolutely. Yes, those boundaries have been blurred. We could all sit here and use the phrase computing is the new literacy, et cetera. I think the main thing is we need a little caution about what we mean by saying computing is the new literacy. We throw this phrase around, but literacy is a phenomenon. Of course, you can approach it many levels. There's the person who can just about sign their name versus the person who can actually read great work of literature or write a great work of literature. The question I think we have to ask is not, is the line blurred? Yes, absolutely it is. Do people benefit from it at large? Many, many people will. The real question is, does a small amount of exposure help everybody? And I think that's actually a very questionable proposition, right? That this tiny amount of exposure is somehow immensely beneficial and carries over in all sorts of ways. I think that's controversial. So I'll leave it there and then let other people speak now. That's a good point. It's a question of quantity as much as quality there, right? So any other thoughts on the same thread? So I think we should. I think we should. Yeah, please. I think we should. Sairam, Pramod, Vikhand, and I can go last. No, that's OK. Pramod, you can. Please. Oh, OK. Fine. Yeah, so I agree from the perspective of, so I'm going to look at it purely from an engineering point of view, from an engineer's point of view, non-CS engineers. Is I feel, yes, it's become something that is sufficiently important that I feel everyone should have some exposure to it. But exactly what that exposure is, is something that at least I have a strong opinion on some things, but it's certainly something that is important. To me, it's no longer a subject that is an auction. Everyone, whether you're doing biology or you're doing mainstream engineering, you're doing sciences or you're doing math, all of these are going to involve some amount of computation unless you're one of the rare individuals who only works with pen and paper, which is a very small subset. So in practice, I feel that certainly an exposure, I'm just building on what's seen on the same, which is an exposure is important. How much exposure, what exact exposure, that's a separate question. So I think going down that path is, we're going to end up with a Emax versus Vim versus whatever it's. There's a lot, but there are two things in particular that are important in that along that path. One is it's not just about programming. It's also about thinking computationally. And this applies across the board in each of the fields that you talk about. Because a lot of things that people learn, it's clear to me at least personally and from students that I've observed that you tend to learn some of even the theoretical subjects much better when you do. And a lot of them are easy to do with a computer. So in particular, some of the things that promote and Dr. Rajit have done, all of these are very important because they allow you to mix programming along with some scientific concept or some engineering concept along with electronics and putting it together in an interesting way. This completely changes things because it's no longer pen and paper. It's no longer either theorem proving. It's no longer understanding some conservation laws. So this actually changes the game in a significant way. So I think it's both a tool. It's something that you need to learn as a tool. And you also need to learn how to think computationally. So it's a very powerful way of approaching a problem. So I think that's an important skill. It's like it's kind of like mathematics. So that's my take on. OK, so that actually sort of dovetails into something else which I had in mind, this idea of teaching young children and I'm using the term loosely when I say young children, young children programming, it's divisive. There's on one hand, the people who are somewhat forward thinking about it and who say like, you know, the more kids experience this when early in school, et cetera, they will actually benefit from this in the long term professionally and otherwise. There are other parents who say that, you know, no nonsense. We don't want kids to sit in front of the screen all day. We don't want them to use mobile devices. They should be go out and scraping their knees and playing football or whatever. So and the thing is this thing about educating kids on these kinds of subjects has been the reason for companies, you know, a lot of these ed tech companies that are coming up also. So it's not insignificant. There is a significant thing over there. So what do you have, you know, do you have any thoughts on that? Like, you know, when do we start this? What do we start like, you know, from birth, high school, you know, primary school, high school, perhaps early college, you know, any thoughts on that? Can I take this one? Oh, yes, please do. So unlike the other folks on the panel, I only started learning coding as a fully grown adult and professional and it actually started when I was expecting my son about three years ago. So in a sense, what I understood and my background as a maker made me understand this better is that the idea is that programming, like any other kind of making is important for children. But whether one needs to kind of push it through that whole, the CS education, new kind of unicorn sector that we have, where, you know, auto rickshaw drivers are taking loans to make their kids study in these modules, whether that makes sense, I'm not certain. But in general, many of my friends who are in programming as professionals of the senior level have come into it as people who wanted to make something and they found that the most exciting aspect of coding and Prabhu also mentioned that in his reference. So perhaps that is an interesting way to look at it rather than like putting it into that whole idea that it needs to be a language just like learning English or Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, whatever else you may be speaking at home. So it's just like you learn how to use a paper or a pen and you learn how to fold paper or fold your clothes even maybe now you need to learn how to, you know, understand that idea of computational thinking and programming. I mean, this conversation is a little hard to have, right? Like the first thing we have to acknowledge is that it's completely driven by like middle class concerns about economic security, right? The problem is the fact that it's driven by them doesn't mean that the solutions are actually going to address those concerns, right? The concerns are legitimate, there's no question. Everyone's worried about how their kids going to be or their children going to be better off than they are, et cetera, those are legitimate concerns. Parents, everyone has those, right? But it's not at all clear to me that the solutions have anything to do with the problem, right? And at least in India, for instance, I mean, it's kind of amazing to me to watch the Indian space a little bit from afar. It's astounding. I'm not going to name any companies here, but I think we all know the companies we're talking about. Like we all watch crickets, we all know what's on the jerseys, right? So it's astounding the amount of mind space and the amount of like energy these companies have sucked up with no opposing voices, because opposing voices don't have the marketing news to pull it off, right? I think that we have very little evidence. So part of the thing is I'm also a computer science researcher. I'm not only an outreach person. I don't only educate. I also do research and I also read the research literature. Now to some extent, to be fair, the area is young enough that we can't say very much, okay? On the other hand, we have only pretty slim evidence that starting at a really early age actually matters much, right? My own, a lot of my outreach work in the past 12 years is focused on middle school. So middle school is like secondary school, like ages about 10 through 14, something like that, right? In fact, usually we say around 12, right? Because there's a point at which children have a certain degree of other kinds of literacy already and we can build on those kinds of literacies and then we can try to achieve new things. They know a little bit of mathematics. They know a little bit of reading and writing and we can build on top of those to achieve new things. Trying to put computing in before that point, before they've achieved a very basic level of other kinds of literacy. 100 years from now, it may very well be, we'll look at this and say like, of course that's the right thing to do. What were these people thinking? Like, sure, I'm just a complete idiot, right? But right now I don't think we have the mechanisms, the tools, the questions, the ideas. We don't have those things and we're rushing in. So I think the only thing I would say is like, it's okay, you can chill out, right? It's okay to wait till your child is at least in middle school before you start this thing. It's the race, the race can still be one if that's how you want to think about it. Okay, I think that makes sense. Just moving a little bit ahead in time for this. Now, one of the other conversations that's been happening in India, specific to this is the whole skill gap problem. You have like large number of people who are getting bachelor's degrees in engineering, computer science and who can't code, who can't, and that's putting that charitably, right? So, and at the same time, there is a supply problem. You'd imagine that if this is the case, we have, it's an oversupply problem, but the problem is there on the other side as well. Companies can't find people to hire, salaries are going up, joint sign-in bonuses are going up, referral bonuses are going up. So with so much material, right? So many good courses online, so much open source code, so many events like this that can be attended and so many opportunities for people to learn and upskill. At the same time, this kind of mess happening in the industry. Like, do you have any thoughts on that? Like, you want to square those two? Like this, I think Sriram is just eager to jump in. Pramod, I just wanted to ask you also, yeah, because you've been in that space, right? Specifically? Yeah, I believe the problem is basically cultural, mostly. Mostly. Now, education, at least in India, is mostly teacher-driven. So once you end up pursuing a, say, engineering degree, what really happens is, ultimately, what counts in the end is your grade. How much marks do you score? What is your grade? So you're forced to mug up things, you're forced to spend most of your time doing things which have very little value. And the teachers on their part do very little to make students aware of the wealth of material available outside of whatever the prescribed boundaries of the syllabus. So what I feel is that the basic issue is mostly this cultural problem. People not being aware of these things. And education being driven mostly, education being thought of mostly as a process of learning things just to score marks. So once people get out of that framework, once students are made aware of these things and they're encouraged to pursue these things, I feel that the situation will improve. That's what I personally feel. So the two quick comments I want to make. One is whenever I do visit, whenever I visit India, I try to visit the local colleges, right? Because those are the ones that don't get visitors as often, right? IITs get their share of visitors. They don't need any more visitors. And it's a frustrating experience because everybody's just so damn reverent, right? Like everyone's afraid of stepping outside the boundaries, stepping outside the boxes. And so, you know, so Nufal said, look, look at all this. There's all this amazing material. But to approach, to grab that material, you have to have a certain degree of irreverence, right? This is echoing what Pramod said, right? So the uncharitable view is that the students are, they only want to do what the professor wants them to do because they want the grades. But the more charitable view to the students is they have that culture where they can just go out and reach out and take something else and not be penalized by their instructor for reaching out and getting something else, right? So there's a whole sort of cultural thing over there that as Pramod said, but I want to respond a little bit Nufal to what you said about all this material, right? Again, pardon me for being the voice of researcher, but we have really good research now on how MOOCs worked out, okay? And I think it's really relevant to the point you just made. So we've now had several years of very good studies on studying what happened to the MOOC phenomenon, which in the U.S. at least started about 2012, starting about 2015, we started to get the research results. And what they basically show is MOOCs are a great mechanism for the rich to get richer, right? It's a classic Matthew effect because a lot of people succeeded with MOOCs. The people who succeeded were invariably people who already had a bachelor's degree, often a high quality bachelor's degree, and they were trying to advance themselves. So they had a master's or something like that, right? So they already had all of the learning skills and all of the self-regulatory skills that are needed to get a good education, right? I mean, ever since I read that literature, I realized one of the things we do as professors, one of the main contributions we do is actually not my brilliance and not my genius, not all the other things that I think I'm in doubt with. It's actually setting a calendar for assignments for my students. If I leave them to themselves, there's two million things they could be doing and they're gonna jump around from dart from one thing to the other. What I do is I say, I will figure out a path of knowledge for you, I will carve it down for you, and I will schedule you, and I'll tell you, this is gonna take three days and that's gonna take seven days. That is actually the single most valuable thing I do as an educator, right? That self-regulation is very hard to achieve and these resources are great. I mean, the MOOCs were always marketed with, there was a boy in Peru, there was this one girl in Pakistan, yes, but they're one out of a billion, right? And the planetary scale, right? And we let these people get away with this bullshit and it's just nonsense, it's complete nonsense, right? So the people who are at PyCon are again that sort of that quote unquote elite. They have the motivation to stay up on a Saturday evening, right? They're not out at a bar or whatever they could be, they're here trying to learn, right? They're already set themselves apart as a kind of elite, right? So the problem is all this material exists, in fact, the more material there is, the harder it is for a self-learner to get started because now you have the problem of choice, right? So I just wanna moderate that comment about the material to say, the materials there, the people are there, but there's actually a non-trivial pipeline problem between those two. Yeah, I think I take your point. I mean, that's very valid and it's something that has come up as well. And also what Pramod and Ambika said, I mean, in the Indian context, there is no better way to kill interest in a student than to make the subject compulsory. There are a lot of kids who do martial arts and who enjoy it, but once you make it a subject in school and you were graded for it, you have grace marks and all of that, that's the end of that. So I mean, that's there. I just have a few things to say about, I mean, I'm gonna refer back to the previous question as well. I started late too. I mean, I did biology. I didn't want to do CS in school because I liked biology. I wanted the option, at least as a card to play. I started late and when I was an undergrad, I basically said, look, computer science, ah, it's like a calculator. That was my attitude. I started off there and then I picked it up. And I honestly feel that that's how it should be. I mean, you wanna do something, you do it. And kids should be encouraged to do exactly what they want. So for example, I'm gonna pick something completely different which is music. If you look at someone who's trying to make it big in music, in karnatic music, for example, they have to start really young. So they start young, they'll be sitting and playing, practicing day in, day out. That's what it takes. So it's not an, it's a choice. I think programming is a choice. So if you, but if you choose to take something in the science engineering domain, it helps to know it. That's- But I'm gonna push back against that a little bit Prabhu. So yes, that is true. Absolutely right. Like, you know, if you impose something on people, they don't wanna do it. You leave them the choice. The difficulty is that choice is not actually a free choice because it's tied up in so many other issues of identity and society and social pressures and availability. That's the place where, so that is actually the argument that people make for pushing for required computer science courses, right? And so our approach and the bootstrap approach is to say, no, no, we're not gonna require it. We're gonna take existing required courses and weave it in there because then at least we haven't ruined computer science for that kid even if other things have been ruined for that kid, but that's the only subtle thing is like it's, for me growing up middle class in India, I was sort of accessibility to computing and the idea that I might want to reach out for it. There's a very different experience than a bunch of other people, that's the only pushback. Sure, so I completely agree. The reason I was trying to say this was just that the other problem is way too big for this panel to even, I don't think we even know the answers, right? I mean, how is it that we're gonna tackle these non-trivial issues about skill? And this is not true just in the non-elite colleges. Even here, you've seen an IIT, you're gonna find students who just can't program. You're gonna find students who can't even think straight. You're gonna find them. And how do you deal with that? It's a non-trivial problem. I don't have the answer because it's a lot of resources. There are lots of social issues. There are lots of economic issues at play. There are issues of students having emotional problems. There are people who come here because they think this is the last resort. This is their gateway ticket to get something fantastic. So nothing is aligned, right? It's not like, here's a goal and I wanna approach it. Then it's all straight forward. The problem is in life, that's not the case. That reality is way too complex for us to talk about in this context. All I'm saying is I don't see a major deal with it being either one way or the other if someone's smart enough. They have the access. I agree access is not a choice. It's not a free choice sometimes. But given the fact that a lot of this is actually available, free modulo, the fact that you have a internet connection, right? So subject to that, things are available. It's not as if it's locked up in some place and you cannot access it. That's the big difference I see with computer science. These are we getting into a specific educational institution or getting a job. That's a kind of different kettle of fish, right? So that's what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to say that very often in the Indian mindset, things become too predetermined. Things become, oh, you have to do XYZ if you want to do this. I'm just saying that that's not the case and I don't advocate for that. That's really what I'm saying. Yeah, I think your point is, it resonates probably. I mean, all other things, notwithstanding, there are more self-made programmers than there are, say, self-made mechanical engineers or self-made other things. That's probably one other way of looking at it. But I think we can probably start taking questions from the audience right now. I think we have a rough idea of where everyone is and stuff. I was just looking through the questions. The first one that came is the video working. So I don't think that's really something which we need to answer over here. But yeah, let's just see. So let me just look at this. So yeah, two comments that are very welcome. Looking, is this a place we can look as well or no? I don't know if you see the same thing as me, but if you take the, there's the private chat comments, tabs on the right of the video. In the comments tab. Okay, got it, got it, thanks. I see two comments over there which can sort of be construed as a question. We'll start with that perhaps. One is, schools teach you to follow Shinto CVs. As schools teaches you to follow creativity, individuality is discouraged. And a follow up sort of is all they want marks when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. So I wanted to, so I mean, I remember reading this myself like, the marks are used to measure the student to evaluate, to measure the quality of the student, measure the, how much they've understood what of the subject. And as a measure of the metric of how good the school is. And these three things are not exactly aligned. So you tend to play games over there. So maybe you can comment on that. Sorry, there was a question that, nice question before this, by Rahul Khmeresan. He's starting with computer that's becoming a gatekeeper in different seconds. That was a- Oh, I think I missed that. Okay, I think. Yeah, we should start with that then. Yes, definitely. That's good, yes. Let me just, yeah. Good, Prabhu, you gotta start it. Give us an answer. I was just bringing it up to the final. Okay. You touched it. I don't know. Sorry, yeah. It does become a gatekeeper, because again, the way I see it is, it's like anything else, right? So if you come into a, if you're a singer, I'm gonna pick the singing theme because it matches really well here. If you're a singer and you're bound into a family of singers, you have a big leg up, right? As in the, you start off in your file, you can identify all these radas, you can go to hundreds of concerts, you've picked up all of these things, and now you have that thing in your, your brain is swimming with music, right? So yes, I mean, I think that's like by definition, each of these, you start earlier, you're better at it. You have more of the 10,000 hours that you make up. And then you get to a point where you're an expert and you can beat everybody else who's not had that make up. And if you have a genetic advantage, even better. So there are lots of these things that necessarily become gatekeepers, but maybe you're asking a more deep question. As in, so the only way I can possibly answer the question is, well, if I see it as certain things I cannot do, that used to be a problem in India. For example, if you do a commerce course and you have no background in science, you can't take a whole bunch of jobs, you can't, in the past, I don't know what it is right now. So that is definitely a gatekeeper. For example, you have a commerce degree, you can't get into IIT, well, you can write the gate, I think, right? So there are some of these things become gatekeepers. Yes, so yes, it could be, but I don't know how bad it is. Ambika, I'd love to hear your perspective on this, given that you're sort of a little, you mentioned you've been doing this for a few years, you started as an adult. How does the whole gatekeeping question feel to you? So I mean, I would firstly see Rahul's question more about literacy, which perhaps is not the same as knowing programming or coding or understanding computational thinking. And my, like the, a very interesting anecdote came to my mind, my mother-in-law who is now retired, Railway from retired from the Railways, spoke to her not retired staff team member who told them that for every new computer that comes into the office, four people have to be let go. So like this equation of this machine versus person is at this larger level, and then there's your idea of literacy and then there's the idea of learning computational thinking and CS. And then I look at it from the other perspective and now I see as a designer and a maker, knowing coding has given me a new tool to speak to a new cohort of people. So earlier I would draw and I would take it to the carpenter. Today I can make a code sketch on processing or P5JS and I can take it to a person who's much better at coding and help them visualize it. And inversely what I see a lot in terms of the people who come into my streams and my teaching sessions, I see a lot of people who are much better at coding than me come into those spaces. It's because I feel that generationally there is now a sense that people want to do things that help them feel emancipated. And I think a key aspect to that in their minds seems to be something creative, something to do with being a maker, whether it's as simple as a young person saying I want to be a YouTuber, right? So they see that, okay, this is my CS education, which I did for four years, which I have to continue doing as a web developer in XYZ company. But in my spare time, I'd really like to see how I can take all of that mathematical and analytical knowledge that I have and create something beautiful. And I'm beautiful, I mean, just purely aesthetic. So those are aspects. And I see that many of them are now trying to come into the creative sector. They want to be part of design agencies. They don't anymore want to join the big cognizance and whatever else of those. I don't know the names too well. And they want to join us as a small organization. And they're really good at what they do, but they want to now contribute in a very different way towards the economy and towards what they're doing with their own lives. So perhaps, I mean, there are many layers to this. And I think literacy maybe Rahul meant it more in terms of knowing coding. But I think it's now for all of us a time to be able to explore all of this as intersectionally as possible, because that's the way to go. I mean, you guys may know maybe Prabhu, there's an artist called Tom Sacks. His entire work is around aerospace. He rebuilds entire spaceship models. He rebuilds the surfaces of the moon with plywood and with glue. So, you know, and with paint. So, I mean, it's like a matter of, and many times we do work with people who are extremely technical in STEM and extremely technical in building. So like, how do you bring all of those things together? How do you bring a person who's doing it, who's a really good AV technician and technologist and bring it with the person who's a third generation miniature artist? How do you bring a musician who's a kinetic musician and bring them to an algorithm which is like a coding plus music based generative format? So these are questions that come to us in our creative sector. And that's why many of us at even at a later age are rushing now to learn the ideas of computational thinking. And we keep that as the base that we need to learn the idea. We don't need to learn Hello World. You don't need to know print brackets, quotes and Hello World. You just need to understand how the systems work. That is important for us at least in the spaces that we are in. Though I will say a lot of what we do in response to this claim that everyone needs to know computational thinking, it is not clear to me, teaches any computational thinking, right? Two weeks of programming in scratch doesn't teach you darn thing about computational thinking. So, the phrase computational thinking really irks me, by the way, just so you know. Because it's based on- Yeah, but maybe Sriram, it irks you because you already have a sense of it. No, no, you didn't let me say why. You didn't let me say why. It's based on a false premise. It is based on an assumption on the single most invalid assumption in all of education, right? If you read Jeanette Wing's article, for example, it's actually better than most of its successors, right? She makes an argument. She says, look, there's two kinds of computational thinking basically. There's computational thinking where we apply computing in the sciences, okay? That's actually not a new idea, right? Any act, the first computer was built to launch missiles, right? So we've been doing differential equations on computers literally from day one, okay? But then she talks about the other, the profound kind of computational thinking, right? If you know how to do X, you'll know how to do Y, right? If you learn queuing theory, you'll know how to pick lines in the supermarket. If you need to pack your backpack, been packing problems, okay? And that is a very profound idea. That's the actual interesting idea, okay? And that is an idea that education researchers call transfer, and the most robust research we have in education says transfer does not exist. It does not work unless you really, really, really explicitly built towards it, right? And so my point is not that is there such a thing as computational thinking? Probably, there may be some construct there, but A, if we don't teach for transfer, we're not getting any of that. And B, if all we do is like two weeks of scratch and say scratch equals computational thinking, we're not getting that either, right? So the problem is a lot of really, really bogus stuff hides under this phrase, which is why I dislike the phrase. It's been used as a cover for all kinds of bogus stuff. That's my real point. But that's the whole idea that you take a premise and you don't have to necessarily stick to the ideas that and assumptions that are coming in from some theory. Like for me, computational thinking doesn't mean been theory or turing or whatever. For me, it means being able to put my thoughts and ideas in a way that I was not able to in the past. In the past, as a designer, I'm trained in a certain way. I observe the world in a certain way. And my observation in the shopping line is not going to be how many people that I'm observing their shoes, I'm observing what they're doing with their hands, I'm observing how they're holding things. So suddenly- You sound like a great designer. I don't know where the computation part comes into that. Yeah, but- But the point is the computational part was meant to be something more than that. Yeah, I'm sure it was. But that's what I'm saying that why do we need to, if we are able to think about all of this intersectionally, if you and I are on the same platform, then why must we continue to think about computational thinking in terms of Jeanette Wing? I'm sorry, I may not know the name correctly, but that's the whole idea that if you're saying that people are coming into this, to listen to us and they know that I am not from a CS background, then I think it's for us to look at these spaces totally differently. Why do we need to be stuck in these ideas of what CS can give us and what it can't give us? I mean, it can make me a better designer. Nobody would have thought of that five years ago even. Even now, my mother who's a designer tells me what are you doing with this code, right? It's the same way if someone was, she's like, I don't know, she does coding. That's how she tells people about me. And if I told her that I was a designer and I do branding and it, she would be able to pinpoint and exactly tell people what I do. So I think it's about us trying to move away from that and perhaps in the Western education system you do get that chance, but here even if I'm in a design school, I never get the chance of thinking of myself as being in development and if I'm in development recording I never get the chance of thinking of myself as an artist or a creator. So I think it's for us in our spaces to be able to move those ideas in young people's minds. So just to clarify, because I started this thing with computational thinking, this one will be very clear. See, if you actually take, if I want to engage you on that, I'll say computer science is bogus. It's all mathematics, right? So the point is it's not about the specific words that I use. What I'm trying to say is it really, really helps if you know how to use a computer and program. That requires two things. It needs you to learn some programming. Because I don't care what it is. It doesn't have to be Python. It can be Java. It can be pirated. It can be anything. And it also requires how to think like a computer. Rahu, can I interject? Because there's a question that's come up that speaks exactly to the point you're making. One of them, Rahul just posted this on the private chat. Most programmers don't understand the first principles of CS. They'd rather jump directly into making applications. How do you encourage people to go to the lower abstraction levels? So I think that theory versus building stuff, tension is always there. So I mean, I just wanted to bring that up so that you can weave that also into your. So I absolutely agree with you. A lot of these terms like data science, right? I also cringe a little bit when someone says that. It's like, what's the science in data? There's a lot of these things that are terms that we use to speak colloquially, but it's not precisely defined. And then it sort of irritates someone or the other. So my intention was not to irritate you on that. It's just about, I see it as a tool. As an engineer, maybe that's my claim. I see it as a tool. And I suspect Amdika sees it the same way. And I think it's an enabling tool. And I see no harm. But Prabhu, I think the problem is there's at least three different things here, right? There's computers, there's computing, and there's computational thinking, okay? And if we conflate all of those, which we've just done, none of these words mean anything anymore. And people are gonna very comfortably talk past each other, right? Like somebody said in the chat, okay, make sure they don't learn anything about Excel, right? Well, is Excel part of computational thinking? Is it part of computers? Is it part of computing? If we use all the same words to mean all of the things we want whenever it's convenient, so if the words don't mean anything, why use the phrase at all, right? But wasn't the term computer first used for the women who worked in- Sure, and that meaning- In an article, okay, yeah. I mean it did- So then computational thinking can shift as a meaning, right? You can, and so let's agree then that we don't mean what most people who actually studied the term and researched the term mean, right? Well, I guess then that is- There's an entire body of work that studies and studies this term and investigates the term. Look, when people say, I wanna understand whether computational thinking happened. They need a construct that they're trying to measure, right? If we let that construct mean anything we want, then it's kind of trivial to measure it, right? It's like, did anyone, did a computer get turned on? Yes, computational thinking happened, right? Why do we wanna use the word thinking? Thinking implies like some higher skill. So if we wanna talk about low level skills, which is the question here in the file you pointed out that what got posted here, right? Well, we wanna use the word thinking. Well, why do we want to wrap ourselves in this wonderful glorious term if we don't want it to mean anything, right? We've gotta like have a meaning for the constructs we use so we can talk about if we wanna measure it, I don't mean measure like numerically, but evaluate in any way, like ask about success or failure. We gotta know what it is we're even talking about. Sure, so why don't you define the term then? We'll agree with that. Oh, I don't even like the terms. I don't care about the term. I'm just saying like the term as people typically use it has to do with transfer, right? You have a more precise term is my question to you. It has to do with transfer. Computational thinking seems to be centrally around the notion of transfer, okay? The idea of you learn, like why should we teach computational thinking? A common argument is, if people learn computational thinking, they will be able to do other things better and the other means implicitly means transfer, right? That's what the other part means. So it's beneficial because it has some broader benefits beyond just the ability to write a program, right? That has been like a central idea to almost all of these definitions for a very long time. And in fact, people sometimes distinguish like computational thinking versus say algorithmic thinking to say sort of algorithmic thinking is more inward looking. Computational thinking is this more outward looking idea, right? I don't actually care for these definitional games. I'm just saying there's at a very high level who just like the top 30,000 foot view, there's a notion of transfer and that's what that term seems to associate with, right? So if we don't wanna use it, we can use another term. Otherwise we imply transfer and then we have to be careful because somebody listening who knows that definition is gonna think, oh, you think if X happens, Y happens, when in fact, that's not what you meant. That's it. So I have a small comment over there that might clarify the point, which is that there's a friend of mine here who's a neurosurgeon. He's like a doctor as a medical doctor, but he's also a programmer in his free time and he has like a couple of apps on App Store and he's quite reputed in that area as well. So I recommended him to a friend of mine because he wanted to visit him for his mother or something and he went there and my friend is a programmer. He spoke to the doctor for 10 minutes and he came back to me and says, you know, that guy's speaking like a programmer because he's trying to sort of, he's trying to ask specific questions and debug this guy's mother. And that was sort of, I mean, it's sort of, you know, lit a bulb and like this, that method of thinking is something that, I mean, it changes the way you look at things in some sense. If you do this for long enough, I can say that about anything, but maybe that's the thing that we're trying to teach in the first place. I don't know. And if it is, we're not accomplishing the two weeks of scratch, right? So this is this, yeah. I can see one comment here by Anubhav. Now he has mentioned a course called build a computer. Now, one of the fascinating things I find about computing is, you can start from very simple abstractions. You keep building layer upon layer upon layer upon abstraction and ultimately you reach something really complex. Now, there's a course called Nant to Tetris. If you do a Google search, you can see that. This course will teach you how to start with a simple Nant gate, then build more complex, combinational sequential circuits, build a simple CPU, write a small assembler for that, write a small programming language compiler, create a small operating system, write a small application program. It's an amazing course and there are any students listening to this, I feel that they should try it out. I think that course is a small plug. I think the person when he gave a TED talk about that course, he specifically mentioned Pramod in the TED talk because of the work on that. So I'd like to mention that as well. But I think let's shift a little bit more into the practical side of things, right? There's a bunch of questions that's been coming up for that, so one of them is this, so I'll just mention a few of the questions that should give us a meta question that should help us. While doing my CSB tech, I hated mugging all the theory, but I only knew that mode of learning. Once I started writing code, I enjoyed the process. So the coding aspect of this. Then there was Rahul post another question. What's the fix for the problem where middle-class parents who want to teach their kids coding but not the redacted way? Then yeah, what are your views on pushing force into education? So these are all some of the more practical aspects of actually teaching something to students and how to do it, what to teach. So I think that that would cover a bunch of questions which a lot of them have been asked. Maybe we can take those. What to teach and how to teach it rather than just the definition. I'd like to hear Pramod's views on this. Yeah, I think that's good, yeah. At least from the perspective of undergraduate computer science education. Right now what we have is, we have a four-year course and in this course, we have got two projects, a mini project and a main project coming in the third year and the fourth year. And these are the only two contexts for students, again at least some hands-on practice with programming. So what I feel is that maybe something very simple, make it compulsory to have one project every semester as part of the curriculum so that students get a chance to apply the coding skills. Number one, number two, there was one comment on pushing force in computer science education. I feel that still there are a lot of universities in India, colleges where they are using Windows machines and old turbo C compilers. So just shifting over to using Linux that will by itself create a lot of change, improvement in the standards of the students. Change and improvement are two totally different things. Sorry, this, this, this, look, I know, I'm wandering into the nest of vipers here by taking on the force. Okay, force is a mechanism. It's a means to an end. Until you've described the end, you can't talk about the means. Is force useful? Maybe, could it be a step backward? Maybe, if you have a curriculum that is completely centered around audio and video, maybe Linux is not the best way to go, right? So for the only reliable place we have, like audio and video working in Linux is like on Mars or something like that, right? So if you're gonna spend all of your time messing around device drivers, maybe that's not the right way to go. So I think we have to be careful with these statements, right, like, yes, is it valuable? Of course, do we have uses for it? Tons of uses, but simply shifting a college from like Windows to Linux is not necessarily solving any problems. It might introduce a whole bunch too. Actually, I think that's not quite right. I think that's a, see, if you take, let me give you a very simple example. The state of affairs here is such that most people pirate software. I don't think that's a good thing to do. So do you want someone to shell out 2,500 rupees to buy an operating system and not own a computer? Or would you like them to have a computer that they can actually use and do something useful? Whether or not they can play that MP3 or that AAC5 or something. So I don't think- People with the pirated things not doing anything useful? I'm not saying that. I'm saying that are you encouraging piracy in that case? So it doesn't, so I'm just saying that, yes, it is a useful tool. I agree with you that it's a useful tool. And I agree with you that just because you switch too fast doesn't make you suddenly, you know? But I don't think there is necessarily anything bad about encouraging people to use free and open source software. A lot of people don't even realize of the existence of, oh, there's these nice free packages- That's a very different point though, right? That's not what I was pushing back against. Sure, sure. I agree with you. But I think there is value in using cost, especially in the Indian context because the numbers are really hard. They're really, really hard because I remember when I was a grad student and I'm not somebody who's not good, I have a lot more privilege than many other people. I couldn't buy a textbook costed $60. I couldn't buy a textbook. So what do you expect me to do? So I'm not gonna buy the argument that, you know, just because it's commercial, it's good or bad. I think the cost has a huge role to pay in the country. I think that's not something that, I know you're not disagreeing with that. I know you know it's an enabler, but I think it's a significant factor in the Indian context. I may or may not have pirated various things in my childhood as well, right? And all of my books are free and online for precisely that reason. I got MIT Press to shift to making their books available for free, right? So I'm a huge believer in the concept of accessibility of knowledge is like a huge big thing. And growing up in India is what taught me that. So I completely get that. I just want to push back against like a claim, a blanket claim, like shifting to foster somehow gonna make anything better, right? When it could even make things worse. Sure. I can say anything, right? I can say anything, right? You can anything brought to an extreme is obviously not a good idea. No one's advocating in extreme. It's just that in a limited context. Clearly this context is not a global context. This is a context very specific to India. It's a Picon India. And I think it's important because a lot of people have, I mean, Pramod himself, right? I think there are lots of things that have happened for him because he was on the process. And that's why there is something about a community. There is something about a community. You can't take that away. The fact that I started contributing to open source was because I wanted to give back. And that's a huge deal. It's not something that's like, look, I'm not gonna have that same degree of engagement with anything else, but something like a community. So a community is a major player here. So I don't think it's just an argument of, oh, you do fast, you're gonna solve the problem. I don't think anything is like that, right? I don't think any solution anyone is ever gonna offer is ever gonna be something like, I do this and I immediately get a solution. That's never gonna happen. So it's a matter of positioning things in an environment in a given context in which terms are understood or the situation is understood in which you're placing something. So that's what I think. I'm pushing back a little bit on what you're saying, but I completely agree with you that it's not a blanket. No, I get your point, I get your point. I mean, yeah, we're all open source developers here, right? So it's not, I'm not here trying to make a place for close source systems. Yes, yes, totally. I'm reacting to a specific remark, that's all, yeah. Really, I totally agree. And I also am not on the other extreme saying, look, everything has to be fast. If not, it's evil. I'm not saying that. I'm saying there is a clear role that FOSC does have to play. And it's a significant role in India, given the financial, economic, whole bunch of other things. And the fact that I can learn, it was a moment, I opened up for me when I first got my redacted NUCID. I could look around, root around, and I saw so many programs. I like, wow, this is the universe I never thought about. I didn't even know about it. So it's huge. And the fact that it's available, it's on a CD, it's on your own computer. I don't have to go root around on the internet to find it. That's a big deal. And I think, at least for the curious ones amongst us, it's like I'm a kid in a candy store. So yeah, sorry. I think Sriram, there was also, there's an unspoken aspect to that. I mean, there's a lot of proprietary software that's being used only in Indian colleges, like Turbosy. You won't find Turbosy anywhere except in Indian engineering colleges. It'll be running inside DOS box, maybe on Ubuntu. And that's where people do their job. Okay, but the problem, so this is great. Now I've got like 80s flashbacks. But see, I think the problem, so yes, that's a very interesting point. And I think what we may be doing is then conflating issues, right? The question is, why the hell is anybody using Turbosy in 2021, right? And as I said, when I visit Indian colleges, this is all actually, as I said, it's a frustrating experience because I feel like I'm in this time warp, right? Like why are you people still talking about this stuff? Surely this can't be what you're still talking about, right? And so the problem there is more, I would say the time warp rather than the Turbosy and the fact that Turbosy is commercial. And like getting to the root cause, the root cause is the time warp, right? And if it's not Turbosy, they could, look, for all these people who'd use 80s, like GCC from 1985 as well, right? Like that's not gonna solve the problem. They're still using a correct one from 1985. And so I think that's why I wanna sort of separate out these issues a little bit. Sure, absolutely. I really appreciate your, you know, I can see you're trying to abstract the discussions here. But I'd like to, sorry, can I add something to this? Sorry, now I have a few points. I think the most interesting aspect of your conversations around force. Firstly, in India, the design curriculum was from the sixties. So we are even more dated than most technologists. But coming in from this aspect of having to specifically for design, having to use a closed source software because everyone knows that eventually all designers have to use the Apple and all the software that comes with it. And in general, one knows that it is built towards a productivity that we require as designers. And then of course, as he said, the drivers and whatever. And I'm trying to use Linux and I'm always feeling. So in that context, I think the interesting thing that Prabhu also mentioned, perhaps not explicitly. So is that the key learning for any person is coming through community. And I think all of us have experienced that in whatever community we have. And if we are learning through an open community that's basing itself on values of being open and contribution, it is so much better compared to working in Adobe or whatever other kind of software that we end up using as designers. And then not having that value inside my own, inside my own being to be helpful, to be contributing, to have these soft values towards others within my community and be competitive and unrealistic about other people's feelings. So I think that's very interesting and perhaps not explicitly stated. But, and I think, Shiram, I'm sure you would know that Stefan Hani and Fred Moten speak about learning within the university but within your unofficial spaces. So I mean, I'm very roughly paraphrasing, but that is where for me, I find that that's where key learning is. It's not through us as being teachers giving gan like this from our head, but from the networks internally who are like building it together and challenging us as perhaps in this sense teachers or facilitators to do something which is larger perhaps. I mean, look, FOS has the potential to revolutionize Indian education, right? Like you have the ability to go directly to the students, right? I mean, this was the idea behind the freedom toaster, right? Is the, what's his name? Shuttle words idea, right? That'd be this box you could go and you could get a CD, you plug it in. So you sort of sprinkle CDs from the air, so to speak, right? Get everybody, your student using this at home and then going to that teacher and saying like, hey, why aren't we doing more of this in the school? If I can do this at home, why can't we do this at school, right? But the other problem there, the other root cause there is the freedom to go to the teacher. First of all, the courage to go to the teacher and ask that question. And secondly, the teacher to have the courage to say, huh, that's a good idea as opposed to like, you know, you need to know your place, right? And so I think this is where the prominence of people like Pramod, right? Who's now sort of very well known is useful because now it's not like me saying it, it's Pramod sir saying it, right? So you put the blame on somebody else. You need other people to blame, right? And Pramod can take the blame. So that other students can feel empowered to go out and say this, I think that is an absolutely essential change that needs to happen. And it also fades into your earlier point of this irreverence, right? So you have now an environment saying, I'm not going to use turbo C, I'm going to use GCC for whatever it is. I mean, there is this undercurrent of that as well. So. Yeah, and that also suggests the marketing approach here, right? Is to tell students, look, you can be a rebel, right? You can write the same code, but we'll help each other show you how to use this other environment that may be like more difficult to use depending on what your background is. But we can help each other, right? And that's where the pointed five minute video, right? Telling students there's an entire course online, that's not going to work, right? Telling students there's a five minute video that shows you how you can take your code for this college, right? And make it work under GCC instead. And you can still write your solution and turn it in and your teacher wouldn't know any better. That video is immensely valuable. That's like infinitely valuable relative to like the course that's online, right? Because it's pointed help, right? And having that revolution work would be great because that could be the starting point for students taking more ownership back of their education. Like we all agree, I think that clearly needs to happen, right? But like, what's the easiest way to do that? Maybe that's the way the fast community needs to approach this. There's a question that's come specifically for promote which is how do you make sure that the mini projects which you said might, you know are not plagiarized and the student really learned something from the project? This whole business of, you know, you can buy projects. That's absolutely no idea. How then? That's very tricky. I feel students have to be responsible. There's no other way. They should feel that they are doing these things for their own sake. Other than that, I don't feel there is any solution. Plagiarism is like the worst way we use our cycles as educators, literally the worst possible way. My insight for this was, you know, we have a whole system at Brown. Like if you could report, you can write a report and it goes to some deans and whatnot. And my colleague pointed out, every one of those reports takes hours to write. And that's hours spent on the student who wasn't willing to learn that you're not spending on the student who was willing to learn, right? So I think the, like I've done a lot of research actually to try to work around this. How can we change the way we do pedagogy so that plagiarism, like encourage plagiarism so to speak, right? People copy, people copy from Stack Overflow. They copy from all over the place. How can we change computing pedagogy to take that into account and make it a positive and teach them something rather than like being always punitive, right? But you have to assume that there's some downstream effect of this plagiarism, right? They're going to show up for a job interview and not get a job, right? And if that doesn't happen, well, what are the job interviews doing? What's the degree doing? Then there's a much bigger systemic problem. If that does have a downstream effect, then promotes problem is taken care of, right? So yeah, like spending cycles on plagiarism is like the worst thing we do as educators. I mean, this is like this questions a few more, but I think we have reached a time limit. So I think we should wind up, right? Can, I think we can wind up by, you know, having a short, it's a bit of practical advice from each one of you on this specific topic. We'll just go according to the order on my screen. So Sriram, you want to go 30 seconds? I've spoken enough, I'm going to give my somebody else my time, go. Pramod, you're muted, Pramod. I think you're muted. Yeah, yeah. For students out there, this is the golden age of learning. You have plenty of things out there to learn from. Utilize that and grow yourself professionally as well as personally. Yeah. And Ambika? Just have fun, like just be learning always. Don't worry about degrees and jobs. And I know engineers also stress about a lot, your students specifically about packages and stuff. Just don't stress about all that. Do what you want to do. You want to become a, you want to become a lawyer after this, go ahead and do it. Like just do what you want to do. So Prabhu? Yeah, my advice is, yeah. Pick, figure out what you want to do and give it your all. That's it. All right, I think with that we've come to the end. I'd like to thank all our panelists, Professor Sriram, Pramod, Ambika and Dr. Prabhu, for your time and for the audience, for all the great questions and to the organizers of Picon for handling such a large event even in the middle of this kind of pandemic. Like, you know, it's phenomenal. So thank you so much. Is this a bit completely virtual or there's no physical presence at all? No physical presence. All of us are in our bedrooms. So that's where we are. Fantastic. Thank you so much. And Nufal, thank you for the work you did to make this happen. You spent a ton of effort on this. So thanks. Thank you. We had the easy job of just showing up and blabbering on. So. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Nice to see you all. Bye-bye. Thank you everyone for such an amazing panel. Thank you. It was incredible to listen to. Yeah. Bye-bye.