 Okay, it's, I guess we'll make a start and whoever joins can join. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Basically what I am, you know, I'm involved in teaching in high school children. And I've been involved in teaching, well computer science and I introduced computer programming to them a couple of years ago. But the thing is that there's no sort of precedence for teaching computer programming. And, you know, so I'm, so I made up my own little strategy of how to actually introduce computer programming to them. And I decided that I'd introduce Python to them. You know, as opposed to say a block based language or something, because I figure that they can learn Python, you know, after all, I've been teaching high school students aged 11 to 18. If you look at what they're doing at age 11, you know, they read Shakespeare. They do algebraic equations, you know, in Britain, they wrote essays on advantages and disadvantages of Brexit. So I figure that like, you know, at the age of 11, they can actually process textual information quite well, and they should be able to cope with Python. So, you know, I introduced it and it was going quite well. And in fact, I found the 11 year olds better than the 12, better than 13, better than the 14 year olds. So from that, my take home message is that introduce these things early and properly. But then what happened was, obviously in March, there was a pandemic lockdown. And, you know, overnight, we switched to online teaching. And I understand that the UK was slightly late in its lockdown. And we joined say, we were, you know, joining at that time 900 million children in over 100 countries I read somewhere. So this obviously meant, this meant that you have to, you know, we have to re-evaluate how we're actually teaching this computer programming to the children and whether we could actually do it at all. As such, it's a whole sort of re-evaluation. And, you know, so the first sort of thing was an idea is can this online medium of instruction complement or even supplement face-to-face in-person practices, which have been established and perfected over many years. And then came, there's a book and a saying called the medium is the message. And it's a phrase coined by one Professor Herbert McLuhan. And it essentially means in this particular context that each medium of instruction will have its own signature and it's accompanied by its own strengths and its weaknesses. So, you know, what we should do rather than dismiss this online medium out of hand is to try and discover its strengths and advantages and to capitalise them. And in due course we did find these, you know, the great strengths of the online medium. And we found it quite educational. Now, so what did we actually do? Well, the very first thing was actually testing. Now, what's been happening is that, you know, teaching Python, we've been teaching them how to write programmes and they've been writing programmes. And every time they, you know, if you're in a class of say 15 children, every time they make a mistake, they put their hand up. And you rush towards them to correct their mistakes. But and it was thought that, you know, getting them to correct their own mistakes is actually boring. And it will mar their enjoyment of the subject. So the very first thing was to teach them how to correct their own syntax errors. You know, if they're going to get any satisfaction at all, they have to have working programmes. So a few very dedicated sessions to the syntax error. And, you know, these, I had 11 year old, I had a class of 11 and 12 year old. So, you know, wondering how they're going to take this thing. And, you know, they seem to be quite into the syntax error. What do I think to adults even is a pain in the neck. But to them, they, you know, they seem to take it all quite on board. And so, you know, somebody said, wrote to me the most interesting part was the mistakes when we made them. They could have been minor, but they made such a difference. It was interesting to see how that counted how and how intricate a system that really is. And another person, another sort of 12 year old sort of said, I really enjoyed and basically talking about the syntax error here. You know, and this is a programme that he, this person Harry, age 12 wrote of his own volition. And, you know, he's written a, we also talked about functions at this stage, a function which has got playing cards and randomly selects one. A syntax error. And then, you know, during the evening of his own volition, he corrected it and in the morning, you know, he's sending his code over to say that it's corrected. So, you know, the take home message from that is that they're perfectly able at age, even 11 and 12 to correct their own syntax error. They don't find it boring. It only in a way needs to be taught, and it can actually be taught online. Then we move on to. Okay. Development. Now, obviously, if they're going to produce anything useful, they're going to have to learn about functions and modules kind of thing. I would previously thought that this is a tough topic, and you have to obviously be in the classroom to teach this, but nevertheless, you know, want them to do something pretty useful. So, you know, we taught them about functions with first of all a worked example of a function, adding two numbers and passing in information, and then getting them to create their own functions as such. And then we also showed them a function of generating sort of random passwords and asking them to modify it for their own sort of purposes. Now, actually, they managed to grasp the concept of functions quite quickly. And when thinking about it, why shouldn't they really because at the ages of five, six and seven, they, they read paragraphs, and they're quite used to processing blocks of information. So a function is a block of information. So there's, in a way, no reason in that sense why they shouldn't, and they were quite enjoying it as well. And one little boy Alex HD 11 wrote, I enjoyed learning about functions and how to define them so you could access them at any moment. Then, you know, what else can we do, which is meaningful and useful. And so we introduced them to this, the concept of modeling and simulation, and we could introduce this in the cons in the context of the COVID-19 forecast, which have arisen as a result of modeling and simulation. And we showed them the pipe that the papers and there's even code on GitHub, Python code about this as well to show that the Python language has actually played an important very role in all of this. And graphs are integral to modeling and simulation so we showed how you can create graphs. Now when you create graphs, perhaps there's an extra layer of complexity to this type of function in that we have an external file. And, you know, so they have to now know how to files can work together to produce a graph as such. And, you know, we gave them sort of worked examples of temperatures in different countries, and then we asked them to create their own sort of graph code. And this boy, this girl here, she was on age 13, she put in Fibonacci numbers and, you know, managed to produce a plot. So here now we've got a function, we've got extra complexities of an extra external file here, and it's creating the graph. And again, you know, we managed to do this online. And as we were, as I was teaching online, I, you don't really know what tools are out there as such, but we discovered say, online editors, one called repel where you can write code you can share code, you can take over somebody's screen and correct code. And then we make it heavy use of the chat functionality in the Microsoft teams to share to pass code to from each other. So, when you wanted to do something, you know, you looked for the tools, and the tools seem to be appearing. And of course, having said that, I think we're very much in the infancy of online teaching and learning. And we're also, you know, we're very much I think in version one, but having said that what we have, we can do a great deal with. We're looking to enjoy this. One little boy kept saying, Will you tell my parents, every time he had a working program, a little girl sort of said, Oh, you know, I've written a program to generate a passcode a random passcode of six digits. You know, there's a lot of discussion that can take place in an online medium, which can't, you can't, you know, face to face classroom as such. So, you know, somebody was asking what programming languages excel written in. And every, and because this online medium, every time somebody showed their program, I think everybody was looking up to see what, you know, what was being done. So the conclusions are accessing the power and the motivating power of online teaching. I think when properly done are enormous. And it's a great privilege to partake in this. It's very exciting to take part in a field which is in its infancy and rapidly developing. And, you know, we look at forward to the day when everybody can enjoy these experiences. And I think we'll look back on this time and think of it as, you know, one of the greatest experience experience of of mankind ever, and also in the field of online learning. I have a YouTube channel called little anonymous, which has got computer sites videos and videos on programming as well, a website that I've created for my students. And this is my email address. Yeah. So, I've got a talk also tomorrow in Microsoft room from 145 to 215, which, you know, explains a lot more. Yeah, so what would you like to say any comments or any questions or anything. Yeah, well, first of all, thanks very much for presenting. I see that there's this one other guy there now. I just wanted to ask the, so have you developed this this curriculum by yourself. And also, how does it work specifically in the UK do they have. I know in South Africa we've got information technology, but it's only available from grades 10 to 12 is is your your thing you spoke at the very beginning about, you know, teaching them as young as possible. Have you developed the system to to teach them as young as possible. Yeah, maybe available. That's right. I mean what we have in the UK is that we have a system. There is an intention, let's say, to teach computer science from the kindergarten age, and you know that there are various documents about this. Now the documents are written in a very, for want of a better word loose fashion. There's an intention that they should learn how to program. And there's a lot of other things in the document as well about what they should learn about technology and computer science as well. So everybody probably does things very differently. So in other subjects maybe say as maths Latin English, they've been going for longer so there's a uniformity about it in how people do this. So, and there's, you know, because it's so new, probably people do things differently and there's a lot of flexibility allowed in how you do this. So my school of thought was, I would like to learn, I would like them to learn how to program. And a lot of people think that they should, you know, they're too young to learn at age 11, and they start them off at age 15 when they start doing their enroll for their courses. But you know then I experimented and taught the 11 year olds. And indeed, we found I found that they are a lot better when you introduce these things, then you may introduce it at age 15. We come to the conclusion, or coming rapidly coming to the conclusion it's like music, or learning language, or learning sport or something. When you introduce these things younger, they seem to learn these things sort of better. So I have 11 to 18 year olds on my plate so I've introduced it at age 11. My guess is that you can introduce it at age eight as well. And with a few family friends I have actually, you know, on occasion introduced a bit of Python to them when I go over age eight and they are very good at it. So, yeah, trying to develop this so that it, you know, so that it can appeal to, we can introduce it a lot younger. And also, what we've been finding is that the young children, they do not mind say arithmetic examples or hard examples as such. They don't need to be basic. They don't need to necessarily be kept amused with games or something. They're very happy with textual arithmetic examples. So you can start them off. You know, if you, my guess is that if you start them off quite early, very soon, they'll be quite proficient, and probably what's currently taught at older age groups can be brought down a lot lower. Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty prevalent because the younger age groups, I guess I'd kind of look at it like they're eager to learn. They don't know what they want to learn, but they're very eager to learn and just develop. And also, you know, the emergence of technology all around us and kids are playing games, 23 hours a day these days, and they want to know how these things are developed or even the grassroots of them. And then maybe at 15 years old, 16 years old, these kids, they maybe have a bit of an ego about it. It's like you were saying that the younger kid don't necessarily mind a difficult task. Maybe the younger kids, they welcome it and then the older kids, they might like take a knock to their ego or they might give up on it quite quickly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you find that the younger children don't easily give up. You know, they've got that something within them that they want to do things. And also, I think older children, they are, they're pressed, you know, they've got exams, they have to do well. Whereas, in some sense, I found that nobody is expecting anything from the 11 year olds. And because they're left alone. They do an awful lot. In fact, more than the 15 year olds. Somehow, you know that lack of expectation that lack of pressure works very much in their favor, where they do a lot more. Yeah. I was going to say, I think that's a completely separate discussion, but the impact that exams make and tests and assignments has a huge impact on it. Because when they're just doing it for fun for their interest, they're doing it because they want to as opposed to having to do it to get into university or past the year. Yeah, I mean, there are children aged 12 and 13, you know, off their own back, they are doing projects as well. We're talking about Python here, but I had one student who's two students in fact, you know, they do they do a lot of coding off their own back and say, C sharp to produce animations and thing. And yeah, they have the time maybe or the freedom or whatever to actually do that on the interest. Can the others hear me too? I can see someone called Francesco Ingo Peter. Is there anything, anything you guys want to say to. Okay, you're all on mute. Yeah. Hello. Hello, yes. I animated myself now. Yes, it's very interesting to listen to. It's sort of not my regular domain, but I'm a little bit interested in what young people are doing and have some thoughts about it. So it's very interesting to hear about your experiences and what we what really appeals to young people nowadays and the approaches you take. So thank you for, for this presentation. I don't have so much to add. I have some thoughts on my own, but it's very interesting to learn more about it. So, Oh, thank you. Yeah. Any, anyone else any questions or anything. Hi, I'm Francesca. Sorry, I've just come. So I lost the most part of the of your presentation. Could you please resume briefly the core of the project please. Yeah, basically, I'm involved in teaching high school children, computer science and in the UK. And I introduced Python to them a couple of years ago, and I'm teaching 11 to 18. And I found that, well, the 11 year olds are the best and the 1213 14. And this was going okay, until the lockdown, which happened in March. And so we had to resume, had to rethink, can we actually continue even with this teaching of their Python, do we have to be there in person, or show you know what what should we do really. So we decided to actually continue and see actually what emerges. The first thing, you know, if you're teaching online. The first thing it was decided before if they have mistakes or anything at you as a teacher in person classroom go over to their terminal and correct it. In order to for them to enjoy the subject, or anything, they have to. They have to know how to correct their mistakes. So therefore, the first thing we taught them was the sin, how to correct syntax errors. Now this was done apologetically thinking that it would be rather boring or anything, but a few dedicated sessions. They seem to be taking this in. And this is what they wrote, you know, was somebody said to me the most interesting parts was the mistakes. Another boy here. He wrote this program off his own back, you know, to choose a random card here. And, you know, there's a syntax mistake syntax error as he writes, and he corrected it and he sent it in. So they seem to embrace it, this concept, what, you know, maybe people think of as boring. And awful. They seem to be okay with it. Then sort of development. You know, if we're going to do anything useful, they really need to know about functions and modules. Could you do this over the internet. Is it, you know, previously I thought it's quite hard and you have to be there on purpose. But we explained it. They seem to take it on board and produce things as well and you know here are his a function by a 12 year old to generate a random password. And if you think, well, if I thought about it really at the ages of five, six and seven, they read, they read, and they have, they read paragraphs. So they used to processing information in blocks. There's no real reason why they can't understand functions and understand them quite easily. And thirdly, you know, we introduced some modeling and simulation here. And so, yeah, some modeling and a bit of simulation, and can they grasp a concept of an external file to produce graphs. Is it going to be too hard to explain for them. So we managed and you know here, somebody's produced a Fibonacci sequence and they've done this here. So, the conclusions are made was that accessing the power and motivating power of online teaching, when it's properly done is enormous. It's a great privilege to partake in it. And I think it's very much in its infancy. We discovered a number of tools like repel where you can screen share and you could you can screen share and use people's code where you made heavy use of the chat functionality and Microsoft teams and things. But I think it is version one, and it has a long way to go. I have a YouTube channel. If anyone's interested, live anonymous website and an email address. Yeah, so that's a synopsis. Thank you very much. Really interesting. But so, if I understood the Python has been told in a certain sense some basics, comments and so on to 11 in youngsters. Is it right. That's right. Yes. Yes. And did you find that so more young people, young, younger people learned it better than older. Yes, you found that young people, younger people learn better than older people. They seem to have an intuitive grasp of these concepts, maybe like learning languages and music.