 Oh, boy. Okay. So next up we have a talk from Lillian Nandi. She is, and there's her, there's her slides actually already. So Lillian studied computer science at high school, did her PhD in computer modeling from University College London, went on to looking at computer applications and programming in the pharmaceutical sector before entering formal teaching for the next generation. She's currently engaged in teaching Python programming C sharp and JavaScript, and has given lectures and conferences both in the UK and abroad about the teaching of computer programming to young people. She's running computer clubs, including that of computer assisted investment for children, and is a full member of the British computer society. So it should come as no surprise that Lillian is going to be talking with us today about how to train the next generation of people of basically the next generation of computer programmers. And yeah, so please welcome Lillian Nandi. Okay, good afternoon everybody. And thank you very much for having me and thank you very much to the audience for being here. And that was a very good introduction. So, I am interested in developing appropriate teaching methods for programming in Python for school children, and encouraging them to take it up as a hobby, like music, as well as in their future careers. So I'm involved in building up a worthwhile computer science department. And even sort of renowned schools are finding this a little bit hard. We see a few problems, but I feel we all are, if we want can be part of the solution. So my presentation I hope will help to develop amongst others, some of these points. So science is regarded as one of the leading disciplines of the 21st century. They are ubiquitous and prevalent in most, if not all sectors of our global society, medicine, arts, sciences, commerce, etc. And the current pandemic has highlighted to all of us, including non technologists, the critical nature of computers, and it's now recognized as a critical infrastructure in our global society. Indeed, if the fangs were a nation, it would be the third richest nation in the world, and it would be eligible for a seat in the global in the G20. Therefore, coding or computer programming is now regarded by many as an essential skill by any aspiring, ambitious self respecting young person in an aspiring nation, and it's been dubbed the fourth hour, along with reading, writing and arithmetic. And in recognition of the new status and huge significance of computer programming, governments worldwide have introduced initiatives to have to. It taught starting from the beginning of the school career in kindergarten through to junior school through to secondary school, and the regions in red in map are just some of the regions where this is happening. So the question emerges is how do we best teach and motivate the next generation in acquiring this all important skill of computer programming. Now there are challenges involved, and the economist has written the subject is so young that teachers and curriculum designers have little pedagogical research to guide them to put this into context. Other subjects such as English maths, Latin history geography have been taught for hundreds of thousands of years all over the globe. So there's a great deal of collective experience of knowledge on how they should best be taught and how people best learning them. In contrast computer programming for children has only been around for the past few years, and there's little in the way of collective knowledge about teaching and learning of them. So I undertook a project to introduce computer programming to high school students aged 11 to you 18 in the UK to build up a computer science department and sure it's fit for purpose with little collective experience of this nature. I've devised my own framework and also my own set of resources, which are in a YouTube channel little anonymous. The approach has been to introduce computer programming using a bottom up approach, rather than a top down approach, the bottom up approach is a tried tested successful and traditional method in teaching computer programming to adults, foreign languages and mathematics have also been taught in this manner traditionally in this approach, the concepts and operational definitions of the concepts are taught before they apply to a problem. Now this is not the only way of teaching and learning. It is not at all unusual that this approach is actually alien to the modern school student who could have predominantly been taught with a top down approach, whereby the problem is specified. And then they delve further into seeing what tools are available to solve the problem. But this approach, nevertheless, being somewhat alien perhaps was well received. And then an explanation was provided that computer programming languages can be thought of as analogous to human languages such as French, German, Italian programs can be thought of analogous to essays, modules or functions to paragraphs statements to sentences and key words to words. The students really did buy into this explanation and from time to time I was asked questions such as are you fluent in the programming in Python. Indeed, parents in parents even said how much their children were enjoying and loving the subject. And the third bit in the framework is that to introduce textual programming language, such as Python from the very beginning, as opposed to block based languages. The rationale for this is that if you look at what students are doing in other subjects at the age of 1112 and 13. In English literature, they study Shakespeare and plays such as Romeo and Juliet and as you like it in math they solve algebraic equations in geography in the UK. Not so long ago, they wrote essays on the advantages and disadvantages of Brexit. So we surmised from this that children at this stage are comfortable with and, you know, can manipulate symbols and deal with sophisticated texts, so they should be able to cope well as with a programming language, a textual one such as Python, we did indeed enjoy great some success with this approach, a good degree of success as per the output and the comments from both students and parents. And we found indeed that 11 year olds found computer programming easier than 12 year olds, we found it easier than 13 year olds who found it easier than 40 year olds who found it easier than 15 year olds. So probably starting properly from the beginning is better, and to introduce these concepts as young as possible. Students felt happier with this teacher led approach rather than a student led approach or independent learning at this beginning stage. And the best students are the ones who of course are motivated to do well in this subject. And as an educator. It is not an understatement to say the ones that perhaps perform better are the ones from a congenial home environment. But this was all going rather nicely and we were in a nice rhythm, where suddenly in mid March lockdown was announced. And overnight we joined the online global and teaching community, we joined an estimated 900 million children in over 100 countries that have been educated online virtually, and a new set of questions and challenges emerged. So these are the lockdown questions arising for online teaching during the pandemic. Question one, how does this online virtual medium of instruction compare with the established were respected in person face to face medium of instruction. Question two, is it possible to engender a sense of competence, confidence and independence to the students using this medium. And question three, is it possible for the students to enjoy the subject via this medium and produce something even more useful. In regards to question one, as how this online medium of instruction compares with the traditional in person medium of instruction. After a bit of soul searching, it was decided that mindset is the key here. And there are two ideas which helped shape our thinking in it. The first idea is that we should figure out what we want before we calculate what we can afford, not the reverse. This is an idea which has been postulated by Irving crystal. It means we should figure out what we mean to do and then figure out a means of actually getting there. The second idea is the medium is the message by Professor McLuhan. It means that each medium of instruction has its own signature with its own strengths and advantages. We need to discover them, exploit them, capitalize on them. Secondly, we need to build confidence and competence in independence with this medium of instruction. So it is imperative that students have working programs, if they are to be feel confident. It was given to teaching students to correct their own errors, especially the syntax error. And, you know, before it was felt that they are too young to do this. And what would happen is that they would, if they had an error, they would put their hand up, I'd rush to them, correct their error, and then rush back again to my seat. So it was imperative they do this themselves. So a couple of heavy duty sessions was devoted to this, and then indeed afterwards we had a test. Now to our sheer abasement, the young students seem to embrace this subject of the syntax error. And Nikita age 12 says, to me the most interesting part was the mistakes. When we made them, they could have been minor but made such a difference. It was interesting to see how that counted, how intricate a system this really is. And Alex age 12 says, I have enjoyed learning how to create a code that creates a random password. I liked working on this partly because when I wrote it out it had a syntax error. This made me experiment, which was very fun. After fixing it, I decided to improve it as well, which made another problem. Now here is Alex's program with the syntax error in class of his own volition. He decided to write a program which randomly selects a card from a pack of playing cards. He had a syntax error in it. Basically, can see playing cards. He's written the function name with spaces. He took it home of his own volition in the evening he corrected it. The next morning at 815 am in the morning, I received a message saying that he's corrected it, and it works so much for enthusiasm. Now, question three, which is to do with how students can produce something even more useful and meaningful. This would necessitate students learning about functions or modules early on in their programming career. Now, first of all, I had to change my idea about functions. I previously thought it would be quite hard for 11 and 1213 year olds to be to learn about them, and even harder online than it would be on person. Thinking about it, children as young as five, six, seven, they are comfortable with the idea of paragraphs in language, and really the idea of processing blocks is not alien at all. We started by showing students a worked example of how two numbers are added, and telling them how you can pass stator in A and B, and then you call it addition 10, 12, addition 6, 3. So we have examples of the functions here on the right hand side that Alex aged 11 created himself, and we see that he's extended the idea in the addition function by passing in real numbers as opposed to integers, as he was shown. And we show that he's also written a function called multiplication where he is passing in three numbers. And he says, I enjoyed learning about functions and about how to define them so you could access them at any moment. And here we see the functions which have been created by default age 12. You see that he's created two extra functions, division and subtractions. And he's created a function also where strings are being passed. Now it's interesting to know that they created these functions themselves, which negated us or me from actually giving them exercises telling them what to create. They have enough creativity within them to create the right stuff that we want them to create basically. Now we decided to push the limits a little bit more and introduce the students to the concept of modeling and simulation and how you can use functions for modeling and simulations. So this involved an extra piece of news as it were the concept of the external file. So the program reads the external file and then creates the graph so you have another level of complexity with the external file. And we see here, we've used chiffon has used the matplotlib library and she's age 13. And she's created an external file of Fibonacci numbers. And, you know, the graph has created the plotted rather the Fibonacci numbers here. So, going back to the topic of mindset and Irving crystals quote, we should figure out what we want before we calculate what we can afford, not the reverse. And this way of thinking about issues really did help. And we made pleasant discoveries of what it was possible for the children to do, and also along the way the tools that were available. So we discovered along the way that online editors were available. www dot repel dot it where you can share code and students can, you know, as a teacher can take over the code and edit it as well. We started them to make also heavy use of the Chuck functionality in Microsoft teams, not just for chatting, but for passing and code of student to teacher and vice versa. And also, I haven't tested this year, but apparently you can set up classrooms and assignments in repel editors, which will be very handy in the future. Now, here's something for enthusiasm. Peter age 12 wrote a program of his own volition and he said to me in the Microsoft teams chat, Miss, I can't share my screen. So I posted what I did on Python, it generates six random digits to use for an iPhone passwords. I myself didn't actually realize this, although I do have an iPhone for many years. So now he, they are also teaching us as well. So here we have to revisit our original framework and to modify it. And so we see here that the syntax or punctuation as it would be in language is also very important. And it needs to be included at an earlier stage, the learning of the syntax error and syntax. And also the concept of modules needed to be, they need to learn this at an earlier stage, and include, and indeed what I've learned from my online teaching, I will now pass back in my face to face teaching. So here are some of the conclusions and the way ahead, some of the strengths of the online medium of instructions we learn the online medium actually promotes very good listening, which leads to better understanding. The online medium unleashed a healthy dose of creativity from the children or the students and online medium promotes very good structure. In fact, the children commented that this on the online lessons they were getting were from everybody were were actually very well structured and we found that the online medium is actually very unforgiving with poor structure. Point two, in future we can import some of the practices of online medium of instruction into face to face teaching. And, you know, previously, we thought it's a substitute, but indeed it has its own set of advantages. And, you know, thirdly, there are many, many exciting developments we feel that are to come in online teaching in years to come. And, you know, we are probably in version one of online teaching. And the scale of this venture was surely in years to come we will consider this as the greatest experiment in the history of mankind in one of the greatest experiments in online teaching. According to Albert Einstein, he says, I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn. Okay, I have a YouTube channel, Lil Anonymous. Please check it out. If you should so wish. I created a website for high schools children. That's the website name there. You can be contacted by demo at yahoo.com and I will be happy to take any questions. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much, Lillian. So we'll hang up for a moment and we've got a few minutes here. And if anyone has any questions, go ahead and put them in the Q&A or if you want to be able to talk to Lillian afterwards. You can also find her in the Discord Room, Talk Next Generation's Billionaires. So we'll just hang up for a moment, see if anyone has any questions. And actually I really enjoyed your talk, Lillian, I have to say for myself because I do have a passion for education as well or run an educational software company. So it's really good to get notes from someone who works in the, you know, who actually teaches in a classroom environment on more effective ways. I think it is, were you surprised, I'll ask you, were you surprised by some of the things you found with online learning? Yes, I was very surprised. I mean, you know, everybody went to it overnight and rather reluctantly and everybody thought it is actually a, you know, the initial thought that it's a substitute for it. And I was trying to replicate that you can do, you know, replicate things that you do face to face and that it would be a poor substitute. And the fact that, you know, in some ways it's superior and you can actually get quite a lot out of it really did surprise me. And, you know, I think in online learning, people are more patient and they listen a lot better. I would not be surprised. Actually, if the students learned a little bit more through the online learning than they did face to face, and they also became a lot more independent. Yeah, I can imagine. Definitely a surprising outcome. There's a lot of books and courses out there that promise to teach children coding. And of course, you know, not all courses are created equal. Is there anything that's really stood out to you in the way of like curriculum, especially if like there's parents who are watching that this is not in their schools but that they may want to, you know, be able to do this with their kids. Are there any resources for that. Okay. I would actually say to be honest. There is quite a bit which is, I think, being created for children. But I actually think take an adult textbook and kind of go through that. You know, I think there's an assumption that children want to play games, but I think in the same way as adults learn. There's one called, you know, a child with an adult Python crash course I can't, I can't remember who wrote that, but it is actually very good. You know, a 12 or 13 year old can actually take that and go through that themselves. And they can learn the fundamental building blocks from above. I have it. I'm going to promote my YouTube channel little anonymous. And I have about 12 videos at the moment on computer programming. I've got other videos on other areas of computer science. But yeah, please take a look. That would be a Python crash course by Eric Mathis, by the way, published by No Starts Press. That's right. Yes. And actually, I'll put one other question out there that I think maybe on some viewers minds, maybe the future is, what would you say to parents or the teachers who maybe lack some confidence with this themselves I have heard a number of, you know, educators in both forms say, well, you know, I don't, I'm not really all that confident with, with programming. So, you know, I'm afraid of introducing this to my kids because, you know, I'm not really computer savvy. What, what advice would you have for them? I would say, well, first of all, ask themselves, you know, how interested they are in the subject themselves and assuming that they do have the interest themselves. I would say, you know, go on a course yourself, you know, either go through the, there's lots of tutorials on the web, Udemy courses, crash courses, as such, go through. In the UK, we have something called GCSE, and I would say go through the questions in that there are projects in the GCSE, I would say go to the, you know, try the project yourself, and, you know, spend a year or so becoming very confident in it for a year to 18 months, and then you can roll it out yourself having the actual confidence. But I do think that people need to build up the confidence and the fundamentals themselves before they roll it out. All right. Well, once again, thank you very much, Lillian. Really appreciate having you here.