 So we've got social engineering tech education coming up next and Tyler is here either with a full band or a posse I'm not entirely sure which but let me hand the stage over to him and please welcome him to the stage Well, you should get that to that. That's cool. Thank you. So yeah, I did bring a bunch of people here I know that they're not on the formal schedule, but that's because I wasn't entirely sure who was coming So that's good to know tour camp was actually nice enough to provide all of us free tickets And so a lot of us are from I'm from Seattle But these two for example are from Chicago James over there on the end is from New York And a few be over there is from Philadelphia. We have few other people around as well And who we are hopefully will become more clear in a few seconds. So Social engineering tech education. What exactly does that mean? the way that I look at it social engineering applying engineering principles to things that aren't technology and Tech education obviously getting people interested in technology and getting them to learn about things So traditionally the way that we do education is we have like schools. We have workshops. We have classes. We have Guides walk-throughs. We have books whatever and traditionally if you want to get someone to in to learn about technology This is the way that people do things Which I think many of us here are familiar with the fact that we are not Oftentimes this is not the way that we learn things I think most of the people who come to tour camp are more interested in kind of like the hacker mentality of like find something figure out How it works, but in any case Next slide Yeah, so in any case like I think all of us have friends or Kids which I know is a big one and I think is why tour camp gave us some of the tickets here almost to get my more kids involved You know if we work for a company, we might have executives who do not consider themselves technically minded And I think the big one for me that I am always concerned about is politicians There are a lot of people who consider themselves as I can't do technology This is not something I can do and as a result like they're not going to take the classes. They're not going to learn to code and that leads to things that are Sometimes humorous sometimes sort of disappointing and sad net neutrality repeal the potential copyright law that is Looking more likely that it's going to pass in Europe if you followed any of that All of these sort of things are because like people don't know about technology and they consider themselves like not the sort of person Who could ever learn so they don't give it a try? So who am I I'm going to introduce myself I'll have other people briefly introduce themselves as well. I didn't make a slide for them Because I didn't have any bios. I'm Tyler. I run a nonprofit that works all across the US 49 cities I think right now across the US to get kids interested in technology and get them to give coding a try and Specifically targeting people who are completely uninterested in coding and people who think I could never do this This isn't something that I do for us. It's partially an equity thing like we want to get lower-income kids kids from underrepresented backgrounds interested But it's also, you know, like I said, it's a thing of just like increasing the general awareness But for this I did like Microsoft research machine learning applied statistics I found it a startup that raised money from white combinator and And I was not actually the founder of this organization, but I did some other things So my kind of background is basically from like a startup and engineering background Like what can we do for tech education that people aren't thinking about right now? Do you guys want to all introduce yourselves really quickly? Yeah, so I can start I'll keep it a bit simple But my name is James gone. I actually have been working with a student R&D for the past three and a half years just about and That's been in the form of running a code day down in Boca Raton Actually remotely which has had a lot of challenges and then also to recently run some computer science fairs with Microsoft eels My name is George matter. I've run and host I've organized and hosted two code days and these days I just mentor at code days. I just go and Help direct kids in their efforts to build things My name is Liam Schoom. I've organized the past three code days in Chicago along with Anton and our original manager Akash Previous to that. I attended. I think five code days as an attendee and it's where I really got Really cut my teeth on coding and got got interested in it as a career And I've been doing some stuff recently with a programming club at my school with some locally organized events for Chicago public school students So I've just been trying to get involved in tech education Both as a student in terms of like learning cool things and also organizing events for fellow students Haven't had as much experience or opportunities wherever I could find Hi, yeah, I'm Anton. I also started out of code day and have been helping with code day Chicago I think that these types of events are super good at encouraging kids So Liam me and a bunch of my friends are currently working on a Chicago Organization that also does tech events. I think tech events are really cool My name is G and Lazzarini. I'm a dotnet software engineering consultant at DXC technology And I don't think I'd be where I am now if it weren't for code day and student R&D. I started volunteering and found this community back in 2012 and I've seen the work they've done at code days that I've helped to volunteer with and Impact so many people positively. So it's definitely something I'm a big fan of and yeah cool So I could tell you more about what we do, but I can just play you this one-minute video Which will do a better job in less time I remember walking into my first code day and seeing all the faces and everybody on the laptops that was cool to me because I I'm from there's not a lot of people that are into tech and we didn't really have the resources to just have Events like this a program start out by reaching students who don't want to take a CS class because they think programming isn't for me By engaging with an existing interest like other video games We get them to attend one of our programs you get these the village nerve ads and then there was one with like an Xbox 360 controller was literally just an Xbox 360 controller and it said do you want to learn how to make video games and I was like Yeah, but this is just looks it looks it looked it looked too good to be true So I clicked it anyways because that's what you do with ads like that you just click them I got I Think five or six of my friends and I told them hey come come to this thing with me And they didn't know about code either And my roommates a beginner, so I was like come on down and we came and we're so happy we're here I've come to like every single one ever since one students are at one of our events We teach them computer science through the lens of their existing interests as well as making them feel like part of the code or community It's the entire thing is just a ton of fun. It's this feeling you get where You can just explore any interest you have With code or tech Your beginner Coming together and like as you go they know like tons of cool stuff and put together really cool projects also like fun programming games Like make programming a party I met somebody new and he's like a big brother to me now But oh, yeah, I already knew something like that. It's like my family Really just took me to another another world opened my eyes and It just really sucked me in Yeah, so that's us in a nutshell we work with students We try to get students who wouldn't otherwise be interested interested in technology. We've had I think at this point about 35,000 students who've gone through our programs all across the US And we base everything on behavioral economics, which is a fancy educated like Nobel Prize-winning term for What I consider to be social engineering effectively Traditionally basically the way this is work. I chose the worst stock photography. I possibly could by the way for this presentation. So so traditionally economicists considered people to just be like Completely logical and purely like they do exactly the right thing all the time and clearly that is not what people do That is robots So there is this guy Daniel Kahneman who proposed that this radical idea that humans were not completely Rational and did a whole bunch of research into all the ways that humans are not rational and so even though it has a word economics in there It's actually a lot more based on Like various, you know, like logical fallacies. Do you want to mention something about that James? Yeah, so I'm actually Recently graduated economics major and one thing that I really like about like behavioral economics in this approach in general Is that one thing that student R&D manages to do really well? Is to adapt to different situations? So for example, I was one of the first people to long-term manage a code day From a different state So while I was going to school in upstate New York I was actually running the code day down in Boca Raton and Sort of organizing everything via phone calls into emails And so that was a very different experience from what a lot of our organizers have in terms of You know the challenges that arise from that and managing a team remotely and One great thing about behavioral economics is that really it boils down to if something isn't working You really cannot just keep doing what you're doing and to that same degree You know a lot of things can be made more efficient by trying to standardize certain processes And one thing that we do really well is to avoid doing that when things aren't working So we will try to standardize things to make things more efficient But if those things aren't working in certain contexts, then we try you know Everything possible to try to figure out why that is and to introduce new variables that wouldn't traditionally be considered right so basically Traditional framework is way to teach CS is traditional schooling and behavioral economics is like a different framework for us to look at problems and find new approaches So Daniel Conner is the guy who prevents it presented this initially He want to know about prize for it if you're interested in detail There's a book called thinking fast and slow which is really cool But I'm just gonna go through some of the things that we've actually learned that it hopefully will be helpful to you as you try To get your kids your friends your family members Or if you happen to know any politicians who might be able to vote on things like that neutrality some things that we've learned that from Applying this to tech education that might be helpful. So first one is just getting people interested One of the things again, I put quotes from Daniel Conner and it doesn't really matter, but like People tend to believe things just because they're told them a lot And so one of the most common ones that you'll see with this is like this is a picture of someone at a code day People think of themselves in terms of identities because they're told that this is the way they are So if someone is good when they're really young at music for example is perhaps this person is I haven't actually met her But she was that one of our events so If people are told that they're you know, they're really good at music from a young age They'll tend to think of themselves as you really good at music from a young age and for the rest of their life in Losses challenge. They'll consider themselves to be that sort of person And at the same time a lot of people and I think that we are all familiar with this have this view of what programming and hacking is Which is I mean obviously this is a little bit exaggerated But I've gone into high schools especially in the middle of the US and people and I asked them what they think of when I say programming they'll literally describe this So you'd be surprised at the number of people who do legitimately think that programming is typing ones and zeros even if not completely logically at some level people seem to believe this and So if you are this sort of person, you're not very likely to consider yourselves to be this sort of person It's not something that you think is very achievable and that's not true I mean, I think that Certainly even a tour camp. I've never been to tour camp by the way I mean this is this has been amazing and like the amount of art and music and The way that everything is sort of connected together is really amazing But for a lot of people if you just ask them, do you want to learn to code? They would say absolutely not I could never do anything like that because that's not the sort of person that I am So having what I like to call these sort of like hybrid activities Is first of all a really great way to get people interested in learning if you just ask people Do you want to learn to code? Most of them will say no for something like tour camp? It might be music and art There's a lot of really cool music and art things and in fact I've gotten some of the people to come to tour camp with our group because You know, there was lots of really interesting things like the crème brûlée talk That's not you know a traditional. Oh, here's how to you know do network security or something talk For us, it's code day. It's video games And so what we do is we will actually just talk to students and we'll say do you want to make a game? And they'll say no, I don't want to code a game. We'll say well, it's okay Do you want to make art for me for a video game? Do you want to make music for a video game? Do you want to do voice acting for a video game? And that's actually how we get a lot of people who have never considered themselves a programmer and who've never considered trying to do programming You know interested in coding So that's that's one thing that you can do is if you're trying to get like a student of your if you're trying to get like a Child of yours interested in programming One way to do that is actually to not try to get them interested in programming at all Because they don't want to do that and to find something that they're already interested in Figure out some way that it's related to technology and start from that basis and obviously that's not going to teach them everything about coding But it's going to get them excited enough and I think that we're all familiar with the fact that like intuitively people are curious I think that's why we're all here Sparking that is is really important second one making programming fun so Basically When it what what this section boils down to is like programming languages that are real programming languages What we would consider to be real programming languages are really shitty for people who are not Experienced in programming and so like if you chart fun, whatever that means on a graph This is kind of what the story looks like you come in like moderately excited, especially if you're a beginner You're like really excited. I'm gonna work on this cool thing I want to do you know like we get you excited about that and then you try to do it You don't make any progress and like maybe you make a tiny bit of progress And then you don't make any progress because you hit your head against a wall for an hour because we all know that programming is actually like 80% like debugging and 20% bugging right It's not you know you hit your head against a wall for a really long time Especially if you're a beginner because everything is new to you and you have no idea how to do anything And then maybe you make a little bit of progress again And you get a build working and it kind of does something and it's not anywhere near what you want it to be And then you hit your head against a wall for a while and eventually you get to this point that I like to call And I don't say this when I'm talking to schools. I like to call it the fuck it point And eventually if you are tired enough of programming and you hit your head against a wall for long enough You get to this point where you're like, I don't want to do this anymore. Fuck it. I'm going home That is what we want to avoid and so how do we make this as fun as possible? Real programming language is well great for the long term. It's great for someone to know that they're really not very good for beginners Because this is what they cause is people to hit their head against a wall for a while When they don't really want to be there And so an example of this is like scratch is the common one that we teach to beginners I actually really don't like scratch because the thing about scratch is you have to understand game loops And yes, you don't have to actually understand how to drag and drop things You know, you don't have to understand how to write code because you can drag and drop things But conceptually if you want to make a game where a character can jump up and down You have to understand that conceptually physics is just pulling someone down toward the ground And when they collide with something then it stops and that conceptually when someone is jumping up all you're doing is adding a force upwards and that Conceptually the way that a game works is it just every frame, you know is constantly pulling them down a certain amount based on You know, I mean, it's just it's like you need to know so much about how something works to make a really simple game So we actually like to use the thing called construct and I'm gonna see if I can Okay, this isn't already not voting well If I can I'm gonna do a demo of this really quickly Let's see if I can connect to the Wi-Fi or not. If not, it's no big deal So I can just talk to that a bit while he's trying to figure this out. So So I think that I can testify very well to this So when I was a kid my dad tried throwing like C++ books at me and it never really got me interested in coding But once I started being able to program from a more like Friendly sort of manner then I got way more interested in coding and I've seen that at all the events that I've run and all the Student R&D type events is that we're able to figure out the best like good ways to actually connect with students and Get them interested in something that you know I you wouldn't get from being thrown a book with tons of like code snippets Yeah, so I'm gonna really quickly like in five minutes I think run you through how we would teach students to make a game So we find we start with something interesting. How many people in this room know Bill Gates, right? Yeah, I'm not I'm not even gonna actually require you to raise your hands So here's what we do is we find has anyone seen the video of Bill Gates jumping over a chair Okay, so this is what we do we play this video and students all know Bill Gates But none of them seen this video so it's great. You can leap over a chair from a standing position Depends on the size of the chair Yeah, so students love that as I think we do as well Why closed I closed it So what we would do is we would say okay? Well this area right here is our world and this construct thing Don't worry about what it is yet and what we're gonna do is we're gonna create a new thing in the world It's called an object don't worry about that what that means everything in a game pretty much is gonna be a sprite Some things won't be but you'll probably start out with this So if you're not sure go for it. We're gonna make the things in this world. What is one of the things? Ask the students Bill Gates Right We'll click on the world does someone want to come up here and draw Bill Gates as fast as they can Have a volunteer Okay, Gene. I'm gonna have you do it draw Bill Gates as fast as you can go for it You also have to look backwards because my Linux monitor configuration is interesting Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna call this good enough Because I this isn't the entire point of the thing but yeah, I mean this is this is the general idea So we'll do that and we have to crop it Right, and then we'll have the and you know in in real life We do this in 20 minutes instead of five minutes, but I'm gonna do as fast as possible. We have the chair So we'll make a chair and a chair is a sprite because almost everything in a video game is a sprite and every single student draws The same chair the only difference is which direction it's facing We'll crop it we'll put it here and Okay, so if we hit run now, this is gonna make the world's most boring game because nothing happens So yeah, that's our game right so now what do we have to do? Well First of all, we actually need the ground and usually I'd let students figure out that this is a problem on its own But this is where I talk about how computers are stupid and how if you don't put the ground in Then things will happen and by the way, you can't name it floor because that is a mathematical operation So we have some ground and we'll go ahead and resize it and this thing this language By the way has all sorts of stuff like arrays and link lists and like you can do in-app purchases and everything But here's the way it works and we talk about concepts and we talk about objects versus instances But here's the key of the entire thing is like in five minutes All I have to do is like add platforming behavior because every game is gonna have platforming behavior And some people would say that's bullshit because you're not turned teaching the code And I would say like every single programmer imports modules all the time to do all sorts of basic stuff Oh, yeah, and by the way computers are stupid. So we have to tell it that the floor is a solid Right, so we'll go ahead and click on this and edit behaviors and add a new effect and we'll say oh Oh, sorry, I added an effect instead of behavior Behaviorism will add a behavior and we'll say it's a solid and we'll do this and by the way This does have actual code, but all of the basic stuff is basically in modules Now you can just import so now we have a jumping game and we could add collision detection of the chair and what I'll have students do then is then go on their own and like Add a bunch of fun things that they have on their own And so we'll have things like chairs flying down from the ceiling and Bill Gates is trying to dodge them And they can do all of this in less than an hour And then every single one of them comes out of this workshop with an immediate idea of what they're gonna do next And they're excited and they're they think it's gonna be so cool And if they're an artist they want to add all sorts of cool art But they still do the gameplay and if they're a musician they want to add music But they still do the gameplay and when you get down to it the gameplay is writing these things in events Which are basically like JavaScript events because this entire thing is made in JavaScript And by the way after you go out of code day you can write modules for this in JavaScript And so it's it's really great because I agree with people who say that this isn't real programming in the sense That we do it, but it gets people interested right away So that's one of the key things I wanted to talk about Cool go back into From current slide That is not what from current slide means That's okay. I'll just click there really quickly. Anyone else want to add anything to that general concept while we're Yeah, so I would say that this works well because it manages to Engage students through video games One yeah, everyone loves video games So one thing we actually did recently was trying to develop some new workshops for those CS fairs I mentioned and One idea I came up with was to do something blockchain related and so I managed to Put together this workshop that taught students how to deploy their own ERC-20 token in like half an hour and It was really simple didn't even require writing any code But managed to explain to them some basic ideas behind blockchain and cryptocurrency And you know let's do it away with that pretty quickly those workshops were packed same with like 3d printing Which is not really coding, but it gets them in the door And it brings you know again We were looking at that graph of like you know the fuck it point this like immediately gives them something to catch hold to And we'll talk about the next part later too Give realistic expect impressions this is another really big one for us So a lot of students people tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease of which they retrieve from memory As in things that are easy to remember or things or things that are easy to see are things that we think are true Which is not always the case So if we think about like a sporting event or like race car driving It's very easy to tell who is in the lead and students can tell who is in the lead And if they were racing the car, they'd be able to tell it roughly where they were I mean, you know, maybe you don't have a bird's-eye view of the entire thing But still with coding. It's like how do you know how well this is doing right? I mean all of us have probably had this experience We don't know how well this is doing for students who are new to this entire thing They look at their code and they're like like this doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? And then they look at someone else who has their code building and they're like they got it to work And of course that person had the exact same struggles 20 minutes ago But like from the outside you just see two people sitting at a screen, right? So you can't tell it like maybe you could measure like pizza consumption And my guess is the people who are eating more pizza probably have slightly more free time You know or what at whatever like I always tell people to like look for when they're looking for people who are stressed out Look for things like people who are like biting their nails or like running their hands through their hair That's the extensive the feedback that we get on how well people are doing and students aren't looking for it And so as a result like students tend to judge themselves by the struggle that they go through and On the other hand they judge other people by the result that they see and as a result when students talk to mentors Or any of us who are actually good at things They don't see us as people who have learned to do things, but don't know how to do many things as well They see oh, we're a programming expert and obviously this isn't realistic because there's like six Like well, okay, so this full point wasn't supposed to be up. You know, but that's fine So people litter it's just some students literally think that programmers Literally have memorized every function And I have seen students in classes that I've taught her at Kote where the way that you study in school Is you take notes on things and so I've literally seen students You think the way to become a programming expert is to take a notepad and go through the Java documentation or the C sharp Documentation or whatever else and literally take notes on every method. I have literally seen students do this many times And obviously that's not how we've learned like I I took this slide from another presentation Where I was talking directly to students, but there's over 6,000 classes in just the Java standard library Java being the standard a PCS thing not that I like it I'm not including third-party packages not including other programming languages Not including like even the methods even if you were to just if you were only to do the classes So it's just not realistic But that is the way that a lot of students really think is that we are programming experts And at some point if they try hard enough one day they too will know all of technology Right because again that that perception bias about things that come easily to mind or the things That we're aware of so how do we you know? Oh, this is a conversation I have by the way all the time even with really good programmers that are students who haven't quite figured this out is like I'll say You're really talented programmer and they'll say no I'm really bad and I'm saying no you're actually really good like I've worked with a lot of programmers I used to run a startup like I used to hire people and they'll say I appreciate that but I don't know how to Write an operating system right or like I don't know how to use get very well Which does does anyone actually know how to use get fully with like the entirety of like? Yeah, I mean I've been using it for years and even so I still have to Google some weird error messages or like yeah So like this is called the availability heuristic is what Daniel Kahneman called it and he and a guy named Amos Tversky This was their very first thing that they discovered when they were looking into how people were irrational So what are some ways that we can avoid the availability heuristic? My favorite is to just whenever someone asked me a question not answer their question Quite simply if someone is not a programmer and they're not really good One of the best things we can possibly do is teach them that we don't know the answers to everything all the time And this is probably not true for just technology by the way So if you have You know a child or if you're working with students or if you're working with people who are new to something And you know the answer to something this is the hardest thing for the mentors that we train to learn Don't tell them the answer ask them. What have you tried so far and what have you googled? Those are my two favorite questions, and by the way, that's another thing. I mean students feel bad about googling things But can you imagine if we felt bad about googling things like how terrible we would feel about our lives at the end of the day That is how students actually feel and I've had to take them over to friends laptops You like work at Facebook and happen to be hanging out nearby and be like show me which tabs you have open just to prove the point So that's one of the main ones is like just telling mentors to not give them the answer And I don't know you guys have good examples of that Okay Okay Cool, so that's that's one more thing is like the availability heuristic is is a really big thing and I Want to stress throughout this entire presentation that we're talking about tech education And we're talking about how do we do this for tech education? But this is equally applicable to anything that we all think we can't learn right? I mean if we if I'm really bad at foreign languages I've been trying for a while, but that's partially internalized and I'm aware of that logically like The reason that I think I can't learn another language is because like that's just who I think I am and whenever I try Immediately I get negative feedback and other people it seems to come so naturally to them So like I don't do it, right? When I was in high school I used to think that computer programming was the only thing I was good at and now I'm like really interested in baking and plants Which by the way if you ever Tyler dot VC slash plants if you want to see a live stream of some succulents growing in my closet That is not the sort of thing I would have done when I was in high school Just because like that was my perception was other people can do this. I can't and they're so good at it Last thing I want to talk about that we really learned is leave people with fond memories because as Daniel Kahneman Again the inventor of a lot of this Said like the remembering self is very different from the present self All of us will have a certain memory of tour camp when we leave and hopefully it will be positive But what it turns out is it's actually very unrelated to our actual experience here And maybe some of you have experienced this like whenever I go on vacation with my parents Or whenever I used to go on vacation with my parents at least because I don't anymore They would always take pictures of everything in our entire vacation would revolve around taking pictures so that later on They could look back at the pictures and remember what a fun vacation we had taking pictures in front of things You know, I mean, that's that's the way we remember things And when it comes to getting new people into interested in something the very first memory is is absolutely the most important And so when we have an event like code day, which I'll show you a video of what it looks like later Our goal is actually not even really to teach them much about how programming works at all Our goal is actually just to make them feel like they learned something about programming and that they did something And then make them feel really good about themselves And those two are not related at all because especially these are 24 hour. They're basically hackathons So they're gonna be really tired and away and when they come out of it They're just gonna have like an emotion and a vague sense of like having done something related to programming So I'll play you a video what that looks like. This is the video we have on the website I apologize. It's pretty old. So it's like not the highest quality video. We need to redo it But this is literally what we saw students on even of what code day looks like and you'll notice by the way that We mentioned the word coding or programming maybe twice in the entire thing outside of our name Code day is an event where student programmers and artists from around the world Get together to build cool apps and games and have a lot of fun all in just 24 hours You can attend whether you're a total beginner or very experienced At the start of code day anyone with an idea for an app or game pitches it we then form teams are on the coolest ones Hi, baby, I'm Drew and our project is called sounded it's basically It simulates a conversation that you would have with like this virtual character Neural network simulator and visualizer if you're a total beginner We have optional workshops at the start to get you up to speed or just get started working on your idea immediately Our mentors your team and other event attendees are happy to help out as needed Time moves quickly at code day and as it gets into the evening We have lots of fun activities planned to give you and your team brief breaks from working on your ideas So this is a no hands programming contest Whatever I show this video in schools the teacher was like are they fighting? That was a group rock paper scissors and people are getting ready to show off what they made All that in just one weekend We hope you'll join us at the next code day to make new friends have fun and build something awesome Yeah, so I mean I think what you can really see from the video is that the entire focus of the event is really not on This is that was my last slide that the entire focus the event is not on Teaching people how to code really it is about leaving them with that experience and making sure that they have fun and making sure that they Have a positive experience afterward because what it comes down to is again the most difficult part of Programming of teaching someone to program is often not especially for for this context of this workshop is not actually teaching them When someone is really interested in something yes Maybe some people have more natural aptitude or less natural aptitude When someone is really interesting like interested in something They're generally going to want to try to pursue it and a lot of the time that is the thing that actually makes a difference is like them Just wanting to do something and so not even focusing on Teaching them the basics of programming But just getting them so excited that they want to continue on their own and that they're not even going to ask you for help Anymore because they want to go out and Google it and because they know that real programmers Google things You know and and that they know where to start right from the beginning You know giving them that ability to do that is is what makes a difference and again like at the very End of the video you saw that like counter-strike mod I think it was we're like there's a guy jumping up like those people didn't really do much of anything They just kind of played counter-strike the entire time and then made something at the end and they were total beginners And and they also made a bunch of blue backgrounds. This is one of my favorite stories They made a bunch of blue backgrounds literally just backgrounds that were different shades of blue And they didn't they were in middle school I think at the time and they didn't really know much about or anything about credit coding But they had a really good experience and they did make something coding related Which is that mod and so the next code day that they went to they made a website that listed all of their blue backgrounds And then the next code day that they went to they made a mobile app that allowed you to like It would automatically fetch the latest blue backgrounds And it would it would allow you to select a blue background for their website And then the next code day that they went to they made a live social networking site where you can discuss blue backgrounds Which was absolutely a running joke at that point But it really does kind of prove the point to me that like it really is not about when you're trying to get people interested in things It's not about what they actually learn at that first experience It really is all about all those other pieces of things all the irrational pieces of things of human psychology to really get them interested in something and I just want to I want to turn it over to some other people to just talk about anything that they think I like I missed and then We're all here to answer questions for a little bit But I did just want to add as a very last parting thought like how many people here thought that they would be interested in crème brûlée before seeing you know Osmond talk about his like adventures in engineering that shit out of crème brûlée, right? That is exactly the sort of experience that we want to give students as well And so when you're trying not just students I mean again, whether it's your your non-technical manager Whether it's your family members who don't understand what you do whether it's you know a politician like whoever it is We need to get more people interested in this and the way that we do this is often not through the traditional methods It's through understanding human psychology all the little flaws of it and finding ways around those flaws to get them interested So with that it do you guys have anything else that you think we should talk about or that I missed and then also Anyone else has any questions feel free to yell them out Yeah, so I have kind of a side point just on that last point Tyler made We will often have students from varying sorts of educational backgrounds in computer science So some have taken say AP computer science and not done anything apart from that So sometimes we get students who know, you know for loops and objects, but they haven't really done anything fun And so even though, you know, we focused a lot on that more beginner-oriented stuff We're really able to connect with a wide range of students and really get them interested in it in a way that they Wouldn't have imagined before coming to a code day I think sort of at the end of the day or regardless of your skill level of regardless of what you're pursuing the Principle to accomplishing something that's difficult is motivation and drive do that so code day instead of Following the traditional school-based classroom setting, which is clearly an effective method of teaching CS where you just slam textbooks and Standard libraries and people's face we instead try to sort of build positive memories that you associate with coding So when you hear like the word coding or you see code you think oh, man 12 a.m. Singing karaoke drinking Mountain Dew with my friends At this crazy event you don't think of just like letters on your screen You think of like some kind of positive memory and that drives you to do to do more and it instead of just teaching students The raw materials or resources you need for programming It gives you sort of like the drive and motivation to pursue your passions through code Yeah, so being in high school has given me kind of a unique perspective on the issue And I think the biggest problem is just that the way that APCS classes are taught makes it makes coding into more of a standardized Kind of curriculum than an actual fun experience So for example, there are big tests which force you to recall like standard library methods And the reason that that's so bad isn't even because they memorize those They have to memorize those methods but because students often just start to think of coding as like this pedantic school activity That I have to just just like memorize and then after the test it's over So I think that a really cool thing about code day as we show them. Yes, that's one side of coding But there's this also this really cool awesome fun the creative side where you code something and you instantly see feedback And you can make like little shapes move and that's what really kind of shows students that you know This is actually something that I might want to pursue and that's ultimately our goal Let's see another thing I'd like to talk about is kind of another side of code day more for the volunteers and mentors at the last one I helped facilitate in Bellevue T-Mobile I went ahead and make An app to coordinate interactions between the on-premises mentors that we got to come and all of the students I wanted to lower the barrier as much as possible for any of the participants to feel comfortable reaching out to people What I've seen in the past is since frequently they're they're often young and Still building confidence in this subject the odds of them reaching out to somebody for a problem. They have It happens But if that's not maybe the person that can give them the right direction They're looking for the odds of them doing it again is very small That's a that's a really really really key point to remember when I said programming experts like it's really daunting to talk to someone who To you is like an absolute expert in the field and you're just this total newcomer. It's super daunting. So yeah, that's super important And I've been doing this long enough that I kind of came in earlier kind of more relating to the rest of the students And now being at the other side of the table Seeing this other perspective and having friends and peers I've made along the way Who I see are kind of in different places and a story I really like from the last coat day where I had this app So essentially really quick in five seconds They could just see everybody on there and request their help they'd get a text message and come and I got as many people as I Possibly could to register as a mentor and one of my favorite Bits of feedback I heard were people who didn't realize how much they had to teach and give back And I think that that was a great opportunity Out of code date for people to really get familiar with networking and build that skill as well Thank you. I'm not sure. Sure. Was that it cool? Okay. Um, so why we're gonna kind of wrap up because I want to get to questions so I kind of have one last point so Just in general what I've learned over the past three and a half years is really if something isn't working Then you just have to figure out how to do it better and how to do it successfully so in teaching students if They're disengaged then really just try to change up your methods in a way that you think will be more successful and Keep doing it until you find something that is successful and roll with that. Yeah, that's it's a really good point And I did want to add just as I forgot to put a summary slide off and I was gonna do that and I didn't the key takeaways again are just Find something that is a existing interest and find a way that coding relates to it and start there Make it really fast and easy for them to build something initially so that they have a place to start from and make sure that they have a Positive experience at the end and make sure that you don't come across as a super Intense expert that knows everything and that they could never possibly approach So that any questions for for us that we can answer. Yeah Yeah, so tickets are $10. That's actually something I didn't talk about in this presentation. That's interesting tickets are $10 Almost everyone gets a promo code and it depends from city to city what almost everyone means But like in Arizona for example, we'll have 400 people at an event and like 13 of them will have paid So but that's actually one interesting thing when we used to run completely free events One of the things that we found was that Obviously a lot of people are not going to show up, but guess who if you actually broke it down by experience level More of the advanced people showed up and almost no total beginner showed up And my theory at least as to why that is is like they were just psyching themselves out on the morning of and there Was no reason for them to be there So even if they get a free ticket the fact that they felt like they paid for it by means of asking for the free ticket Or the fact that they felt like it had a $10 value Dramatically increase the number of people who who come and so at a at an event And you're like a really high-income area where we don't give out very many promo codes because it's just not an issue We usually have 90% of people show up at an event that we give out tons of promo codes It'll still be like 70% at an event where we marketed it as free Again, even an event where it was effectively free versus an event where we marketed it as free Marketed as free was like 40% and almost none of them were beginners Yeah Yeah, absolutely. So across the US it varies from city to city in general 68 or 69 percent of participants are from an underrepresented group I think it's 40 underrepresented in computer science. So I think it's about 41 percent people who identify as women 38 percent low-income students and 28 or 29 percent African-American or Latino Yeah, so it probably does I mostly whenever I'm talking about the statistics I'm mostly talking about beginners I could actually look into that if you're interested in the answer and I can put it up as like a blog post or something more Details on the statistics in general people usually don't come to kind of day more than two or three times And I think a lot of that is it is really focused on beginners and people start to cycle out really quickly like they start to get good at it and I think that there were tons of events that are great out there for people who are really experienced coders I think we could do a little bit better of a job of marketing of like providing for them at our events as well But like it's not our primary core focus and so like we usually don't focus as much on people who are returning I will say the other the key metric that we actually measure in terms of success though Is the percentage of people who are that the number of people who are beginners who say that they continued coding when we Asked them again two and a half or three months later So we do actually have about 70 percent of people who started out without an intent to pursue computer science Are still working on a project outside of school work two and a half or three months later That doesn't mean that they'll pursue it professionally or anything like that But it does mean like they are still at least taking it seriously by and large and Some of those demographic numbers can also vary city by city. So I know like my event in Boca Raton ended up being like 80 percent men one time and you know three times in a row after that was like 60 percent women Yeah, so it really it really does depend as well same with low-income or other demographics Mostly high school we've been trying to work with middle school a little bit more Middle school students are interesting. They're often a lot more excitable But they which is a good thing But they're often a lot more excitable Which is a bad thing at 10 at 12 midnight when everyone else wants to kind of like just chill out and like either work on Their project or sleep and the middle school students are at one point We had these weird inflatable hammers as swag and like the middle school students were literally one of the middle school students Was literally running up to a wall and hitting it with the hammer for like over 20 minutes So that's actually been saying we've been kind of trying to figure out where the balance is there We mostly work with high school students middle school students It's usually a little bit easier because they don't have as many preconceptions So it's a little bit easier to kind of change their mind High school students a little bit harder, but you know, that's kind of that's where we started out And we're kind of working the other way might have been better to start with middle school students For elementary school age kids elementary school age kids It's it's still very much the same if they have an existing interest like this is what we found But we do have some elementary school age students who come If they have an existing interest in something Trying to get them interested through that through the lens of that existing interest as much as possible Even if it's just a TV show they like Showing them how to make a video game based on that TV show a big one that I see as well for younger students Is they seem to be into games like Minecraft or Roblox or things like that all those have modding kits I'm gonna have actually seen 10 year olds who don't know much at all about programming Coming into it like they really don't have any experience who just through sheer force of will Managed to learn Lua, which I think is what Roblox uses as their modding engine Not very not very well, and it was not very much But the fact that they loved Roblox so much which by the way I've never played Roblox is really weird to watch whatever was going on on the screen Through sheer force of will if they really like something Especially the younger students seem a lot more driven even to you know They take less coaxing as long as you find the thing that they want to do the other thing with younger students Is they spend more time slacking off you kind of have to be okay with that The nice thing about an event like code is we kind of have this arbitrary deadline of like you're gonna present something tomorrow Like everyone presents and that's part of it It's like everyone presents almost no one goes home, and if you're there We're gonna encourage you to present and you're gonna find something to present another thing is that For middle schoolers, especially one thing that I found that works well at my event and some other ones is that We so we run code day simultaneously throughout the country So we'll have like 20 30 cities all having a code day at the same time and Sometimes some sort of meme like things will pop up within that culture And so for example We had a Twitter war between Boca Raton and Chicago a while back and that really engaged a lot of the middle schoolers who really enjoyed that sort of competition aspect of just spamming Twitter with memes Yeah, we actually we teach a We have a cybersecurity like CTF and it has questions everything from like really complex questions that people have not ever gotten to Fish this person like here's a link if they click the link It will it will send you the flag over your email to Like take a picture of you of like draw a picture of the person organizing your event in Microsoft paint And that's one of those things as well that really kind of draws the students in because they feel like they can they can collaborate and that That's like another super popular one and it actually has That was sort of presented through one of our sponsors who wanted to get more people interested in cyber security Splunk and They it actually has increased the number of people dramatically that I've talked to who are interested in cybersecurity as well and say some of the surveys We've sent out Yeah Where do you live? Bremerton um talked to us basically like send me an email. I'm the executive director. So I run code a sort of all across the US Send me an email. There's a link on our website or my email address is right up there Again, we run them all across the US on the same day And so the next one is actually not until November because schools aren't in session over the summer So November, I think 10th the 11th is the next one. We do them three times a year seasonally We tried to do them more frequently once and it was like way too intense Does the Portland region one still happen in Hillsborough from time to time Portland has not for a while because we don't have any Volunteers from Portland anymore. So if anyone's interested in volunteering for Portland, that's actually what I'd like to get started again It hasn't for I think about a year and a half Any questions cool. Thank you all for coming