 Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar. We're really excited to have you here today. And you should be seeing our screen right now. We're really excited that you are taking time out of your busy day in your classroom to join us and learn a little bit more about how to build an app. I'm Angela, and I lead the community team here at CSON. What that means is I get to work with teachers all around the world, like your teacher. And make sure that they feel excited and confident and supported when they start in UCSOP. I was also a kindergarten teacher for 15 years. So a special wave out to all my kindergarten friends that are watching and listening today. I also am a mom and have two kids that are in third grade and sixth grade. And I usually work from my house in Minnesota. I'm in San Francisco right now. So let's talk about what we are going to learn about today. We're going to get to meet Adrienne here in just a moment. And we are going to learn the steps for building an app. Now we kind of made it a little bit simple today when we explain this. And then we're going to take time to answer your questions. That's what we're very excited about. So Adrienne, welcome. Tell us a little bit about you. Hi everyone. I'm so excited to be here today. I'm one of the people who started CSOP from the very beginning. And I grew up in Texas. I grew up in Houston. And when I was in school, I studied art and I also studied computer science. And today I live in San Francisco, California. And you may see a map like this hanging somewhere in your classroom. As most of you know, it's a map of the United States. But I thought it would be helpful to point out exactly where CSOP is located. And if you look at that big red arrow, it's pointing to San Francisco, which is right there on the West Coast. So let's zoom in a little more and look at the CSOP office and where we're located. This is a picture you may recognize, even if you've never been to San Francisco, of a little bit of what San Francisco looks like maybe from a TV show or a movie. And then if we get even closer, we see the building that CSOP's located in. And we're in downtown San Francisco. And we have an office on the seventh floor of this building. This is a little bit of what our office looks like. This is where we all gather together and have lunch each day, sort of like your cafeteria and your school. And we also then have space of where we have our desks. So this is what my desk looks like. And you can see that one of the big things on my desk is a computer. And that really brings us back to what we're talking about today. And computers really are everywhere we look and everything that we interact with probably has some connection to a computer. So even things that don't seem like they're computers, like traffic lights for instance, are controlled by computers. Microwaves even have computers. So if you ever warm something up in your home or you make yourself some tea or something like that, you're actually using a computer. Anything that has a display that looks like Sonic probably has a computer. If you've ever taken a flight on an airplane or you've seen an airplane before, they are all computer controlled. In fact, many times they fly themselves unless someone actually takes over control of the airplane. And I'm sure many of you have played video games and video games are fundamentally computers inside. So computers really are everywhere we look. The other thing is that computers are used by almost every kind of job. Even some jobs that you might not normally think about using computers very much. So for instance, if you go to the doctor because you're not feeling well, they may look up information about you using a computer or research a problem you're having using a computer. Of course, your teacher uses a computer and creative people use computers too. So if you ever watch an animated movie or you play a video game, there are artists that use computers to make those paintings and graphics. If you wanna go into space, you have to use a computer. There's no other way to calculate how a rocket should launch and how you should get into orbit in the right ways without a computer. And even for someone who's writing a book or an athlete who's trying to train, they are all using a computer to get better at whatever they're working at. So let's talk a little bit more about apps now. Why do we even need apps? The topic of this is building an app. But what is the purpose of an app? And the real purpose is that often computers are really hard to use. Computers are good at what they do, but not necessarily at what you want them to do. So the app is a kind of bridge between what the computer can do and what you can do. So the goal when building an app is to really make a computer easier for a person to use. So let's talk about the steps and we're gonna go through five steps. The first step is to think about what you even wanna do with this app. So here are a couple of examples. If you want to make a game so people can have fun, that's one kind of app you can build. Sometimes though you wanna build a different kind of app that's not so much about having fun, it's about helping people solve a problem. Like maybe you wanna make a calculator and you want to help people solve math problems. So that's a different kind of app. Once you've figured out what you'd like to do, you get to do this really fun part of the project that involves using your imagination and also learning from the world around you so you can draw ideas. You can think about all the things you could do. This is really where you get to go a little bit crazy and just think about even the wildest stuff that you didn't think is even possible. But you're trying to come up with great ideas and then you also look at people around you and say, hey, can someone help me with this or can I learn something from them? So I have more ideas. Okay, so this side that would be fun to go back and take a look at the very, very early drawings that we did for CSAW. The original code name for CSAW was P2. And the way we talked about it at that time was a visual journal for the classroom. This is what it looked like. It doesn't look like, CSAW doesn't look like this anymore. But all it could do, all you could do was post a photo or select a photo from the camera roll and post it into your journal. And that's really a good indication of where to start because you wanna start somewhere simple. You don't wanna get too complicated too quickly. Once you figure out what you wanna do, the next step is to tell the computer what to do. So let's talk a little bit about how that works. You probably know a little bit about reading and you can explain how you can read to a friend and they can then have information that they didn't have before because you've shared it with them. Computers don't read English but they do read something called code. And this is what code looks like. So it's the same kind of thing that you were gonna write something just like you'd write a book. But instead of writing a book, you're gonna write it in computer code and the computer is gonna read it and then it's gonna do things for you. So this is some of the code that's actually in the CSAW just to give you an idea of what it looks like. The cool thing about writing code is you get to tell the computer what to do. You get to be the boss of the computer and the computer will do whatever you want it to do but it will do exactly what you want to do which sometimes you realize isn't exactly what you actually wanted it to do. So let's talk a little bit about some of the things that computers are good at and some of the things that they're not as good at. So they're great at math. They can calculate numbers really quickly and they're really good at searching for words. So if you wanna look a word up in a dictionary, a computer can do that much, much faster than a human ever can. But there's some things that computers are not good at. One is being creative. Computers do not have an imagination. So that is something you're gonna have to count on yourself. And another is really understanding what's important to a person. So one of the things that you can do when you're thinking about your app is ask questions about what does a person want, not what does the computer want or what can the computer do. Okay, so let's recap for just a second. First three steps. Think about what problem you wanna solve. Come up with a plan, come up with ideas of how you might solve that problem and then tell the computer what to do in the language that the computer understands which is called code. Now, it may seem like we're done. We've told the computer what to do, right? We can just go home and enjoy our new app. Unfortunately, usually things don't work quite as well as we originally anticipated. So here's an example of something that we did in CSOT that early on, the way you connected to your class was typing in a special code. And we found out that this was just too hard when we tested it. Writing a code, a lot of people got the code wrong, it was easy to lose or forget and we ended up using this QR code instead, which is probably how many of you connect to CSOT today. And that came through testing, we didn't know that originally. The last step is after you've built your app and you've tested it, you need to actually get it out to real people so they can use it. And that's where you share it with anyone that you can think of. And hopefully if they like the app, they share it with their friends or their colleagues and can then have more and more people using your app. This is what CSOT looked like when we actually launched publicly. A little more complicated than those drawings I showed earlier, but still not as much features or not as many features as we have today. Exactly. Well, we have a few more minutes left and we've talked about all sorts of things. That was really fast though, right? So that gives you an idea of how to start thinking about building an app. And what we're gonna do right now is if you can hear me, tap your shoulders and then turn your body towards your teacher because we're gonna give you about 30 seconds to have your teacher maybe type in a question that you would like us to answer. And we will have maybe time to answer three, maybe four questions from some of the students that are listening live here today. So go ahead and we're gonna give you about 30 seconds. We'll play a little bit of music to share some ideas with your teacher and they'll type it on the screen to us. Hey, so lots of people have questions and we're actually gonna start with Ms. Garcia Smith's class in Illinois, right? And this question comes from Daniel. Daniel wants to know how many times did you have to test your code to get something right? This is a great question, Daniel, many, many times. In fact, there's still some things that we haven't gotten right. So things get better, code gets better over time but it's never perfect. All code has bugs. And so you try to make it better over time but you're always testing, you never stop. That's a great question. So then I wanna say hello to Ms. Newerhead's class and they're asking why did you wanna create the app CSOP? That's a great question. So we actually came up with the idea for creating CSOP by talking to teachers and hearing about some of the problems they had in their classrooms and then being excited about trying to come up with new ways to make a classroom work a little bit better. And it was both from hearing questions from teachers and also thinking about our own experience in school and what we wished we would have had that we didn't have and wanting to create that for the classroom. So those are really the two places CSOP came from. So Ms. McDonald's class wants to know how did you learn the code? That's another great question. So I've always been interested in computers but it took me a long time to learn how to code and usually the way I learned how to code was just trying something myself and not being afraid to get it wrong. It's really hard to actually break a computer and so I would encourage you to just try stuff out and see if you can learn how to make a little webpage or how to write a little program or use code.org whatever is most interesting to you just jump in and don't worry about getting it wrong. I got it wrong many times but through that process you learn how to get better. So it's just keeping trying over and over until you start to figure out how to get it to do what you want it to do. And don't give up. That's a big one. Don't give up. Definitely don't give up. Ms. Gass' class wants to know how long did it take to make CSOP? That's another great question. So the very first version of CSOP I think took us about six months to make but we really think about CSOP as something that we're continually improving. It's not something that's done and it's something that we've been working on now for four years or so and we continue to be excited to work on it and make it even better. So we're gonna have one more question live and then we have a couple of more things we wanna share before. We have to say goodbye for today so we love that you've all joined us but Ms. Ferris' class wants to know how do you make the picture icons on CSOP? That's another great question. So if you see all the pictures in an app and I think it's important to realize that that's something that you don't usually do in coding. Usually you use a different program that's good at making pictures. Sometimes it's called a graphics program or a painting program and you can then imagine a picture you want and then draw it out on the screen maybe like some of you already do in CSOP and that's how we make the icon. So exactly what you're doing in CSOP is very similar to how we make the icons for the app. We just use slightly different software. And what's actually really cool I'm so glad that you asked that question because we have a little creation activity for you actually and your teacher can find this right in CSOP in the activity library and it's called create the next CSOP class icon. So we are really excited because what we're gonna do is let you design and create just like Adrian has been talking about how he does that every day at CSOP but you can take your ideas and do some planning and make a CSOP class icon. And then your teacher can actually share that with us using the hashtag CSOP coders and we're actually gonna pick three people that kind of we would like to use their design make that come to life inside CSOP. So this is a great chance for you to do some creating and play around and we're really excited to see what you come up with. So you will see that right inside CSOP your teacher can for you and share it with you if that's something that works in your class but we wanna thank you for coming today. We are so excited that you spent time learning a little bit more about how to build an app and please make sure that you're sharing all of the great things that you're doing this week with us and we're excited to connect even more. Bye everyone. Bye, thank you so much.