 I am a professor at Drexel and as a professor I like to think about really big questions and really big things So I'm gonna start with one which is what great things could a computationally literate society do What I mean by that is what if every single person or almost every person you knew could program and use Programming to express themselves personally to engage in in civic action. What would that be like? We don't know Because that's not the case and in fact before people could read and write We didn't know what a computer what a you know literate society could do and it turns out really great things So in my research group we try to develop tools that help spread computation So where do we start? Traditional literacy starts when you're very young you're surrounded by books stories words that are built universes that are built with words and images and This starts at a very young age today. We have something an Analogy to this that is computationally based The web is a new kind of universe of Stories and it's not just built with words and images There are data and videos and visualizations and all kinds of rich computational underpinnings here That we're not usually exposed to we don't usually pull back the covers and see those things All right, so my my research group wanted to enable people to build beautiful things and Expose them to somehow that works and that's what I'm going to tell you about today So our goals for this new tool were actually to target storytelling and digital journalism We wanted to enable people to make immersive interactive bespoke content And we wanted this tool to be an on ramp for computational skills So so when you encounter programming later, maybe you'd be a little bit better prepared So our design principles were to make code make sense We want to expose people to a little bit of HTML a little bit of CSS We don't want to get in the way, so we want to embed tools in existing workflows and ecosystems And we wanted you know to support composition help people make beautiful things on the web Not just computational things So our our inspiration here was if you remember the snowfall article in the New York Times in 2012 a Lot of people noticed that because it was gorgeous. And so You can see this is the sort of the the The splash with the blowing snow and it immediately engages you in this world of Where this avalanche happened this news story and if you look at the whole article This isn't actually the whole article. It's kind of condensed a little bit, but you can see that You can't see it so well in a static image But as you were scrolling through these images were responsive the videos were responsive And you can imagine that this is a very complex kind of article to put together For someone who's a beginner or who hasn't got a whole lot of background in in web development But when you pull it apart you can see that actually what we've got here is a bunch of building blocks that taken one by one are not that overwhelming and So what we did was created a tool that would help people take this step-by-step Building block approach to building complex content and that's where snowball comes in and so I'm going to show you a fairly brief Illustration like 90 seconds or something like that of just a couple of things that snowball can do and Of course, please do go and try it out on your own So this is your standard WordPress installation. You'll see that on the left. It has is my video going. Let's see. Ah There we go. Okay, so it's not working on my screen. That's why so here I've created a new post Welcome to Saturday morning and by the way Congratulations on being here So we scroll down we see we've got all these building blocks that we can use these are our basic ones. There are also Social media we've got some different kinds of data that can visualizations that can be about it I can't see very well, so I'm not sure what I'm thinking over there, but we've got a splash screen We added a splash block It's pre-populated with the name of the of the post. I'm selecting the background image I'm sorry. Yeah, I am selecting a background image my text no longer can show up So I turn it white and so you can see that there are some very basic kinds of Design features that you can use as you are building here's a text block You're going to be able to dive into that code the underlying code the CSS Window down there. I'm typing in to turn the text a different color. I've turned it teal I can also go back and you know turn it red and I immediately see the feedback So if the tool doesn't give you the ability to express something the way you want to you can go in there and start Monkeying with it But you can also do something straight out of the box So the hope is that this gives people the right hooks to start developing more computationally intensive posts Okay, so here is a nice little data presentation a chloro chloropleth This is the Pikachu population Everyone knows that Pennsylvania hunted Pikachu nearly to extinction So we lower that and you'll see up in the map that Pennsylvania now the population is Represented by a lighter color so you can kind of play with these data visualizations integrate them into your posts This is what we just created, you know, it's it's fairly fairly rough But you can imagine that you can create very complex and engaging posts with a tool like this So that is the basics for snowball With this is an ongoing project. We're actually collaborating with Mozilla foundation They have some similar kinds of projects that are seeking to engage people in building the web And in doing so create a population that is able to express themselves computationally and with more sophistication increasingly more sophistication as more and more people move online and we're conducting studies to measure computational skills and understanding that go with creating content like this and becoming better able to to engage with the Possibilities of expression on the web so When you give people the right tools to think with they can think in new ways And I just want to encourage everyone in this room because I think we're all designers and technologists as we develop the platforms That enable people to connect and communicate We're building the platforms on which they are doing really important human things So we were developing for journalists, but you're out there developing for whoever you're developing for and Designing for students and whoever that might be So think about the fact that your tools are enabling them to think in new in different ways And it brings a new perspective to the kind of work that you're already doing I can I can almost guarantee it so So that's only eight minutes But I'm going to leave you for at least a moment with the contact information for my research group and give specific call out to Tom Park who's sitting right up here. He's the developer of snowball and the project lead And we had some wonderful Drexel students secret and Brian who also worked on this So please feel free to contact us in the future if you have any questions and And I'm going to go ahead and switch this over for our next presenter