 Hello, my name is Ishaan Singh. I'm 15 years old and I started coding at the age of around 7 or 8 and I want to talk about how this isn't as impressive as many people think it is and how you can get more kids to do this sort of thing with Pi Arduino or what I like to call the combination of Python and Arduinos. Most of you might be familiar with Arduinos, but just in case you aren't, Arduinos are electronic boards on which there are a small microcontroller which you can use to control different inputs and outputs such as motors or LEDs or other sorts of things. You can use them to create complex robots or you can use them to create fun simple things as well. The main thing is that they are programmed in C++ or a modified version of C++ most of the time. Here is me winning GCI which is a Google coding competition. Here is me at age 11 desperately trying to convince a room of adults that my Arduino project is worth something which is identical to what I'm doing right now so I guess nothing much has changed. I want to talk about how my dad tried to get me into coding which was on this train, the Doronto Express. I still have scarred memories of that train because of this. He tried to show me his fintech level enterprise Java code to try to get me interested in what this even was and his thought process was a little sane I guess. It was about oh it's so cryptic maybe I could get interested in that just from how confusing it is but it just doesn't work that way. You need to introduce at a simpler level. So the next thing my dad tried was using scratch but the problem with scratch is it goes in the opposite direction. It's too simple for its own good. You always seem to treat it as a toy rather than see the expanded possibilities that can be done using this kind of technology. So my solution was PyFarmata. When he got me into the Arduino I used C++ which was fine for me but to get even younger kids into it I think this is the way to do it. What I mean by my solution is I use this in order to teach kids in my city Pune in part of multiple workshops comprising ranges from as young as 6 to as high as 11 or 12 to teach them the basics of the Arduino and to get them really excited. We use a library called PyFarmata and PyFarmata is basically disguising itself as if you're putting code onto the Arduino when in fact there is code already loaded onto the Arduino which and the Python code is simply communicating with the Arduino in order to achieve its goals. And this is real Python code. It has imports, it has while loops, it has objects, it has if statements, you know, all that stuff. It has the advantage of being not too simple like scratch. It has real syntactical mistakes that you can make. It has real advanced concepts that you can teach the children using simple things that they can easily understand like objects using real LEDs or real piezos and stuff like that. And I think the main thing for me is that just the simple thing of a blinking LED on an Arduino with a simple kind of circuit will just make kids infinitely more excited than a blank blinking cursor. Fundamentally, for me, it seems like there is a physical interaction that makes younger kids especially very, very interested. For me, the proof is in the pudding mostly. These are some photos from our workshops and you can see that they are pretty engaged with the circuits, with coding and they see the kind of infinite possibilities that are there in this kind of thing. Many of them come back to me and come up with outlandish ideas for what they can do with this. Somebody came up with an automatic chess playing robot and this kid was six. He had never been exposed to Google's chess playing, AI or anything like that. He came up with this idea knowing only this kind of very, very simple physical interactions are possible. So somebody else came up to me. He was eight and he talked about talking solar system project that he had already built a solar system model and he wanted to make it so that if you pressed buttons on the planets that the Arduino would talk to you. It would actually say something. We had introduced him to speakers like 12 seconds ago and he came up with this idea. So I just wanted to just think about this. If you're trying to introduce your kids into programming, it's not to say that if you're a programmer, your kids have to be a programmer, but in this day and age, it's especially important. So yeah, if you want to contact me for whatever reason, you can message me on Reddit or email me. Thank you very much.