 Welcome to my second ever EMF camp talk, I spoke here in 2012 on women in computing and they asked me to come back, but I didn't really want to talk about the women's stuff again, so I thought I'd talk about something else with a subtext of ranty women stuff just for fun. So this is a talk about working with school kids and trying to get school kids excited about computer science and about computing and about computational thinking and about coding and that kind of stuff. But before we go into any detail about that, I guess the question I should probably address is who am I to tell you about this stuff? There might be some school teachers in the room, there might be some people who know a lot more about this than me. So I thought I'd give a quick overview of the kinds of things I've done in this particular domain. So for about the last 10 years I've been doing stuff with schools outreach from my job as a lecturer in computer science. So it's part of the university's outreach mission to go into schools and engage with school kids. It's also, probably shouldn't talk about this as much, but it's also part of our marketing because if people go into schools and do a good show it's kind of advertised as the university and it's also huge fun. So I've been on the project Technocamps, which was a massive European project, we went into every school in Wales I think with that project. I had a much smaller project called Gows, which stands for get on with science and that was kind of fun, that involved doing all sorts of things with the local school. I'm a STEM ambassador so I work with schools in that way. I'm going to talk a bit more about that particular aspect later. I have this Android programming day which I wrote, which has been run I think about 200 times now. It's a creative commons workshop, you can just download it and run it if you want to do it. And I'm on this playful coding project which is looking across Europe at getting playful activities to engage kids with coding and with computation in a creative and kind of open and playful way. Finally, the one in the bottom, ARC, is the Aberystwyth Robotics Club, which is an after school club where we get nerds in and we build robots and then sometimes they fight the robots or sometimes they don't depend upon what kind of robot it is. And that picture at the top is of course me with my first computer. So right, that's who I am to tell you about this. I know quite a lot about computers, I know quite a lot about schools, I know quite a lot about doing stuff which is fun. So in order to convince you that this kind of activity is worthwhile, I think it's important to sort of take a step back and think about why would you even bother trying to engage kids with this kind of stuff? There's a sense in which computing is more embedded in the curriculum now, so schools are doing more of this stuff, but it's not necessarily done in the most entertaining or engaging way. And I think it's kind of important to see computing not just as a means of getting a better job, although that is obviously a motivation for a lot of people, but also as something that kind of gives you a cognitive toolkit for dealing with other kinds of problems. And this concept, computational thinking, was introduced by Jeanette Wing in a little article called computational thinking. You can find it in the communications of the ACM. It's actually really easy to read, it's only like three pages or something, but it blew my mind when I read it the first time. It's really concise, and it talks about how being computationally literate gives you a new toolkit for dealing with the world. So you approach problem solving in a different way. There's ideas of algorithms, there's ideas of sequences, there's ideas of control that you use when you're debugging a washing machine, as much as when you're debugging some code, yeah? The idea of sensors and responses and reactions and looping and scale and abstraction, all of these things are absolutely core to computing and computer science, and they're also core to science in general, and maybe it's just because I'm a bit of a nerd, but they're the kinds of concepts that I use in my everyday life as well. Not that I'm the kind of person that writes an algorithm for making a cup of tea, but you get the kind of idea, yeah? So computational thinking, if we don't teach our kids this stuff, then they're missing out on something that's actually really useful for them as a kind of way of interacting with the world. So that's reason one to do this, yeah? The second reason to do this is that computing is an inherently fun activity, and if you're teaching computing through the medium of spreadsheets, I think you might find that difficult to convince people of, but if you're teaching computing through the medium of something like Scratch, then actually there's some really cool fun things you can do with it. So I've made the huge mistake of clicking a link on a Windows machine. Oh, here we are. So this is a gallery of projects that were inspired by a visit to the Salvador Dali Museum, and they're just animations and they're just silly animations that enable you to play with the concepts of Dali's paintings and it's a kind of Dali hackathon that we did, but it's just, it's playful, it's interesting, it's exciting, it's artistic. It's nothing to do with spreadsheets, but the kinds of concepts that you're working with when you're doing this kind of stuff are the kinds of concepts that you can then later apply in different... Yeah, thanks for that. Okay. Right. So yeah, I had to borrow a laptop because my laptop's too old and the presentation stuff doesn't have a VGA connector and my laptop doesn't have anything else, so I'm not normally this technologically incompetent, I assure you. Okay, so computer science is fun, right? When you're programming, you're quite literally building things out of ideas and I can't think of anything more exciting than that when it works well or anything more frustrating than that when it doesn't work well, but unless people get the chance to try it, then they're not really going to be able to know the kind of people that would enjoy doing it. So we have to kind of show people the playful and creative side of these things. Having said that the whole getting a good job thing is not a major motivator, you don't have to be motivated by money to be concerned about the fact that the number of buckets of money that come in has got to be slightly larger than the number of buckets of money that go out, right? So the fact that computer science leads to a reasonably good job in many cases is a reason to try and push this in our schools, particularly with groups that don't necessarily engage with computing, which is going to bring me neatly on to my next slide where I stop and have a bit of a rant. I don't know what the gender ratio is at AMF camp, I haven't asked for the figures, but I'm going to guess it's about 20% women because it feels a bit better than normal for me just looking around the place and walking around the place, and computer science generally we're looking at 15%, and that's pants, particularly given the fact that computer science is a discipline that leads to good jobs, particularly given the fact that computer science is something that's fun, particularly given the fact that computer science is really creative and really exciting, but we're in a situation where girls just aren't getting involved, they're getting turned off it and they're getting turned off it really early. So that's the other reason, particularly women should be engaging with this stuff. You can't be what you can't see, so if everybody they kids see who's doing computing is a guy, then you're going to assume that computing is something that's done by guys. So I think it's kind of important to kind of encourage the kids to think about doing this really quite fun and exciting thing because it might get them money, it might get them a rewarding job, but it might not be for them, but at the moment they're not even getting the chance to see whether it's for them. So that's my kind of why. The next bit of this talk is a kind of section which I think of as how, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to run through some different types of engagement activity that I do and then talk about the pros and cons of each one with regard to getting the kids on board. So the first thing I want to talk about is the Aberystwyth Robotics Club. The Aberystwyth Robotics Club is an after-school club for kids from the local secondary schools. We take kids from 11 and we've got a group of beginners and we've got a group of advanced kids, and this is a set of the beginners with some of our student ambassadors. The two students you can see, three students you can see standing there, are all undergraduates with us who help out in the club, so they get quite a lot out of it as well. We have a kind of project-based approach for the little ones, so the 11-12-year-olds follow a kind of curriculum and the older kids do whatever they want. So the robots the little ones we're building are these little, we call them magician chassis because that's the maker of the chassis, and they've got a scoop on the front which lifts up and down with an actuator and they've got motors and they decorate themselves with googly eyes because everything looks better with googly eyes. The aim is to do a little robot course and you lift up the scoop and everything. It's all about building it, programming it, designing it, decorating it, painting it pink, that kind of stuff. So that's the newbies. The advanced kids, they basically do what they want. So this is a Cyberman head that someone got from a garage sale or a boot sale or something, and it's got some neopixel eyes that change colour depending upon how close things are. It's got a raspberry pie with a pie cam and you can see the blue thing on the screen behind it is the view from inside the Cyberman's head and we're going to get face recognition. We've got the face recognition working and they've got a voice changing thing and they've recorded some Cyberman voices. So you'll walk up to it and it'll do a Cyberman voice if it sees your face, which is for a 14-year-old apparently really exciting. Other projects, we've got Joseph, the Technicolor 3D printed robot. His arm's fallen off, it's on the table next to him. I don't know if you can see there's a sort of model's head with some glasses, those are ultrasonic glasses for the blind. A couple of 15-year-old boys are building where they tell the distance and play sounds in your ears to see which one's further off nearer, so that's kind of cool as well. So that's a robot club and it's brilliant, it's exciting, it's probably the best two hours of my week. Most weeks, don't tell my husband. But the thing is, you see, we wanted to get a lot of newbies in September, so I said I want 50-50. I said I want 10 girls, I want 10 boys. That for me is the perfect gender ratio for a robotics club. So we went into all the local schools and it wasn't me going into the local schools because I'm aware that I'm not the most girly of girls. We got Katie, she's a third year physics student. She's a proper super robotics person and she's also very, very good at being girly. She was the one that went in and she said we want 10 boys, we want 10 girls and we want everybody to apply and you're filling the form and everything. At the end of the recruitment phase we had, I think, 26 guys and three girls. So we went for 10 boys and three girls because that would be better than making the ratio even more skewed. Why? These are 11-year-olds. Why are they put off so early? How does this happen? I think this is kind of like code clubs, yeah? You quite often get this with code clubs as well. What you've got going on with clubs in general is that they're massive fun to run and for someone like me who's a proper nerd it's really good fun to be with other people who are young and just finding this stuff out and it doesn't really matter if they're boys or girls, really. You have really high impact on some kids. The 30 kids who come to a robot club they are learning so much so quickly and you wouldn't believe how quickly an 11-year-old can pick things up if they've got an individual undergraduate helper seeing next to them. They just race ahead. But you're only ever dealing with the ones that are already keen, yeah? You're dealing with people who are already part of the in-club and getting the girls in. We've really worked at that this year and we haven't succeeded. So that's my thought about engaging through clubs. I'm going to continue doing it because the impact on the kids that you work with are great and it's just so fun. But I don't have a solution to the girls' problem with that one. So the next type of engagement I want to talk about is the kind of family event. So I do quite a few kind of family events where we've got, we get people in on a Saturday and it's a coding family fun day or it's a family robot day and we get big brothers and little sisters and mothers and sons and all sorts. So we have got an Android programming one and we've got a robotics one, like a Lego robots one. And what happens is that the parents come in with the kids and they spend the whole day there and we involve the parents in the activities to a certain extent. So for the robot one we actually get the kids to write a program to program a humanoid robot to follow an assault path and then we tell the parents that they are the humanoid robot but they haven't got any eyes. So the kids get to sort of program their parents and walk around the room blindfold which kind of works quite nicely as a kind of exciting activity that makes parents trip up. And I think these kinds of activity are slightly more slightly more useful from a kind of outreach perspective because they're really fun to run but perhaps most importantly you might change the parental perceptions of what computing is about and who does computing actually when you're thinking about who's going to be influencing the kids more if you can change the parents' minds about what a computer scientist looks like that's probably going to have more of an impact more broadly. It also gives parents something to do on a damp Saturday so after my Android programming workshop I bumped into one of the mums in Morrison's and she was like, she's still doing it, you know? She's still doing it. And she gets half an hour on a damp Saturday she's not watching YouTube, she's writing Android apps and you think that's kind of cool. So that kind of giving people the opportunity to work on things on their own after the event is also very useful. The cons of this kind of thing you don't always make super progress because you only ever do it for a day and a day means three hours really because you've got the setup and the install and the lunch break and the coffee break and the people turning up late and crowd control and somebody's laptop doesn't work and you're probably looking at three hours so you don't get a huge amount done and you are generally again you're looking at the keen ones you're looking at the people who have chosen to give up their Saturday to do this they're probably either fairly keen already or they've got keen parents so there's again you're probably not getting everybody who might be influenced in this particular situation but when we did the Ray Book Mindstorms Day down in Pembrokeshire in a church hall one of the mums ran in at the end of it and said he just said it was the best day of his life and I was like wow what does that say about anyway so I've only got one picture slide for this one because I've got hundreds of pictures of things that look just like this and what this picture is representing is actually going into schools and I haven't got a lot of pictures of going into schools because photos in schools very difficult to take got to get permission all that kind of stuff so I get lots of photos of screens but not necessarily of schools this is a workshop called you basically make a clock in scratch so they're programming the clock they've got to work out the angles it's got to go tick tick tick they can choose their own hands they can choose their own font for the number they can colour things in you get people with cars as hands it's a workshop that I did when nine year olds in the local primary school and what we did is we said we want to do do you want us to do a coding morning and they said yeah you can do all of this year so they had tech all morning so we went in and we had half the year in the first period and half the year in the second period so we had the whole of that particular cohort and that's one of the things you can do with schools that you can't do with specific events where you're inviting people in you can actually get everyone you know you're getting all the girls because you're getting all of the people so I do really I think schools, workshops and going into schools and doing that kind of just a couple of hours working through something with a whole class can be really valuable if you insist on seeing the whole class rather than a club you do get to see everyone obviously most schools are more than okay with people coming in to help out and are actually quite keen to have people come in particularly given the current emphasis on computing in the curriculum if you've got computing skills and you've got communication skills and you want to get involved it's perfectly plausible to contact your local school and ask them nicely in the UK DBS is a kind of major thing in order to go into a school you have to have a DBS check which means you've been checked against the criminal records bureau and everything getting a DBS check costs money but if you register as a STEM ambassador with STEMnet they'll sort it all out for you so that's a top tip if you want to go into schools register as a STEM ambassador they'll do the checking you'll get a STEM ambassador's ID card you'll get the proper paperwork and approach the school and say look I'm here as a STEM ambassador and the schools will know about this scheme and it's all about getting scientists and technologists into schools to help with curriculum enrichment stuff teacher engagement can be hard so quite often if you're in a school and you've got the whole class the teacher might decide to go off to another room yet they shouldn't do this because they should be in the class with you it's really good as when the teacher gets involved and then is able to run the activities themselves going on I've got a couple of teachers I work quite closely with who are able to actually carry on the workshops that we've been doing together on their own and that's brilliant but there are other schools I work with where I'll go in there and as soon as I turn up the teachers go and have a cup of coffee and obviously there's things for them to be getting on with but it would be really nice if there was a little bit of help with crowd control because most of my training regarding crowd control is to do with 21-year-olds had you calmed down a class of 9-year-olds if there's not a teacher there I don't know so yeah and you can't take as many photos but that's not really a downside so yeah last type of event I'm going to talk about is a kind of random selection of events and these are kind of doing outreach at displays and festivals and one-offs in schools and so on so these photos here are from the Eisteddford which is a big festival in Wales that I went to on Monday and we've got some VR glasses and we're showing kids a roller coaster on the surface of Mars which is kind of a cool thing to have and what you're looking at here is encouraging students encouraging kids to think of something exciting associating it with computing but you're probably only going to have them for like 5-10 minutes because they're just strolling through and they're going to stop and you've got to have something go wow for 5-10 minutes very different to having like a 15-week curriculum for the robot club or a 3-hour session when you go into a school so this is a shot from a really quite bonkers day called Pythagoras day where we took over the local museum with a whole set of different installations and all of the schools brought their people in to look at these installations in different ways that Pythagoras influenced things and this is actually a colleague of mine I can't take any credit from this I was just like holding stuff rather than designing it but they sent a high attitude balloon up with the local primary school with like Lego men in a little case that went up into space and took photographs and that's another one of those kind of really big high impact things that makes people go oh wow you could do that with computers you could see where it is and then it went out a signal and um this is um I was on holiday in Malawi and we went to the local school and said can we do something and they said yes and we turned up and they said you've got all of year 3 and year 5 which is all of the 15 year olds and all of the 13 year olds and I was like how many is that and they said 250 and we were like okay okay 250 people no computers at all so we did the program of robot with a blindfold exercise and that was kind of cool and that's not kind of that's kind of more like fun than influencing people to go into computing as a career but I think we probably gave them a session that they can remember if nothing else so I'm going to finish off and talk about a project that I've been working on of things that you guys if you want to go and do this stuff you can just pick it up and take it and it's called playful coding and I don't know can you see there's a map of Europe on that slide so this is a EU project that's coming to the end coming to an end at the end of August what a shame and getting new EU project is going to be complicated because but anyway this was very good I was very pleased we've done a lot of excellent work it would be great if we could continue I've visited three schools one private company in UK, France Spain, Italy, Romania and we were really closely together we picked up workshops that I'd written and they got run in Romania and in France and in Spain and we've run some workshops from Romania and Wales and we've fed back and basically there's about 20 workshops that have all been tried in four or five countries and they've been tested by lots of people and they've been in 80 different schools they've been run with about 4,000 different kids these are proper tried and tested activities and workshops that you can pick up and take and we wrote these all up in a book which you can download for free from the project website and it doesn't really read well it does really read like a book that's been written by 35 people with five different languages no six, no seven because there's Catalan but anyway it's not that bad but there's some useful stuff in there even if the prose is occasionally tortured so the general philosophy of the project and I had to put a picture of Seymol paper on this slide given that he sadly passed away just the other week is that we don't like learning to code initiatives which just give the code yeah and just upon skills for the workplace we think about this as something that's fun and exploratory, playful teachers and facilitators not ordering the kids what to do coding should be playful particularly if you're looking at younger kids particularly if you're looking at younger kids so in the last three minutes of the talk I'm going to give you three workshops that you can pick up and take away briefly describe them so the android fun day I've mentioned before this is a one day family workshop uses free software that's available online called App Inventor that comes out of MIT you can write apps with it you can get them on your phone you're not going to write the next Angry Birds but you might write something useful you might write a Pong game or something or a drawing package all these things are possible using App Inventor and we've run this with participants I think the youngest we had was six I think the oldest we had was probably 65 because we run it as a family day so you get grandparents and parents and aunties coming in and it's good fun you go from nothing to having an app on your phone and that kind of works as a real motivator for kids because the very act of having mobile is itself a motivator for a lot of children you want them to write an app that works on a computer program that works on a screen that works on a phone actually much more enticing this is one of the workshops that come from the Girona group from the early mastery project and the idea of this is you write an animation as a big group like a class animation and you get together and you write a story and then each little group animates a 30 second bit with the character coming in on the left of the screen and going out on the right of the screen your time it so that each one starts 30 seconds out of the other one and you put the laptops in a row and you end up with an animation where the character goes all the way across between the laptops and it works perfectly it's a simple idea but you get 30 kids collaborating on something that runs across 15 different screens and it really fits together and the other one I want to talk about is this one because we're probably going to run it as a national contest in Wales but the idea is you take a poem and you get the kids to basically make a pop video for a poem they write an animation where characters move around and highlight their stories and you do it for nursery rhymes or for poems or something and that's that so five o'clock on the dot this is the link to the resources playfulcoding.eu if you want to have a look at it there's a book to download there's feedback stuff if you're in the UK become a STEM ambassador they'll sort your DBS check and help you go into schools and encourage your daughters and your nieces and your female relatives to have a go because it might not be for them but if they don't have a go they won't know that and that's that hehehehehe