 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit London 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back to Excel London, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our one day coverage of AWS Summit London. theCUBE, we go out to the events, we extract the signal of the noise, and I have recruited a co-host, Theresa Carlson, who's a friend and vice president of the worldwide public sector at AWS, and we have a really special segment for you today. Anna Sargent is here, she's a computing teacher, and Charlotte, who's a student at Townley. Wait until you see what we have in store for you. Theresa, let's get it started. So first of all, welcome. Thanks so much for having me. Well, and I'm so thrilled to be your co-host. I just want to tell you that right now. That's a first for you, right? Yes, it is. It is like a key. I finally got one up on for you. Yeah, exactly, I get to be on theCUBE. Hi, John. So here's the deal. So you have this Get IT program. Tell us what that's all about, and then we'll get into it. Well, you know, we've talked about over the last few years just in general about skills, skills development, how critical it is and important for every age. And Get IT is really a continuation of what we're trying to do to create job skills around cloud computing at every age, especially in elementary and primary school years. So Get IT today, what you're going to see from both Charlotte and Anna is we did a competition. There was over 160 applicants, and it got netted down to 10 schools that came here today, and then we had two finalists, and then we deemed a winner, and they're going to get support and help, but also all these schools are going to get support and help. But it's really about the experience of them learning how do you utilize cloud computing in a real world application that actually matters to them, which can also equate to kind of social responsibility, which most of these young people really relate to because they want to do something that matters to them. Just tech for tech is not exciting, but tech for good is very exciting, and I think that's what you're going to hear about here. We love to talk about tech for good, and Anna, you're at the heart of this, so how did you get into this? How did you get this all started? Tell us your story. Well, my head teacher is quite an innovative person, and she's been in conversations with Amazon and Future Foundations, and they came to the school with the idea last year and invited the school to be part of the pilot program, and so the Amazon ambassadors delivered their presentation to the school in September, and as a team in the computing department, we got together and said, well, we think this is a great opportunity for girls in tech, so we actually rolled it out as an actual scheme of lessons. So the whole year eight, so that's 224 year eight students got together, they all were divided into groups of their own choice, and we gave them the outline or the brief, and said, you know, think of an app for good that would fulfill a social need in your community, so think about the community, and prepare a pitch, and we then set timelines and deadlines and helped them through the research, and obviously spoke to Amazon, came to the London offices as well, and spent some time with your colleagues in the London office, and you know, and then basically helped the girls pitch their final idea. So Charlotte, you got this prompt, essentially, and then you took it from there. Tell us a little bit about yourself and then how this all came about and what you guys did with that prompt. And today is your birthday, so happy birthday. Thank you. So basically, I'm 13 at the moment, but we've been doing this project in year eight, as Anna said, and basically, we were given the idea to make an app, and everyone was really excited initially, but we weren't too sure about what we wanted to make it on, and we were lucky enough to have the choice to choose whatever topic we wanted to make it on and kind of decide what cause we wanted to help and the solution to help it with. And then we were given loads of help with the Amazon ambassadors, and they really were like really kind and generous with all their help. They came to visit us and they watched our presentations, and it really gained our confidence because we presented to the class and in front of the teachers and Amazon ambassadors, and it's been really lovely because we've been able to gain skills that we didn't have before in computing, and it's gained our confidence, it's boosted it, and we've just become much more interested in STEM and computing. Charlotte, let me ask you, what was your application about and what inspired you for the application? So my app was called Positivamy, and we based it off of a mental health and kind of having a more positive outlook on life, and we decided to do that topic because we thought that it was really important to students to have a stress-free time in school and to have them always feeling stressed and under the weather because they have a lot of work or they're under-organized and stuff like that. So we believed that it was quite important to help people like that, so our features included like a planar, a mood tracker, and just other things to kind of keep you organized and happy throughout your school life. So I'm fascinated by the adoption of this approach, and were you always interested in STEM, or was it something that this catalyzed your interest in your colleagues? I was always interested in STEM, and in townally they promote it a lot. Okay. And they're very interested in like, because it's an all-girls school, we promote females and we try to make sure that girls are interested in all subjects, no matter what, and it's been quite nice, but I believe that it's kind of made me more interested in STEM with my classmates because we've had a fun experience, it's not just been doing computing, it's been having a fun experience, we've been designing our own thing that we're passionate about, so it's been really lovely in that sense. So, please, go ahead. Well, I was going to ask you, how did you bring it together as a group? What were kind of the core components that you worked on to bring the app together and then have the final that you got here today with? So we kind of thought of the idea first about mental health, that was kind of our starting point and then we developed it to what features we can include in the app. We made a mind map saying whatever features we wanted, what topics we wanted to cover and then we thought about the target audiences and they really helped us think about this in the boot camp that they hosted. It was really helpful because Amazon ambassadors came to each kind of app and they helped us with what we could include and how to build on that idea. So that helped us include the target audiences, the ages that we wanted to target our app towards and it kind of helped us with the general theme and how many features we wanted to include. Of course, you had time pressures, right? So you had to make some trade-offs. So how did you make those trade-offs? You just talked to the potential recipients of the app or sort of brain score? Yeah, we did a lot of surveys to what features people thought were the most important for our app and a lot of groups did that because there were a few different times that we needed to get it done by and every time we obviously had a time limit and so we needed to put the most important features in to our PowerPoints and our presentations and the prototypes and so we did surveys and people answered what features they thought were the most important to put in the app and then we implemented those before any other more unnecessary ones. How did you organize your team? How many pizzas did they eat? Yeah, did you hear about the two pizza team? Did Amazon talk to you about that? Amazon Web Services? That if you had more people on your team that feeds two pizzas, it's too many. Oh, because that way you can move faster. We mainly decided the team because we got to choose our friends to work with and obviously we worked better with the people who were more comfortable around so that was quite nice that we got to decide who we worked with but then the roles that we were given we kind of just decided on what each person knew the most about, wanted to do research on and then from there we kind of just carried on with the topics that we were initially started with. You told me something a while ago that really piqued my interest. You said you're an all girl school and you almost had to reverse engineer your gender because it was a little too pink. Can you talk about your thinking around a different kind of diversity? So basically we wanted to make the app like accept all beliefs and stuff so that was our main focus or diversity and we didn't really realize initially that it was mainly quite girly but then when we presented our initial presentation obviously we got through the first round where we presented to the class but then we got some feedback from Miss and she really helped us telling us that you know we want to make it unisex so that it's more approachable for all people and all students rather than just girls schools and then it would have more, not purchases but it would have more audience. Yeah, better adoption. But so what was that, what that involved? Was it colors? Was it language? Was it, what made it less girly? I mean it was more colors and like this whole theming of the app we made a logo that was quite, like not young but quite young and girly a bit and it was mainly the colors though we did like pink which is, I mean it's traditionally seen as girly, pink so we tried to make it, we searched up like unisex colors and it was more green, purple, blue, stuff like that so we implemented that into our app in the second round so that it was more unisex. Last time I interviewed you I had my pink tie and pink shirt on. Yeah, that's what I liked, I think that was good. I've got my unisex on too, that was my dream but one of the things that you did do that I really liked is you did the usability which you went out and you ask individuals what features would they like the most? I think that was really important and you could of course always do that with both boys and girls and figure outs but that was really smart. So let me ask you another question. One of the things that we do find with girls and something I've been passionate about is they don't get into STEM or technology and they don't stay there. After going through this experience, one, do you think you might be more inclined to stay with technology? And then I'd like to just know your opinion on how we can continue to forward this with girls after this experience, what else would you recommend? Yeah, so as I said earlier, Townley like promote STEM massively, they have STEM days and everything so the girls at our school, we are really interested in it. This project has really boosted my confidence and my interest in STEM though because it's, as I said, it's made it more fun. It's not only just doing the computing work, it's made it a fun way to do it and you're working for, you're targeting towards an achievement at the end to get that app made so everyone's trying really hard to get it done and that kind of gains your knowledge and then you learn all the new technology as you're going along so it's quite interesting. What are your thoughts on that Anna? I mean, we're always having this discussion on theCUBE. You look around this show, it's an amazing show first of all but there's a lot of men here, the line out the men's room is huge. So because in the male dominated industry, you look inside your own circles and your circles happen to be in other men so it's a challenge that we want to surface and be aware of, what would your recommendations be to break those barriers? To do the programs like this, to actually go into schools and encourage young people because I think by encouraging all young people, you know, you'll get the diversity and also the awareness, we're very subject driven in a way that our education system and actually a lot of the job roles out there we're in school, we're not aware of because we're busy teaching so it's great to actually come in and we think about app developers and we think about testers and we think about programmers but there's all the other aspects as well which actually unless industry comes into education and helps us show the students what the breadth of roles are out there, you know, it's very easy for students to just go into sort of like a very sort of set path. So by having programs like this coming into schools and having the industry come and talk to the students and inspire them is, you know, a fantastic opportunity hence the reason why we decided to run in the whole year eight, the program. And I've seen, like you saw today from all the groups but they kind of tech for good that the girls and the boys were able to actually decide on something that was meaningful to them and I've seen that a lot just around the world that when you go and talk to children about tech you've got to connect the dots and I think you guys did that really well in what you were doing with your particular application but across the board the things that we saw today which I think inspired them even more because it was the thing that they were passionate about which teaches them along the way. Yes, yes. So we love tech and I was introduced at age 12 with a C prompt and learn basic. Kids today you learn tech before you can speak you're punching devices but so what was the tech behind what you were doing? Were you programming? Were you using cloud technologies? What was behind it? We mainly use more simple technology and the most of the work was just making PowerPoint presentations and Word documents but obviously there were side things like we made the surveys on Word. We used Photoshop to make prototypes of the screens for the app and we learned a lot of technology at the bootcamp as well. We learned about the different kind of things we could use to make features of the app work and we learned about obviously Amazon were like the leaders of the program. You learned about S3 storage, right? You learned about EC2. You learned about all the applications in AWS that you could build it because at the end as you build it you'll use hopefully all those technologies is what we'll be helping you with. You know what I love about the story though is in Theresa you know this you can do almost anything with tech. Now sometimes it's too expensive or too complicated but the tech in many ways is the least important. It's more important to understand what the consumer wants what the customer wants, what that experience is like what the colors should be, right? And then you can make the tech apply the tech to solve that problem. 100% and put all those tools together but I do hope that you learned what cloud computing was during your because that was I always kind of joked because a lot of the students at the beginning they use it but they don't always know what cloud computing is. So kind of learning the scalability and how the ease and testing and just moving fast. So I think that's what you guys have done in a big way. From a teacher's point of view are there other aspects that you think that should be done like either continued or done even better or faster that we're not getting to? This is definitely a step in the right direction. We are a bit more traditional because we introduce the students to Python. So they sort of start programming using Python and perhaps we should look more at cloud technology in greater detail in schools. But we're kind of a little bit behind in terms of education in the way that we actually which we need and we need to speed that up. And this is one of the big things that we're trying to do on an AWS side is bring the new technologies into education because that is the highlight of what we see is they're still using kind of older outdated technologies and getting them excited to understand how they learn with and utilize new technologies within AWS and a cloud platform. Because you can move faster, experiment, have quick failures and recoveries and the expense is a lot less expensive than you normally did. Well I've been around a long time. The reason AWS changed the world and it changed it from a world where technology, especially information technology and enterprises was a world of no. We can't do that because it'll take too long, it's too expensive, no, no, no. And what Amazon has done is sort of removed all that friction and returned it into a world of yes, and builders and this is amazing what's happening. You are the future and it's really such a pleasure having you both today. Thank you. And Charlotte and of course Teresa. Thank you guys. It's an honor, I agree. It's an honor to co-host, but to have you guys and hear your passion and excitement for what you're doing. So my advice, keep it up, don't give up, stick with technology and STEM, you will not regret it, it's a great career. And have fun. All right, thanks again. Thank you. All right and thank you for watching. Keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. We're live from the Excel Center here at AWS Summit London. You're watching theCUBE.