 Wonderful. My name is Linda because I'm an author and illustrator a mediocre programmer and a business school dropout There's like a well-known secret about Scandinavian people. We tend to be the world's most self deprecating people ever So the only identity that I actually feel proud about saying is that I'm a business school dropout Everything else is kind of like in parentheses, but we'll get to all of those during this talk So I'm the person who organized the first ever rail skills. I'm not the co-founder of rail skills I'm the first person who ever organized it back in 2009 in Helsinki Finland where I wanted to find a group of like-minded women and Men who were excited about learning Software development and never ever in a million years would I imagine that I would end up being here in front of all of you That rail skills would end up happening in all over the world It all started as a small practical thing for for a group of friends in Helsinki But because internet is amazing People started to tweet about rail skills and that over there is DHH in 2009 and I remember printing out that like tweet I'm putting it on my wall I'm like, oh, this is the biggest moment in my life DHH is tweeting about our event and it led to other things happening For instance, there was this guy called Jason Ong that my some of you might know about and he called us and said that Hey, do you want to come to Singapore to organize a rail skills? Hello Kitty Singapore thingy and me and Karri Sarin and we had never been to Singapore before and we had no idea If this thing would ever work beyond like the group of friends that we had in Helsinki We had no budget for anything. We had no plan, but again, we had never been to Singapore So we said like sure, let's come over here And it is my amazing huge big pleasure to be back here after five years four years And my whole life has turned upside down since the last time I visited Singapore And so many other people's lives have changed and it's such a pleasure to be in front of you Today rail skills has been in over 230 cities everywhere from Amman to Australia from Belo Horizonte to Berlin It's all the local Ruby people the grassroots level organizations that want to drive the change to see a more diverse Ruby community and All of you coaches you do amazing Important work by donating your time and your expertise to the beginners and giving people that magical first experience in building software Thank you. Thank you so much for doing that My journey after starting rail skills, I went to New York to work for a local startup over there I was the 15th employee at Codecademy and grew to be 35 people It was a little less than a million users and a little over 24 million users when I left and you can imagine What happens in a company at that stage like things break and people break and companies break and it was one of the best but also one of the most exhilarating experiences in my life and I decided that I want to spend spend spend time with my family and and Be closer to them. I moved back to Helsinki, but you know after New York Helsinki is very small There was not much happening over in Helsinki And I had a lot of that startup zeal inside of me still just like that Let's change the world for the better and so forth But then I figured that maybe the most scalable change in the world doesn't happen inside of dating applications or or I don't know like food Search applications or stuff like that that New York was building maybe the most scalable change in life happens when you're five years old That if we can change the way a five-year-old sees the world We can change the entire world and that's when I decided that I'll become a children's book author and This was all a very noble and big Idea there was only three little problems at this point. First of all, I wasn't an author I had never written a book before I wasn't an illustrator I wasn't very good at drawing items and then finally I still considered myself to be a very mediocre programmer at this point I definitely didn't have a PhD in programming. I had no idea about early childhood development or anything like that But I figured that okay I'm gonna go this through step by step and drawing is in some ways mechanical repetition that if you make a thousand circles eventually the circles are gonna get better and I started my quest towards those Thousand circles and the first drawing that I found from our archives is this I'm four years old and I've made a Moomin house and this is kind of the level where I start from and Then I keep on drawing These are like from four or five years ago not very good yet, but I keep on drawing and The pictures are starting to get a little bit better And it helps tremendously that there's all these people around the world who send me back pictures of what they imagine Ruby looking like there's pictures from Taiwan and from Ukraine and and all over the place and I even get Plush toys from Bella horizontal and and slowly the pictures start to get better also there's has to be more of a narrative of a little girl and lost gems and Hidden father and and all of the friends that she meets like Linux the penguins who are really really damn efficient but really really hard to understand at times and and there is Snow leopard who's beautiful, but doesn't want to play with the other kids and and there's androids who are really messy and Hard to understand, but super friendly and when I like have be friends with everyone else and and foxes who are really ideal They stick and so on and so on so I started to have an idea of like what kind of a narrative I would have and I figured that maybe I could also teach something through these stories like the basics of Computational thinking like how to how to take a problem and and chop it into smaller pieces But it was still a very much an idea until I did something that was Probably like the best or the worst thing in my life. I put this project on Kickstarter and this was January 2014 and I thought that I would have like the Ruby parents I had like the mums and dads who had coached the railscoes like maybe they would support my project and This would be like a small side project and in the 30 days that the Kickstarter campaign was live It ended up ended up gathering three hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth of pre-orders and It's It's not an upload it was like I was crying at this point because this was still an idea This was not a full-fledged beautiful product that the people were backing And this is gonna be a story about everything that happens after this so Yeah, for the past year. I've been a children's book Author illustrator without actually being those things and I've almost been like Alice in Wonderland I took the red pill and fell deep deep deep down inside of the computer and I'm trying to crawl my bag Way back up and every one of you who thinks that ideas are born meaningful and resonant and beautiful Like ideas are born messy and sketchy and horrible and then the only way to like figure out what you're doing is by just keep Doing it drawing those thousand circles one by one This is the first version of what Ruby looked like I had like and as I said like I was getting better at the drawing And I had an inkling of an idea what I wanted to do This is the actual picture what that was on Kickstarter about the workbook session There's like book Sudoku my first error message Firefox is miss like some ideas But very like I'm embarrassed that that still exists today But what I've learned throughout this last year is that you can't go from here to here where you actually have a hundred and twenty pages of a Book like like a tested curriculum like a real thing without having the courage to put something like messy and horrible out there at first You don't go from here to here Unless you start from somewhere and I'm not gonna read this whole quote, but it's from ira glass this wonderful Chicago Public radio guy who says that nobody tells this to people who are beginners I wish wish someone told me all of us who do creative work we get into it because we have good taste But there is this gap for the first couple years you make stuff. It's just not that good. It's trying to be good It has potential, but it's not and so on and so on and Kind of this talk is about that gap about having an idea and coming to reality with it and sort of trying to Yeah, crawl your way out of the computer in a literal and not so literal ways so Last January my whole life turned upside down All of a sudden I wasn't doing a children's book for Ruby parents anymore I was doing a 15 or like a hundred or a thousand books for Ruby parents I was doing 15,000 books for non developer parents who wanted to teach their kids about or change the way their kids feel about Technology and change that their attitudes towards technology and I started needed to start from the very beginning So I started to organize play testing sessions with kids and we started to figure out what do kids enjoy about computers what is exciting about technology for them and One of the sort of basic premises I started with was the idea that if Ruby or JavaScript or Python are there the lingua franca of the future We need more poetry classes not grammar lessons because it's really funny the way we teach programming for For beginners at this point. It's almost like we would teach People to speak French only by asking them to conjugate French irregular verbs and say like there go ahead and do this Instead the way you learn foreign languages is by using them You learn by writing your own poems really crappy at the beginning then better over time you write essays you write opinion pieces You read different things you read contemporary stuff You read classics and you learn to have a vocabulary and you learn different ways of expressing yourself And I figured that there's something about the way we learn natural languages that should apply or there at least it should be like an opportunity to learn programming through these ways and I figured that I need some sort of principles to guide my product development like here I am I have all these people waiting for a book and I need some sort of principles to guide me and I came up with free Principles that I'm kind of going to use as the red line of this whole talk Those are the principles of playfulness curiosity and rules And all of the exercises I'm showing here are also available on hello ruby dot com So you can go there hello ruby dot com slash play you can find you can print out your first computers And you can see what other kids have done with the exercises here's a Danish little girl who password protected her door with a computer So kids nowadays Really funny So when I was studying in school I thought that the world is very binary that there's this group of people who are logical mathematical Introverted and there's this group of people who are creative colorful artsy and extroverted and that there's no overlap between these people and I like totally wanted to be on this side of the group like the people who who wanted to change the world and I Ended up studying social sciences and French and philosophy and arts and crafts And it took me a long time to realize that no like actually there is no binary world We can be multiple things and we as people contain multitudes and it totally makes sense for for like people to do different things and Actually for me who loved Bernard Russell who loved studying philosophy And and like formal logic who loved conjugating the French verbs. I actually really enjoyed French grammar Who enjoyed making socks so following like step-by-step symbolic instructions to complete a sock It totally made sense to enjoy programming and like it and the only difference was that as a little girl I thought that I was supposed to not like computers and The thing that the kids today have the modern little girls is that they don't know that they are not supposed to like computers They don't know it yet and that's the biggest asset they have because they can be curious about computers They are really precise. They concentrate well They're really good at coming up coming up with imaginary worlds And they don't know that they are not supposed to like computers The only thing we as adults would need to do is figure out a curriculum that suits them And that's the mission I set out to do so I listed different sort of basic components of programming That you should master even before you write your first Ruby array or learn anything about I don't know like hashes or stuff like that These are the things that kids Can learn already before the age seven when you abstract them correctly So for instance Algorithms are just like cupcake recipes. You follow a step-by-step instruction You need to be very exacting what kind of commands you give If you abstract properly the cupcake recipe you can pretty easily make different kinds of cupcakes if you swap the blueberries to the bananas you'll have different kinds of cupcakes and if you swap like do different amounts of cupcakes or different amounts of Quantities for the cupcakes you'll have a different amount of cupcakes in the end and Repetition or the concept of a loop is actually really easily explained through dancing. So here's Some favorite dance moves of Ruby the snow leopard in the pink wings or Ruby loves this and The loop she's gonna do is first she's gonna do that five times then she's gonna do that While the parent is holding their nose and then the final round is gonna be doing the loop on while until and Yeah, and repeat until the parent claps their hands together and That's as much as you need to know as a kid about a loop There's something that starts the loop something that ends the loop and something that gets repeated In between or the idea of decomposition of like decomposing a problem into smaller pieces can be done with flow charts it's almost like a spy exercise where or Like all sorts of misfortunes happen to Ruby's friends and you can follow with the flow chart where it went wrong And and this is where the kids can recognize what an infinite loop looks like Ruby never gets Gets to either she stays hungry or she stays full and and there's some wrong ordering in the sequencies and And writes forgets to to stop the water from running Nothing more complicated than that And I think this boils down to the idea that there's two types of joys in programming there's the more intellectual pleasure of abstracting something beautifully of like solving a really hard problem in in a beautiful manner and then there's the more almost like physical joy of getting the computer to obey your will and At least every time I get the computer to do what I wanted to do I feel like yes I'm the top of the world and sort of tinkering and not really knowing what you're doing But tinkering and twisting and toying around with the computer until it works the way you want it to work And I think the latter is called play and play was what I was after In order to understand what play was I needed to go to the people who were best at play And I figured that if there's someone who's really good at play it must be says in the street because Sesame Street is amazing They've cranked out content for 30 43 years Every single week having educational fun content for kids and they actually a B test all of their content before there was even a name for a B testing they had like little groups of kids in front of TVs and they showed different kinds of content already in the 70s and they had researchers on board thinking about this and turns out that Sesame Street things that plays paramount to our cognitive social Physical and emotional well-being and then I went to another toy company who might be even more familiar for many of you namely Lego and Lego says there's five types of play. There's physical play. There's play with objects There's symbolic play. There's pretence and social dramatic play and then there's games with rules And for some reason we adults we think of play as games with rules in this era And they go they go even further and they say that there's three types of motivations for a play There's achievement place motivation. There's social base motivation. There's immersion play based motivation But for some reason whenever we're teaching programming or whenever we're teaching actually anything in life We only use this side of play You see like the progress power accumulation numbers Optimization analysis challenging others provocation domination and in reality Everyone who's ever programmed or at least programmed in an open source community knows that there's so much more to it There's collaboration. There's self-disclosure. There's finding and giving support There's roles. There's exploration finding hidden things There's sometimes escape from real life and avoiding real life problems. All of these things exist But only we use one thing to teach programming So I figured okay, these are the ways I like I want to use all of the aspects of play in what I'm doing And many of you have different kinds of customers So at this point I knew already okay like these are the things that I want to teach these are the curriculum points This is the way that I want to teach things These are like the the principles of play I have and these are the people who I want to be teaching these things with too and You all have different kinds of customers I for instance I have the paying customers those are the parents and then I have the users those are the kids and sometimes these two groups don't really get along well because There's this thing called poop factor in kids kids development You can't have too many poop jokes in in in your content Otherwise the parents get annoyed and then if you don't make the content like fun and engage in the kids get annoyed So there's balancing this side of things But then there's also the production and product development side of things where the parent is actually a big nuisance so I was in Japan doing some playtesting over there and First I gave like a little lecture for the parents and explain to them like this Nordic way of thinking about play and opening like exploring and and making mistakes and trying out new things and then we would do the playtesting session and the parents would be like You know this Let me show you how to do this. I'm like no no stay away like don't I need to learn from the kids What is hard and what is easy? So we made a plan we created? User experience journey map that we gave to the parents that asks them to make observations about their child and This data was it was really useful But most of all it was good to keep the parents away from distracting the the product development process So I don't know what the like the tangible thing for you for your own work is but probably everyone has those two types of customers So the principles where playfulness rules and curiosity And we're gonna start with the principle number one the playfulness principle that question. What if asking always the question? what if and You know when you talk to normal people a layman people who are not programmers They think programming is very silent The programmer they sit in front of the computer and something happens And you never know if there's a breakthrough or not like in sports You see that someone won when a programmer cracks a really hardcore algorithm. They're like might send an emoji But that's about it. So for a normal person like the culture and compassion and colorfulness that does exist in programming It's super well hidden in like this murky underground internet forums like Stack Overflow and places like github repositories and so forth But normal people don't see it and I set out on a mission to bring out those trolls and those like All of the colorfulness that exists in the programming community and that happens through Characters and this is Ruby. She's she's six years old and she's completely fearless a little bit bossy She's my probably at this point my best friend and Then when I tell Ruby in the morning that Ruby you need to dress up for school really fast We're late. She will dress up for school But she will leave her pajamas on because I didn't tell her to take the pajamas off explicitly and and when I tell Ruby that Your room is such a mess like clean up all the toys. They are everywhere She will clean up the toys, but she will leave the pens and papers on the floor because pens and papers are really not toys and These are all things that my six-year-old god other who's who's like the person I mostly test this content with like Her mother is gonna kill me because she has become this obnoxious little six-year-old who who counter Counter arguments everything, but she learns something very fundamental about computer science that you need to give right orders In the right sequence you need to be very exact in naming things and so on and so on and Little Ruby she also has different kinds of rules for how she dresses up. So for instance on Mondays She wears only clothes that are red and green and on Fridays She wears clothes that are not yellow and this way you can teach bull and algebra that otherwise wouldn't come for the kid Until late late late in their lives already for like a six-year-old easily and in a fun way But most importantly the kids learn to understand that mostly Big problems are just small problems stuck together and that computers are not magic and and they are not black boxes That someone else owns but you can actually break apart problems and learn to get through them So the second principle is the principle of logic. It's always asking the question. How it's Imposing a logic on something otherwise hard to understand and this is one of my favorite things In the world one of the things that makes me really sad was that the little girl I was who thought that there is this binary world of the people who get to create stuff and then there's the people who just consume them and For me every time I hear someone say oh like that's that's magic. That's a black box that's engineering work I get really disappointed and sad because Technology is meant to be tinkered with technology is meant to be taken a bard and twisted and we shouldn't think that everything is ready in the world everything is not ready in the world and That's why we teach kids how to see in post logic on something that otherwise would seem just like a like a thing That has always been there So one of the exercises I do with kids is is I give them this little Sticker that has an on-off button to them But you it and I tell them that adults they have this thing called internet of things But then this afternoon you guys have a special skill you can make anything in this room into a computer if you just decide to do so and Here's for instance a bicycle lamp that one little boy made into a computer And when I asked him what the computer does he said that it projects movies as well as access a bicycle lamp And and here's a couple of candles that you can automatically Press to flick on and off and here's a book that automatically like changes pages And this is a really stupid and silly exercise But it helps the kids to see the world and have the imagination to see the world as something that they can they can alter and Change and it actually is really useful for adults, too. They also have this little Cheat that they do where they can think about like different different sensors like orientation and temperature and vibration moisture And and the internet and draw a picture of themselves using their new computers Another exercise we do with kids is they get like a keyboard and the first thing they do is and and a sticker sheet and Put the stickers on the computer and then they write the numbers over there try explaining to Six-year-old why computer numbers go like one two three four five la la nine zero It's really complicated mathematical thing to explain Then they get to design their own buttons I'll get to that later on They get to type their own name with a keyboard the kids nowadays like they don't they see a keyboard is the first thing They see of alphabet. It's not the a b c d e f g thing And then they get to plug their keyboard to their parent and see if it actually works So the parent holds the keyboard and the other or the end of the the power cord and the kid holds the keyboard And they try pressing the different Animals and and see what happens when I press the gorilla button will the parent do this or so and it's the kids can do this for hours and The buttons work also for your own computer. So it's it's a fun thing The third principle is the principle of curiosity always asking question. Why it's having an open mind about exploration It's about finding hidden things and it's about imagination one of the things that really really kills me is that computers used to be the children of poetry and mathematics the first Computer programmer in the world was the the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and The mathematician mother I'd love lace who was the first person in the world to actually understand that computers were not fancy calculators But actually that computers could calculate values that represented different kinds of things and that made a computer into anything and for some reason we've forgotten about this beautiful past of computers and When I show people pictures that or when I tell people that like I think the kids should understand what the John von Neumann model is like They're like are you serious about this but think about it If you abstract computer into the idea that a computer is always something that data goes in Something happens and something else comes out and in effect everything in computing is that when you press like on Facebook There's an instruction that says that add one more like there's data that goes in Instruction tells to add one more like to the Facebook page and up comes two likes or whatever and This is the beauty of computers that there is Data there is the processor and most importantly There's the memory and there's the two types of memory the memory that remembers the data and what happens to it and the memory That gives the instructions of what to do and that is the thing that makes computers so special because a pinboard machine Pinball machine is always a pinball machine a tractor is always a tractor But a computer can be anything depending of what kind of software you write for it And the way we teach this to kids is by physical activities. We've built this like little cardboard computer this for toddlers They crawl inside of the computer and there's a little card that shows them a picture of what they should do when they come out For instance like hop on one feed or come out backwards or or so and then the other kids need to guess What that the code was like and they learn about the principle of Input output CPUs and memory through play and I can tell you that the cardboard box like it It breaks up every single time we do this it gets to be so much fun. I Also do exercises where we talk about what computers are because the scary thing is that six to seven year old five to seven Year olds can be very very conservative When I ask kids is this a computer for instance, I show them a picture of like a car A grocery store a dog and a toilet and I ask him which one of these is a computer The kids unanimously say none of this is a computer like almost just mentioned like what are you talking about? none of this is a computer and I ask them what is a computer and they say like oh that's that thing that like mom and dad spent too much time on like They don't even realize that iPads are computers are mobile phones are computers But then we get to talk and we talk that actually a car is a computer and even five-year-olds know pretty well But a navigation system is and and then we talk that hmm like maybe in grocery stores There's all kinds of computers like the computer that keeps the ice cream Cold and the computer that is used when you pay your pay your groceries and and you know what like when your parents Were your age computers were so big that they couldn't fit on this like this whole stage But when you grow up to be adults computers are gonna be so tiny that they fit into every single milk bottle in the store And that's when the kids get to be really excited. Hmm. What would happen if a milk bottle had a computer inside of it? And we talk about Dogs and how dogs are not computers obviously da what I was saying But and maybe I like a dog's collarbone might have a computer inside of it Or maybe in the future like a dog will have a microchip inside of it And then we get into really interesting discussions of what is an animal and what is a machine and what takes them apart? Like five-year-olds are so smart and then I tell them that in Japan toilets are computers and that they get hacked And this is always like the best thing six-year-olds ever know. I Think one of the things that we do nowadays is In school at least in Finland we teach kids so many things we teach them How they can become astronauts and we teach them how a combustion engine works And we teach them about the global like climate change and all these complicated things But when our kids especially the kids of non-programmers come to their parents and ask What is a bubble sorting algorithm or Linda? What happens when I press YouTube like the play button on YouTube like what happens who talks to one? How does the computer know like how the new video shows up or Linda is Internet of place? We adults we become very silent. We matter something about it being very complicated or very magical Well, it's it's neither it's not complicated and it's not magical It just happened really really really fast Computer scientists are among the biggest idols. I have I We don't have a like flag day for Linus Torvalds in Finland I think we should I think he's the biggest like export hero we have the guy who came up with linux and get one like We don't recognize him at all as a society but now I for less so Yeah, so they've they've built up abstraction levels on top of each other until we have as adults No idea what powers are computers and you are a different crowd from him, but here about like normal people They don't have any idea how their computers work. They have like more powerful computers in their like Pockets than than the one the mankind went to moon with but they still play like I'm reverse with this Which is such a shame so what we do with kids is we start by the very basics and we build a paper computer and We look at the professor Professor processor who's really good at bossing other people around and we look at the helpful ram and rum and we look where your summer vacation photos Or your game levels gets to change Save that's the hard drive and we look at like what kind of operating systems you can choose their computers kids are Like I thought that they would choose like the cute penguin or the omnipresent windows. They always choose the apple. It's like Magic and They get to design their own computers. Here's a few examples of the computers kids would design one of the things they get to do they get to design their own Buttons and sometimes they design buttons to order ice cream or send a teacher to Saturn or The boy actually he made a button to like send the teacher back from Saturn Everything ended up okay and one of my favorite stories is this little boy called Arthur who designed first He was very proud about his paper computer and he designed a button to print out Lego coloring pages Because his mom had printed him out Lego coloring pages before and he was very proud about them But pretty soon he was like bored and felt that coloring pages are not very exciting So he decided to print out three Legos and then when he went completely wild and printed out with his paper computer a toothbrush a TV and then breakfast for the entire family the next morning And Arthur's mom who's one of my best friends and very tech savvy. She was like Arthur, you know, that's not possible But the whole point is that is possible Arthur is gonna grow up into a world where he's probably gonna free-dip print He's like candies on Saturday mornings, and he's gonna free-dip print his Legos That's not even the wildest thing out there. So it's good that we prepare him for that future One of my other favorite stories is of little Ada She's six-year-old and she wasn't very sure about this computer business in the beginning of the computer it's not really my thing and We got to talk with her and I asked her what do you want to do when you grow up? And I just says with a six-year-old's determination that I want to be a Dolphin doctor a Dolphin doctor and Dolphin doctors don't need computers But then we started to talk about it and and eventually she ended up designing a dolphin health Application for her patients that had little pictures of the dolphins and like their health stats and and all this like metadata And and she was amazing UX designer and had such like an empathic view towards the dolphins And I really hope that she becomes a programmer when she grows up But probably my favorite story of all time is of this little boy whose favorite thing in the world was to be an astronaut And the little boy He placed this with his father He has these huge headphones on and he sits on the opposite side of the room with his paper computer absolutely totally immersed into the intergalactic planetary Navigation application that he has built because the father is the lone astronaut He's on the other side of the room but in reality he's in another galaxy in the Martian atmosphere and the little boy's sole Responsibility is to bring the father back safely to earth And these kids are going to have a profoundly different experience of technology They are going to think in a very different manner of what technology is should be should feel like And they're going to see coding as a tool of creation much like Lego blocks or or crayons Not as something esoteric and and belonging to a whole different group of people The ending is probably something like this There's nothing new in what I was talking about the whole history of computers is full of Luminary people who have been talking about this stuff already Alan Turing in in the in the 50s He talked about the child machine the idea that instead of artificial intelligence being done the way it is today What if we like taught the computers to taught themselves? What if we modeled the the computers after the way kids learn about stuff and then see more puppet and Cynthia Solomon in the 70s Wrote this wonderful research paper if you haven't read it Please do 20 things to do with a computer where they highlight our underlying the idea that computer Education should be about practice producing practical things about Doing something really in the world instead of calculating the 21st prime Road squares of like 21st prime numbers or so and then finally there's Alan K who in the 70s And this is an amazing article personal computer for children of all ages He basically imagines like a hackable iPad and he has pictures and everything That's an amazing article that really outlines the creativity that computers have And so storytelling that's not new either. There's a bunch of people who've done this before in amazing ways There's ruby wizardry by Eric Weinstein. There's computational fairy tales There's Lauren Ipsum and there's wise poignant guide to ruby which was by the way the book that brought me into the ruby community I most definitely didn't learn anything about programming from that book But it showed me into this world where wits and wizardry and and whimsicality was kind of appreciated And showed me to this warm community of people and I felt that I could belong to this community as well And that's why we need the storytellers We need the people to bridge the gap between the machines and the men and when you talk with normal people again like I feel really weird saying the word normal people but when you talk with like laymen it's funny when they think that that I don't know that that computers write code And that programming languages are written by computers And they don't realize that no like People write code and a code is code is a language for people to talk to one another and only secondarily for the Computer to execute and that's programming languages are designed by people for other people to understand that the whole DNA Of technology is humanity and in fact in the past a computer used to be a person who's really good at calculating things And the greek it always goes back to the greek They they thought the technology It's not only the tools But also the techniques and skills and competencies alongside the tools that make it possible to do something better and fast So agriculture is technology democracy is technology and somehow we lost all of this We all have childhood stories that have shaped the way we grow up as adults and human beings They stay with us for years to come we read them as little kids and then as adults we don't even remember how much they influence the way we see the world and When I was a small kid I wanted to be a world builder when I grow up So I would wake up in the morning in Moomin Valley And that's how I learned about family values and in the afternoons I would roam around Tatooine being the fearless jedi night subes and rider And that's how I learned about what's right and wrong and and the evenings I would go to sleep in Narnia I don't know what I learned about Narnia Something from moody anyways You don't even sometimes you can't even pinpoint the things that you learn from stories But they stay with you and they influence your taste for years to come The sad thing is that you can't really graduate To become a world maker like there's no university degree that allows you to to do that for a living except The one that does The one exception and the one loophole and that is you that is the programmers of the world Imagine that you guys get to do that every single day You get to create an entire universe with the pure power of your own words You get to design all of the rules all of the vocabularies all of the everything that happens in that world And that power is yours Thank you so much. Oh, I have zero idea how fast I was I think we have time for a couple of questions. I I suspect it's so Now if no one like gets me out of the pickle of speaking too fast I'm just going to be sad and cry here for the rest of that. Please one question Yes Ah, I don't want to spoil it. I so Juanito the thing He said that he's seen me speak this like give this talk seven times So I need to do something different. So this was the reason why I did something different this time No friday hug. Yeah, I think someone else is going to do you steal the friday hug? So I won't steal the show for now But that's one example of like when I show people pictures of the ruby friday hugs they are like Are these programmers? I thought that programmers sit alone in like cubicles and never talk to other people. I'm like, nope This happens it's a very any other questions for linda Or do we want to hear a joke I can repeat the question So I think one of the cool things about the ruby community is that there's shoes There's hackety-hack. There's a lot of like tools available for a parent who already is a programmer who can sort of Like pace out the curriculum in a way that makes sense for his or her like Old kid and that's a big plus in addition For the parents who are not that technical there's code.org, which is really good. It's this us nonprofit that like breaks Breaks the whole like coding curriculum into sequences of like small steps where you have like a scratch like environment And it's gamified and it's very much like points and power and progress But it's really excellent for kids who are motivated by that stuff And then there's scratch which is like can be very when sometimes when I sit with kids down and try to like Engage them with scratch. They need more instructions in the beginning to get going Then when they get going they are like absolutely like on fire and way better programmers than I will ever be after Two hours of work So it really depends on what kind of a kid you have and what they sort of find exciting or or yeah Meaningful. There's also something called hopscotch. That is an iPad application much like scratch What else my kids ruby.com which has a lot of like ruby content But many of those things are very unapproachable for a parent who isn't a programmer themselves So I think we have it good. But then the rest of the population is kind of lost First of all, thanks for trying to change kids minds. I myself I work with kids a lot related sport related And I love working with them So I value your work What I wanted to ask you is I guess you've played around with many many kids for now Do you feel that technology is somehow taking over these role-playing games that you take to schools and It's an interesting question I think not all screen time is equal like you can do really horrible and passive things On iPads if you use them as a babysitter for a kid Like just watching videos and so forth But like all of us know like my parents had no idea what I was doing on the computer when I was 13 year old And I was doing really awesome things and like building actual worlds and making cool things and websites and stuff like that and Like we all know that computers are not sort of passive and bad things for people So I think it's the same with tablets and and stuff like that that there's always like two sides That being said there was a reason why I chose to like the book is an actual physical book Which has been like a nightmare to produce because I come from like the web industry where you deploy five times a day The publishing industry is like we can't do anything under a year. Sorry Which was like, okay that's good, but the idea is that you would have a parent and a kid read together a physical book and Kids before the age seven they learn so much about the world other than computers and computing They will have like the rest of their lives to learn about sitting in front of a screen and interacting with the screen But if you learn about the concepts already at a younger age Maybe it will make it easier for you to learn stuff at an older age and I suppose like I'm kind of interested and curious to see what the mobile experience for say hella ruby would look like But I don't think anyone not even says in the street or or those guys have nailed yet What like actually playing on a tablet looks like or what actual digital toys look like instead of just games or or like Books that are electronic. So I think there is so anyone who wants to work on this problem Is is like probably gonna face some really exciting challenges And please do One more. Yes Hi Linda, I would like to ask one question like what is the greatest challenge in teaching children programming Probably deciding what kind of kids they are because like kids can be so I like my Group of kids I I've worked with and there's been like a bunch of different groups Has been around five to seven year olds and between that age group like kids can be so different from the like They're cognitive. They're emotional skills. They're physical skills. They're like social skills Deciding what is the right level for a kid and not trying to push things down their throat The one thing I really like hate Like the one thing that I feel really fearful about doing is like ruining some poor kid's life for good Because when I was in in so my my programming career actually starts when I was 13 years old and I was making websites And I was like having these mad teenage girl crushes on different people and building like websites in honor of them not creepy at all and Then I went to like AP Programming class and the first thing we learned was Java And the thing that we were supposed to do was like to draw a picture of a cat with Java And I felt it was a ridiculous exercise because I was so much better at drawing with my bare hands A cat or I could draw like a really awesome cat with photoshop But like with the mathematical coordination is like didn't make any sense And the thing that the teacher forgot to mention is that if you want to make one cat It's okay to do it by hand or with photoshop But if you want to make a thousand cats or if you want to make all the cats from the like the colors of the rainbow Or like different sized cats is really good to sort of abstract it and modularize it and make it into a program Code that like draws that cut in For you and that connection ruined programming for me for like 10 years or so because I felt the programming Is this stupid nerdy thing that like is about like putting dots on like Drawing board and and I'm so much better off with photoshop and drawing by hand So probably like answer to your question is figuring out what kind of a kid the kid is and giving the right context for the kid For the learning stuff so that it doesn't become like a boring Like oh no, I need to do the programming exercises today. Yuck So you're saying that we should teach them programming like outside of computers Maybe if that suits the kids some kids really like excel with actual physical computers because you you know Like computer is like one of the best work companions I have because it always tells you whether you did right or wrong like everything else in word is so well There's so much murkier and sort of in between but computer always tells you what is right or wrong So for some kids that definitely helps and works I suppose Yeah context for the kid and then like understanding what kind of a kid they are when you're teaching them Empathy all right. Thank you. Thank you