 Welcome everyone we are so excited that you are joining us for computer science education week today we are talking about how do you build an app this is for all of our friends in preschool and kindergarten first grade and second grade and what we are going to do today is I'm gonna tell you a little bit about myself I'm Angela and I lead the community here at CESA I was a kindergarten teacher for 15 years and I have two kids that are now in fourth grade and seventh grade and normally I work in Minnesota but today I'm in California because I wanted to be at CESA headquarters we are gonna get to meet Adrian he's one of the co-founders of CESA that means he had the idea for making CESA you are going to hear the steps about building an app and we are going to answer your questions but before we meet Adrian there are gonna be two fancy words that you might hear today during this presentation the first one is code and the second one is test and if you hear those fancy words you don't have to say I heard it I heard it just have kind of a silent signal or maybe if you hear that word you put your hands on your knees and then we'll know that you heard it and I will be thinking about what some of those words mean so let's get going and meet Adrian hi Adrian hi everyone as Angela said I'm one of the co-founders of CESA and I grew up in Texas I studied art and computer science in school and now I live in California I'm so excited to be here with you today now I realize you might not all know where California is maybe you have a map like this up in your classroom somewhere where that big red arrow is is where San Francisco is which is where we are right now this is probably one of the things you might recognize if you've ever been to San Francisco or seen it in a movie but we work in downtown in a tall office building and we're on floor 7 and that's where everyone who works at CESA in San Francisco is this is what our office looks like inside this is where we all gather together and eat lunch and this is what my desk looks like and as you can see I have a computer on my desk and computers are really everywhere of course people use computers when they work but traffic lights have computers and the microwaves have computers and the airplanes have computers video games are really just computers inside and lots of different kinds of jobs use computers which is one of the reasons I'm so excited to talk with you about it today so artists doctors teachers all use computers and astronauts runners and writers need to use computers too so when we think about a computer there are certain things that can be very hard to do with a computer and when we build an app we try to take some problem that someone has and make it much easier for a real person to use so let's talk about the steps to build an app today the first step is always to take a moment and think about why you want to build your app is it to help people is it to solve a problem are you just wanting to have fun like maybe you want to make a game once you figured out what you want to do either what problem you want or if you want to just do something fun start writing down some ideas make a plan talk to people and get a sense of how your app might work and what it might do this was our plan for a very early early version of seesaw we even called it p2 it wasn't even called seesaw yet and it was very very early you can see that all you could do was add a photo or upload a photo but it was a very simple place to start once you have an idea then of what you want to do you have your plan together you have to tell the computer what to do and just like people can read books and you read the words on the page computers can also read they can't read books but they can read code and this is an example of some code this is actual code that we run at seesaw and these are the instructions that tell the computer what to do the great thing about telling the computer what to do is it will do exactly what you tell it to so you get to be the boss of the computer you get to tell it what to do computers are really good at some things and not as good at others let's talk about that a little bit so computers are really fast at math like adding and subtracting and dividing and multiplying they're also really good at finding words but there are a lot of things that you are better at the computers are let's see what those are so one is being creative computers don't know what to do they don't know how to solve a problem so you get to be the creative person who comes up with that they also don't understand what people want they aren't people themselves so they have no idea what a person actually wants so that's the first step to building an app we think about what problem we're trying to solve we make a plan we tell the computer what to do but this is just the first part right because anytime you start by telling the computer what to do remember you get to be the boss of the computer the problem is sometimes the computer does exactly what you tell it to do and it turns out it's not what you actually want what you want is for it to do something else so you have to test it and figure out what works and what doesn't and then improve it so this was a very early version of seesaw and we forced everyone to type in a code in order to join and this was too much work we tested it and we found this did not work very well so you're trying it out we're trying it out and we came up with a different idea after testing it to use a qr code that people could scan you might have some of these in your classroom and you can scan it and then you can get into your class really quickly and that worked a lot better that's an example of a way we improved seesaw after testing it after you've done this a few times and you feel like it's working pretty well the next step is to share it with everyone so that other people can get to use it this was what seesaw looked like when we first built it you can see it's a little bit more advanced than earlier but it's still not anywhere near what we can do with it today and we keep changing it right we keep changing it that was from 2015 exactly lots of has happened so that was really really a fast explanation of how you create an app and what we want to do now is we want to take some time to answer your questions and in a moment i'm going to talk to my colleague emily who has been watching all your questions coming in to to see where we should start so emily do you do we want to start with some shoutouts first and then we'll go into questions yes we have people watching from all over the united states we have some friends visiting us from washington we have miss browns first grade class from jefferson elementary school second grade class in middle town mrs gibbs class and i'm also for anyone that we couldn't shout out sending you a special message because we're so excited that you're all here but as far as questions go we have the question how do you make an app yeah great question so in order to make an app uh you have to write some code which is remember how a computer knows what to do and we have some resources that are linked to this that are simple coding exercises that you can do with your class so if you think you might want to make an app you can try those out and get a sense of what it's like there's a question coming in from miss hudselman's class why was it called uh p2 at first when you started building it well before we knew what we were going to call or even really if it was going to work or not we just needed to call it something so we just made up a name and the name didn't mean anything it was just p2 um probably there was a p1 i don't even remember but it was just something we could call it while we were working on it before we knew it would ever be called seesaw all right what other questions emily do we have we have the question what gave you the idea for seesaw and how did you decide on the name ooh great question so the idea for seesaw really came from from talking with teachers and hearing about some of the problems they ran into in the classroom and this is a great way anytime you're thinking about building an app to get an idea you don't always have to have the idea yourself you can talk to other people and hear about problems they're having and then try to come up with a creative solution to those problems the name for seesaw was really came out of a brainstorming um experience we had where we all talked about different things we remembered from school and we really like the idea of taking something that we remembered from school like a seesaw on the playground um that was playful um but at the same time it related to the way seesaw's a very visual um tool so you can see it and we like the fact that that also came up so it was a combination of those two and lauren wants to know from his Chapman's class was it hard to make an app well it's it's never hard to start um it's very easy to get started so i would encourage anyone who wants to try it to to get started but anytime you're solving a problem for another person it's hard because you have to understand what is their problem and then you try something out and you see if you really solved it or not and usually you have to do that many times to truly solve their problem so that process is often very hard and takes a long time and mason from miss williams class wants to know do video game designers follow these same steps video games or anything that you program a computer to do will be very similar you always have to think about what you want to do first and make a plan and then tell the computer what to do and test it so those things will be very much something you would encounter making a video game too i'm going to do a couple more shoutouts while emily's getting ready with her next question so we have miss rubin's class we have mr luke's class miss uh fawcete's class we have miss soulheim's class with us so many classes miss bird's class mr bird's class um all over so what should we answer next emily we had a great question come in from a kindergarten class and they were wondering if kids were allowed to make apps or maybe some ideas to get them started yeah absolutely you are allowed to you you can tell a computer to do whatever you want to do in fact it's very hard to truly break a computer so try some things out and see if you can get it to work don't be afraid um and you know an easy way to start is just make something that you want you know you can if you have an idea for a game or you have an idea of an app that you'd like then draw some sketches for it and you can just make whatever you would like i like the idea too they can just start building with stuff they have you can totally build with with stuff you have or if you have a favorite uh if you have a favorite toy or movie or anything and you want to make an app about that like you can you can make an app about anything you want so just start start being creative and see where it takes you so laura and miss kim's class wants to know how old were you when you started making apps adrian well let's see i first started learning about computers when i was in elementary school and i got my first computer at home when i was in fifth grade so you all are way ahead of me already because you all have computers that you have access to and then i just from then on in middle school and high school i learned more and more and then i studied it in college so i've been doing it for a long time but i do it because i love it and it's really fun to build things i had a class actually ask what's your favorite part of working at seesaw ooh it's a great question um i love the fact that every day we get to build something that's used by real teachers and students and we get to hear from all of you about what's working and what's not we get to test it and improve it just like we talked about earlier and then i love all the people that i get to work with at seesaw every day because the problems we're trying to solve we can't be solved by just one person it's really about the team working together and i love that which goes with this question that at least wants to know who helped you make your app it's a great question um when you're very early on you can make an app by yourself but you'd find pretty soon after that you need a group of people to really work with you so we'll work with engineers who are experts at writing code and designers who think about what the app looks like and how it works and people who are testing and then once you actually put the app out into the world then you need lots of people like Angela to help people learn how to use it and help give us feedback about what works and what doesn't so lots of different people go into making a successful app and students and students we hear a lot from from teachers when they're working with their students to say well this didn't work so well so we need to kind of make it better so we're always listening to your ideas too um emily what we have so many classes here so shout outs um boy it's a long list we have miss chapman's class miss bouchard's class miss harding's class what question should we answer here we only have about maybe one more minute but we had so many good questions it's really hard to pick but one student actually noticed the draft button and they were wondering how do we decide what new things to add to seesaw that's a great question and we want to be careful about what we add we don't want to just add lots of things and make the app way too complicated but when we hear about a real problem that someone's having like in this case we heard from teachers that sometimes students do work but there's something that needs to get fixed in it and rather than having to delete it it would be great to be able to send it back to the student to make changes and so that's where the idea for the draft button came from but we try to be thoughtful about making sure that anything we add is solving a real problem for someone that it's not just a cool feature to add but it really relates back to a problem that someone's experiencing with seesaw and maybe you ran out of time and you want to work on your your creation a little bit more so that's also helpful with that too i think one more question adrian is how many times do you think you failed while making seesaw like you've made lots of mistakes i imagine there are lots and lots of things that i thought were great ideas and then we tried them and it turned out it was not such a good idea it didn't actually work so one of the things that i've learned is to be very humble and to realize that anytime there's an idea it's worth trying so you see sometimes you're surprised something works that you think wouldn't work and other times something that you're sure was gonna work doesn't end up working but that's part of the process and that's what's important that you're always learning and not that you're always right right i think that's a great one and all the things that you're learning in your classroom today really build on the skills that you need to create and solve problems so keep working hard there and you might want to try creating too we have on our website um maybe you want to make a new class icon you could try to design that and we really want to thank you for tuning in today and spending some of your class time with us and we are excited for you to learn and share what you are doing this week for computer science education week and we couldn't get to everyone's questions today but we hope that we answered some of them and always feel free to reach out to us on twitter at cisa if you have more questions so thanks everyone for coming today thank you bye