 Hello friends, my name is Ruth Sealy. I'm the director of the Community Outreach Team in Red Hat's open source program office. For those of you who are in Austin, I am sorry not to be there in person. I very much hope to see you at another event soon in the meantime, regardless of where you are. Feel free to tweet at me. My handle's on the screen there. It's my last name, S-U-E-H-L-E, or email me. I'm Ruth at redhat.com. I'm always happy to chat about anything I tell you today or really anything open source at all. So I've been at Red Hat almost 15 years and one of the most rewarding experiences I've had there is not part of my core job with our upstream project communities. It is the result of a multi-team collaboration called Colab. Colab started about five or six years ago. We wanted to reach middle school girls specifically, preferably in underserved communities to teach them the principles of open source. We didn't wanna do just another coding workshop. There are a thousand coding workshops out there. We really wanted to teach them what's important to us. We wanted to teach them collaboration and that's why it's called Colab. Why did we decide to do this? Why not? We know code, we could teach code. Most companies have a given size do some sort of community project, community work like this, but this is a project with principles that are really important to us at Red Hat. And probably for a lot of you and the companies that you work at, open source is who we are. It's what we do, it's why we matter. And communities are central to my team's purpose to the open source program office. That's what we do all day every day is community. And so it's certainly to our advantage to make sure that the next generation coming forth understands these principles so that they become open source contributors and see the value in that way of working. And that's why we decided to do this. We've had a number of other programs where we looked for ways to tell the story of Red Hat beyond our products and technologies, to raise awareness, to be perhaps even an introduction to Red Hat for a lot of folks to make people want to learn more. These are pictures from a few years back at South by Southwest Create. This is another year at South by Southwest where people collaborated to make this beautiful floral project. But Colab is a special project and it's one that's lasted for a while now. It's not to reach college students that we want to recruit tomorrow, that we want to put in jobs tomorrow. Middle schoolers are not going to become open shift customers next week for sure. But again, this program is about teaching them the power of open source so that that's how they start to work now when they're young. And as to this DNI piece in the bottom corner there, Colab was designed specifically for middle school girls. As we transitioned to a virtual program in the last few years, we have had some boys in the program, some other kids, but it was designed specifically for middle school girls, preferably 11 to 12 years old, about sixth grade in underserved communities. And why girls? Because we want to see more women in STEM careers and STEAM careers. Evidence shows over and over and I've seen a hundred studies that say they lose interest at 13. And despite having seen this over and over in reports and studies, it didn't become really crystal clear to me until we had a class of older ones. We had a class of all eighth graders. And it wasn't the same. It wasn't the same at all. They had already checked out. They weren't as interested. They weren't as engaged as the younger kids. So that's why girls, that's why the age. And we moved it into eventually into this program called open source stories at Red Hat. Open source stories is films, interviews, little short pieces of video about open source in other places outside of the usual software. And you'll hear me mention that again at the end when I talk about some of the kits that you can acquire yourself. So let's talk about how we teach this. How does COLAB work? So middle school girls, generally today, middle school kids, I have one of them. I have a high schooler as well. They generally have very little or no technology experience beyond their phones. We learned this hard and fast in the first class when we discovered they don't know a file dialogue. You can't just say save this file because Google Docs has been saving their files for them their whole lives. They don't actually know how to go to file save as. Some of the kids we were teaching might not even have super strong reading skills, much less science skills. And most importantly in school, they're taught to work on their own. Think back to all your years in school. Don't look at someone else's paper. Don't do that together. Do it on your own. Keep your eyes on your own work. And we tell them to do exactly the opposite of that, which is a little intimidating at first. We don't want them to have just a one or two day quick experience. It's about building a long-standing community. And so we've tried to always do this with mentors from within their own communities, from partner companies that we've worked with in various cities. So this is a picture you see of one of our earlier classes of girls with their mentors. And so they can have ongoing relationships with those people. It's not us dropping in from the sky, doing a day or two of workshop and leaving and never seeing them again. These are people that they can build longer-term relationships with as they get older, as they go to college, maybe even as they start their careers. As to exactly how what we taught them, we've done quite a few different versions of Colab and different curricula. It evolves every time we do it. Colab runs the open source way. It's constant improvements. And it's constant improvements with the girls, with the kids who take the classes and what they think we could do to make it better for the next class. But every class we've ever had in person or virtual has started with this slide. We only have five rules and one of them is simply to have fun. And they are great at following these rules. So when we first show up the first day, they're often a little confused. We found that teachers haven't always told them exactly why they're there or what they're gonna do. They just got selected to do this for one reason or another. We leave it up to the schools to decide exactly what kids get to come. And so it's eight o'clock in the morning for some of them. One class did this during spring break. Maybe it's a holiday. Maybe they got pulled out of class. They're not sure what's going on. And so we tell them a little bit about what's gonna do. And then we go outside. We go out the door and they don't know what open source is. They barely understand software. So we do this cool yarn activity where they build a web and then reverse it just to get everybody's names in your head. Maybe you don't know everybody in the class and to get things started that way. It's a good collaboration starter. And then we get into the nuts and bolts of open source. How does all of this work? And so we explain it with the cooking metaphor. I'm a big fan of the cooking metaphor. I asked the kids, what's your favorite type of cookie? And everybody starts shouting out types of cookies. I've only had one kid ever in all of this time say, I hate cookies. I'm not sure what's up with that kid. Everybody loves cookies, right? So I inevitably have someone say chocolate chip and maybe someone else says, I like chocolate chocolate chip. I want the bubble chocolate action. And so I say, great. So our friend over here who loves chocolate chip cookies, she has a fantastic chocolate chip cookie recipe. It's the best. And you want chocolate chocolate chip cookies. So if you want to make chocolate chocolate chip cookies, you have to figure out how much butter, how many eggs, how much flour, how much sugar, all of those things from scratch. But if our friend over here gives you her chocolate chip cookie recipe that is so amazing, everybody always wants to have more of those cookies, all you have to do is figure out how much cocoa powder to add. You can build on her success and make something new from it. And so that's the metaphor we use to help them understand the basic concept of how open source works. And then we give them a cookie recipe if they want. If you go to that URL, it's a peanut butter cookie recipe, which is not my favorite. I'm the chocolate chocolate chip kind of gal, but you like peanut butter cookies? It is there for you. But that's about all that stayed the same for those five years, that basic intro. And then we've done a lot of different things since then. So we started in 2017 in Boston City Plaza. We set up a trailer and had, I think we had 12 girls that, oh, 25 girls that first time and used a curriculum based around a Raspberry Pi that I'm gonna explain to you. Then we did three more that fall. We went to New York City, Washington, DC and Raleigh. And these red and blue dots indicate the places we've been since then. And it's a little out of date because what happened after that? All the red dots are the places that we've done this in person. And the blue dots are where I started to try to represent where we had reached kids virtually, but eventually we reached so many virtually that I could not possibly, and I gave up on the blue dots. So each curriculum has its strengths is better suited for some classes more than others. So I'm gonna walk you through all of them and tell you a little bit about their benefits and the pitfalls. So this is a brief overview of the in-person workshops we've done. We have the Poetry and Pi was the first one. That's where I'm gonna start. And then breaking the code is the other big one. And I'll tell you a little bit about the other two as well. So Poetry and Pi was our starter. And on all of these, you'll see a number of students, a number of mentors, these are kind of estimates. I think we originally actually did this over four days or maybe even five. 12 is a solid number of kids in general with a mentor for every three to four students. That's a good way to start. So for this project, we began with a pi top seed. The drawback here is it is not cheap. These are $150 a piece, which for what it is, not so bad. You've got a screen, all the functionality, you plug a pi in there, you've got a fully functional computer. But we did let the kids take them home. So this is by far the most expensive one that we did. The OS comes built in with some really cool stuff. And so we started the day by playing with those. I said we weren't teaching coding upfront. We did try to do that just a little tiny bit. And so we had them try to just copy off the screen this little bit of information and we would talk through it. It didn't go well. It did not go well at all. So I think maybe we did that once, maybe twice tops. And then we just gave them the code and would look at it on the screen and talk about it. We didn't have them type it in anymore. But then what they always did do, we would have them build their own Raspberry Pi camera. We would build the hardware. So the next drawback, this is a lot of parts to go wrong. I love this curriculum, but it is the most work and you need some good troubleshooters available to get through it. That cable is kind of finicky. The software is a little finicky. Like there's a lot to go wrong here. So, and you'll see what happens next. There's a lot of time for things to go wrong. So the next thing we do, we've built our hardware. Now we kind of put the A in STEM. We make the steam. So the A is for art. We teach them some basic photography concepts. Some a little bit of art skills. Talk about the rule of thirds and looking for angles and lines and making things visually appealing. And then we talk a little bit about how to express your ideas through photography and we send them out the door with a poem. We used a few. This is just one of them, but we give the kids this poem to be inspired by and we send them out into their cities with all that new photography knowledge and the cameras that they've built and the inspiration of that poem and have them just take a ton of pictures. And they have a lot of fun doing it and then they come back and they build an art project with those photos. And that's when they learn that we all see the world a little differently. We were all taking pictures about the same poem but we didn't come up with the same images. And so they have to come up with a single set of images to represent the poem. They have to share their ideas, but it means they have to listen to others' people's ideas and come to an understanding and a final decision as a group, maybe get an opportunity to see something in a way that they didn't see it before. And that really is where the collaboration piece starts to shine. This first class that was in Boston, the project then was displayed in Boston City Hall so they could have their parents, their friends come down and see what they had done. It was a fantastic project. It was a ton of work. All those red dots on the map, we couldn't have done that, this project that many times. So the next curriculum is called Breaking the Code. Breaking the Code builds this cool book you see and it's based around a story that was written by a Boulder area young adult author named Lauren Sable and Alicia Gibb from the Open Source Hardware Association helped us write the curriculum. So first thing in the morning I say, we're going to make a circuit and light up an LED by lunch. Every one of you is going to do that. And they look at me like, I am the dumbest adult they have ever met. There is no way we know how to make something light up. Not gonna happen in the next two or three hours. And then we do it. And that feeling of satisfaction is really, really amazing to watch. We talked about what a circuit is. We have some basic electricity lessons, but all you have to do for this is draw a line with some copper tape and sticks and LEDs on it and put a battery in it and it lights up. So this is just a little slide we use to walk through circuits, how they work. If you have a smart class, someone says, where's the resistor? So I like to carry a little show and tell I carry a pack of resistors, I carry some other electronics so that when I do get those smart classes I have a little bit of extra stuff to talk about. And then what happens is they each get a page of the book, an illustration from the book. And they create a mock-up of the page. So if you're looking at this one, these two pages don't go together, sorry. But the illustration there, the kids are standing under the light bulb and so you wanna make the light bulb light up. And so you put an LED there, figure out the path and make that light bulb light up. The copper tape path you see there has three lights for a different page. Sorry, you're smart, figure that out. And then we make a little quick paper and copper tape button to press later when it's in the book. Remember this, remember this button thing. The second part of the day, we use all that information we've just learned about circuits and we do it again, but with Lillipad Arduinos and conductive fabric. So now we can use different things. We can make the page shake or make sound. In addition to lighting up, it can do lots of cool things. We originally had some other options here. We had a light sensor and a tilt sensor so that theoretically, things would happen as you turned the page but they were super fennec-y and didn't work consistently enough. So we took those parts out. We really simplified the program there. Another lesson learned, we let the kids figure out how to draw their own paths, how they wanted to make this circuit look and you end up with a lot of spaghetti, spaghetti made out of conductive fabric for kids who aren't quite figuring out exactly how to make the paths or some of them to get the path to work on the page with where the things are that needs to happen, where your button needs to be, where the action needs to happen. You end up with a really complicated path. Fun fact, Scotch tape does not conduct electricity. So if you're looking at this picture and going, your lines are crossing, Scotch tape on top of your fabric and you don't have a problem. So we would have on hand a sample page for each of the pages. Like if you just can't make this work here, just draw this path and you can do it because that's really important to make sure that everyone feels at the end of the day like they did it. They were able to do it with other people's help but they were able to do it themselves. So this time we just showed them the code. We don't have anybody write code anymore but they get to see that this is basically English. Once I explain what it's doing, even though they are programmers, they see that they can read it. They can understand what this says. And the idea was if we had time, if we have a class that's really on top of things, we could even edit things a little bit, change how things worked. So then while they're packing up, I start soldering in the wires to every page and it goes to a little board so they can plug it in. They can take the book back to the school and put it somewhere where everybody can check it out and it plugs into the wall and everything works. So now we have, sorry, I got my slides a little out of order here. Ah, sorry, 3D printed cover is what we have here. On that book, I got a little ahead of myself. You can also see all the wires coming out of the back. It's kind of a big mess. Carried one of these through an airport one time. Do you not recommend? But it is a super fun project. So I mentioned that you wanted to remember that whole button situation. So here's where things can sometimes get a little wacky. I'm not gonna have you watch this whole video of how the book works, but you can see what it looks like. Pages light up. If they have time, they can color the pages. So here's one. This page beeps in Morse code and you can see on the left, there's a legend so that you can figure out the mystery. It's kind of an escape room sort of story and I'll tell you more about that in a minute. This is where having a path for kids to follow helps because some kid did not see that the button should be on the flashlight button so it lights up the page. It should work more like this one. And if you wanna see how thick this book ends up, there you go. That's how thick this book ends up. I'm gonna say it's like five or six inches. It's kind of wild. So that's the book. And then we give them a take home kit, a batteries, more LEDs, some copper tape so that they can go home and recreate this themselves. So they can teach someone else so that they can share that knowledge and increase the collaboration. One of my favorite things at the end of a class, I always say, okay, what did you learn? What do you wanna tell me about what we've done for the last day or two days or how long it's been? And one little girl raised her hand and she said, I'm gonna take this kit home and I'm gonna do it with my dad and my brother because they're not gonna believe that I was able to do this. And that's really what collab is about. That was amazing. So to simplify that book project, we have, this is probably the project we've done the most. It takes that paper circuit from day one that morning project. There's just the copper tape and LEDs and a battery. And we make a little greeting card. So that image is the greeting card. There's another version of it as well. You press the button, some things light up. This you can do like in an hour and you can do it over Zoom. We have done it many times over video chat. You can do it together. It's quick, it's cheap. If you wanna put together a kit like this yourself, super easy copper tape, LED stickers, coin cell batteries, pretty much done. Design your own card. The next big project we did, and I think we only did this once. We did this in London at the Tate, which was an amazing venue. So the micro bit, if you're not familiar, is a cool little micro controller, I think created by the BBC. And most kids in the UK, I think they get them around 11 years old. They're already familiar with them. They kind of have a basic idea of what that thing is. And the way this worked was each kid chooses a micro bit. There's a harmony one, a low melody, a high melody and a rhythm. And they have gloves that connect to them. And then together they use the gloves with their micro bits to make music collaboratively with this thing that they've built. It's pretty cool project. So that was our in-person classes for three years, I think, and then March of 2020 happens. And we need to, what we want to keep teaching these classes, we wanna keep teaching kids collaboration. We want to have those connections in a time when it was getting really hard to have connections, but we can't fly to them and teach this in their classroom anymore. And that was a big challenge. All of those things that I've shown you, there's a lot of hands-on troubleshooting and standing with someone and helping them through it. We couldn't do that. It's really hard. We did some of the paper circuit cards and kids would hold the card up to the screen and try to help, I would try to help them see what was going on, but it's really challenging to troubleshoot. And then really fortuitously, we had a new breadhatter come in who had built an open source text game engine. And I will try not to get carried away talking about this one. I love it because A, it's free. B, it's super fun. Everybody loves games. And so they, we learn about how to build games, both traditional and video games. And then we build it together a little bit and then they play it. And to get out of it, you have to work together. So I talk them through games and the many different kinds of games there are and the many different types of games they've played and they never really maybe even thought about how many different types there were. Maybe we classify them to find the type of equipment you use. Do you need a board? Do you need cards? What do you need? Do you need nothing, just some people? We could classify them by what you're doing in the game. What kind of activity? Is it a trivia game? Is it a puzzle game? Is it Jenga? Is it dexterity? Or maybe we classify it by the type of competition. So in most games, you win. Everyone else loses. Or maybe it's in teams like charades, your team wins, the other team loses. There are some games where it's one player versus the rest of the players. So some kids have played Werewolf or Town of Salem on the app form, things like that. In some versions of Among Us, I think you could make that justification depending on how many imposters the game picks. We talked about that. But in our game, it's entirely cooperative. Inconveniently, the best example of this is the game pandemic. But a lot of folks are familiar with it. Or there's a Lord of the Rings that works this way. It's entirely cooperative. Either you all win together or you all lose together. And that's what our game is. So then we talk about how you might create your own game. What would you have to think about? What are all the things that you'd have to consider to be able to build your own game? And we talked through some ideas they might have. What kind of game might you build if you were doing this? We talked about how you could do it on your own. And there are games that were just built by one person or a couple of people, but mostly they're big collaborative projects. And so then I show them a board game that has a team of like 10, I think. And then I show them this. The number of credit rolls on Breath of the Wild, which was 829. So the parentheses is the number of people who had that job on the game. And this not only teaches them that this is a collaborative thing, that building a game is a group effort, but also that you don't have to be a developer to be a part of a game. Like there's some super specific stuff in here, vegetation art, very specific. And you can't do that without working with all of the other people on this list. And then it's time to build our game. So we have to start with what a text adventure is, what interactive fiction is. So I tell them about Zork, which I suspect more of you are familiar with. We talk about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game, which was one of my favorites. I tell them that Oregon Trail, which they probably are familiar with in a more visual form, actually was originally played on Teletype in 1971 and has been through 50 years of changes. It's a super cool example of a game that has really grown throughout history. And then I show them the code of the game that we're going to play and they helped me build it a little bit. So they get to write sort of inconsequential things like you can see here the school's name or the description of some stuff that's on a wall or what a spider might say because the spider isn't gonna lead you out of the room. And again, they get to see that they can't code but they can read this, they can understand what this does. And then when they get to create those little inconsequential things, each class gets to have their own unique version of the game that they have created, so to speak. They have that stamp on the game that they're going to play. They find it fascinatingly intuitive to play. So there's a little bit of this sort of old school text command, like, look, left kind of thing in Minecraft. I think that that helps a lot. But they actually, so I've played it with kids and I've played it with adults and the kids almost always get out of the game faster. On day two, after we've done all that, we talk more about how you would create your own game. We teach them again, you don't have to be a developer to be a part of a game, that there's a lot that you can do. We talk about planning it out on paper, planning out your game. We talk about planning out your art on paper. So these are the original drawings for space invaders from a fun documentary called High Score, if you haven't watched that. And then we walk through all sorts of open source apps you could use. This is a pixel art app. We talk about GIMP and Inkscape and why they're different. We talk about Blender. This is the Moonscapes and Mass Effect Andromeda Initiative. We're done in Blender. Some of the intro logos for Guardians of Galaxy 2 and Wonder Woman were done in Blender and they find that really cool. And then we talk about Godot, which if you're not familiar with it, it's an open source game engine. We talk about the audio tools as well, Audacity, Beatbox, Milky Tracker. We talk about tons of tools and give them the opportunity to find that piece of something that they would be interested in and then show them how they could bring it all together with Godot. So that's the game. I could talk about the game all day long, but I don't wanna run out of time and I have seven more kits to tell you about. So if you hit that URL, you can actually go buy these kits on SparkFun. And SparkFun also has the whole curriculum for each one of them. So you can go teach these classes with the information that is on there. So let me tell you about these kits. The first is the robot kit. It is exactly what it sounds like. You get to build a robot that can follow a line on the floor. It can scroll a message in its LEDs. It can do pretty much whatever you wanna program it to do. You could actually really expand on this curriculum in some super fun ways. The robotic hand kit is, again, exactly what it sounds like. So Enable, you can see there, it says after you build your kit, watch Enable. So I mentioned back in the beginning, open source stories are film series. Those tie into each of these kits. There's a film associated with each one of these. Enable is a program to create 3D printed robotic hands, prosthetic hands for kids who need them. The conversation machine kit is a visual communication device. And part of the plan here is that you can decide exactly what you want your conversation patterns to mean. So green probably usually means I agree or okay, yes, something like that, but you can work together to decide what each of these things means and use it in the classroom after that to help kids who maybe aren't as good at verbal communication, to give them an alternative method of communicating. The light sensor is one of the simplest kits. I think even younger child could pretty easily build this. And all it does is sense more or less light and spin the fan faster or slower. So you make a little fan blade, stick it on there and you're good to go. And then the last one is the farm kit. So farm is a bit of a big word here. You're growing some microgreens, you're growing some salad toppings. And the one thing that I don't like about this is, well, first of all, it's messy. You do need water. What I don't like about this is that you don't get to see the satisfaction at the end. You can't really be certain you've done everything correctly until they grow in a few days. And so by then I'm gone, I don't get to see that satisfaction. I can't help them if something has gone wrong. But what it is, it's a moisture sensor and so it lights up when you need to water your plants. And that about wraps it up. Again, the last thing that we always do is get feedback from the kids about what they think we could do to make the program better. And a lot of the improvements I've talked about have come from that feedback that we got directly from the kids. Each class has made the next class better. We also get feedback like this, which is the best. That is one of the, that's why I started this by saying this is one of the most rewarding things I've done at Red Hat. And it's not because I always dreamed of being a teacher. My mother was a teacher and that was never my passion. And to be honest, the first time someone said, hey, let's go teach sixth grade girls. And by that we mean Ruth, you go teach sixth grade girls. I was like, I barely like sixth graders when I was one. That sounds terrifying, but it's actually been really, really fantastic, really amazing. So if you are interested in teaching these classes, actually it should have been obvious to us from the beginning that we shared all of this with the world, but we did not initially. And one of the girls early on said, you should write all those down so that other people can do it. So we did. Those curricula are on SparkFun, like I said, for those kids that are there. The poetry and pie and the Breaking the Code book, and I believe the micro bit music gloves are in this GitHub repo. If there is something that you want that's not there, I admit I may not have solidly kept up with every detail over five years. If you find something missing, totally shoot me an email, tweet at me, whatever. Again, I'm Ruth at redhat.com and I will absolutely help you out in any way that I can because I'm happy to see these programs continue. So thank you for joining me today and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your open source summit.