 So, my name is Ryan Bosch and I'm going to talk about how to encourage kids to code. This is a little bit about me. I like a lot of things, as you can see, but I also like coding a lot. And the reason why I like coding is because of my amazing family, which my mom and my dad are both here. That's my brother. And my mom and dad have been really great in teaching me the importance of code and how it can be such a great tool to have in your life. And at first, I didn't wake up one day and decide, I want to code because I don't think anybody really thinks that first. Because, yeah, anyways. But I'm going to be talking a little bit about code and what can help make coding a little more fun to do for maybe kids my age or youth, as you could say. One of the basics that we're going to talk about is ASA coders, which is a coding competition that my dad runs. We had one last year and I was a photo from it and I answered two questions during this slide. The first one is, is coding fun? Now, that's a little hard because for me personally, I don't think of the word fun when I think of coding, but I think it's really great. And as you can see in the photo, the kids who seem to be participating are laughing and having fun with friends and battling it out, which I'll talk about later. The next question is, what is the goal of free coding? For answer that question, I have to answer the question, what is the goal? What is Free Code Camp? Free Code Camp is where students can learn HTML, CSS, and eventually JavaScript. And this allows them to qualify for the ASA coders final, which is the final for the coding competition that my dad runs. Now, Free Code Camp is actually a great website, which I have actually done where it teaches you how to code pretty easily and it gives you step by step and you get to do it by making an app, which I'll talk about later. This is the first screen that you see when you start your journey of learning code on Free Code Camp, which it tells you to write Hello World, but I wrote Hello, talk to the ASCAs, we're here. So later on, you're going to be learning how to make a cat photo app because we don't already have enough cats on the internet. And as you can see, the code is a lot, this is actually my code that we took from the website when we were doing it. But it's really great website because it builds on to your code while you're doing it so it doesn't start over like when you keep on going forward. It gives you instructions, you run the tests, it's really cool, really fun, keep on making really cute cat pictures of things, it's really cool. So what I talked about is something that actually happened with me when I was going through Free Code Camp, I came to a part where my code had an error in it and I didn't know what it was and I looked, couldn't find it, so I stopped because I felt really mad that I didn't get it. And I went away, came back a day later, still didn't know what was wrong, came back three days later, still didn't know until I finally just said, you know what, I'm going to ask my dad because he knows a lot about code. And he actually sat down with me and showed me what I did wrong which was like a little thing that I read incorrectly and I continued. But what the thing I took away from this was why was this not as obvious as everything else? And I think it was because, you know, coding is awesome but it's not super duper easy. Some people have a talent for it, some people don't. But it is a great tool and I think that if you come to a point where you can't go forward for me personally, it's hard to kind of like ask for help but if you do, you can continue on and you can go further. And so that was a really great point. And later on, if you go through FreeCodeCat, I haven't made sure yet but you get to JavaScript where they teach you and it's the same as Python which was before and it gives you step by step and you add on to your code until you make a cute cat photo app. Now if you don't want to make a cat photo app, here is another website which I love. Like this is like the coolest website in my opinion. I have played this, I just don't know how long I've played this. But anyways, it is such a cool game and I'll tell you what. It has multiple levels and islands that you can have journeys on and you can actually build or choose your own hero which I chose, Captain Daniel Weston. You can choose your own language and you go through different challenges and you can save people and prisoners, free prisoners, defeat bad guys. But this is the first level or so after you get started where it just gives you your hero, it gives you a little maze thing. It gives you a gem and it gives you spikes. And it says, move your hero to the gem and it's very basic from there. You just do that and it goes done and it gives you success. Because, yeah. And then later on it adds on, but it's a really fun game to kind of enjoy and play and I think that because it's so cool it has been a great website to use for our Ace of Coders Finals because it is just a video game and it's fun where you can go and you can solve problems and it's just a really great way to interact coding with fun. Now, the Ace of Coders final that we have is a little other part of Code Combat and it's like Dota 2 which is like a free to play multiplayer online battle arena and yes it is as close as it sounds. What we have here is the schools that participated and last year's Ace of Coders coding competition. And as you can see, two schools, when they get together the winner would go on and on and on until you get first, second and third winners. And that is what they were actually watching as you can see all the children laughing and pointing and it was really cool. I'm actually going to show you a video of one of the battles that was actually won and played during the competition. Oh, no. Okay, okay. If I can explain a little bit about what happens is that there's four points as you can see and there's two sides. There's red and there's blue and there's multiple codes that you can do and multiple players you can do but the basis of the battle is that the winner has all of the points. You can put different little people to your points and you just find until you get there and it's just a cool thing. This year's Ace of Coders competition and there's a Coder competitions happening this year and we already have 254 who have already registered but I think that this is a great opportunity to involve people that you might know, like young people because it is such a great atmosphere to be a part of. I was actually there as my first Coder competition I have ever been to. I was not involved but since my dad was running it I went and I watched and it was just really cool seeing how both teams would be in the front when their competition was happening and they would all be rooting and everybody in the audience would be like, boo, yeah and when people would get killed or people would be like boo and it was really, really cool and I really think that it's such a great way for kids to learn how amazing coding is. There might be students in different schools who don't know that they have even been to the Coder or have never been introduced to the idea but because of these competitions they can actually have a part and be a part of a group who know how much coding is fun. Now, I actually have homework for you guys and I know it's a little weird since I'm younger than you and I'm getting you homework but my homework for you is that at a minimum spend five minutes to walk a child you know through the first level of code combat and if they like it, if they don't like it, that's fine but if they do, they could be better prepared for the jobs of the future and I don't know what the jobs of the future are going to be and I don't know what I'm going to be doing in the future but I do know that technology is going so many places right now and that in the future technology might have a place in every single job that there is and learning how to code and knowing how to code it won't hurt because that's really great. Anyways, that's all. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave me a comment at facebook.com. I hope you enjoyed my talk and thank you all for listening and since the end of my presentation I would like to leave you with one final note. Live long and prosper. Forgive me but I'm kind of late. I don't know code of college. Sorry. Starting age, I think... Secondary school this year. All secondary school students for the junior category for the competition at least and JC students for the senior category. We've seen kids as young as six years old play code combat though. We were at some friends house and this kid was playing and he liked it enough that level four mom was really saying it's time to come to dinner and he's like, no mom I can't, I'm coding. It was so awesome. This is really weird. My kids weren't actually allowed to start coding for quite a while because I figured they have their whole life to learn how to do math and follow rules and solve for X and so for most of their primary school years it was go sing, go music, do all create, create, create, create, create and I knew eventually school would force them to learn calculus and algebra so sure enough one day when I saw them both doing calculus and algebra I said, okay we can do a little bit of code. It's in our flood. You know the questions for Shannon? Code Academy, so I like Code Academy. I tend to use just about everything but Code Academy. No, just because of how easy it is to work with people like Code School. I like Code School. Free Code Camp is completely open source and completely free. Both Code School and Free Code Camp and even Treehouse have nice API so if you're an educator or someone who runs national competitions it's easy to see what people have on their public profiles and Code Academy is just each time I've engaged with them I've never quite come away feeling that I could all the time students spent would be on a public profile that they could take with them forever and use with other things. I think if you're all 100% Code Academy that might be a little bit different. But yeah, so that's what we usually use these days in most of the schools I work with both undergraduate masters and at the JC and secondary school level our Free Code Camp, Code School, Code Combat and then any custom things that have been built in Singapore that we want to include in a single competition. Alright, any questions about Shannon's talk? I don't know.