Embedded - 22: Mincraft Is the New Apple II

Episode Date: October 9, 2013

 Jordan Hart from Digital Media Academy joined Elecia to discuss ways to make science, technology, and engineering fun for kids through Minecraft, Arduino robotics, and music.   DMA video: Robotics and Electrical Engineering with Arduino  TED talk: The child-driven education which describes the "method of the grandmother" teaching style. Georgia Tech online CS Master's degree Sincere apologies to fans of Gottfried Leibnitz, he had a truly amazing career that went well beyond calculus, read about it on Wikipedia. 

Welcome to Making Embedded Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. This is Elysia White. Today my guest is Jordan Hart. We're going to talk about robotics and computers in elementary schools. Hi Jordan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So what do you do? Well, I work for a digital media academy, and recently I came on as something of a school administrator to cover certain course categories. So our course categories range from filmmaking to programming.

And really, back in the day, you know, we're about 14, 10 to 14 years old now, depending on how you look at it. And back in the day, it was mostly kind of film and audio and stuff like that. More recently, it's gotten into being robotics, programming, some of the STEM education stuff. So those are kind of my course categories. So I'm kind of the STEM school administrator covering the teen versions of those categories, dealing with hiring, curriculum development, shepherding those courses out of our about 40 or 50 course lineup.

So you're working on designing what the course is going to contain and then working with the teachers to make sure that they understand that and they can teach it. Yep, exactly. You know, through our curriculum developers, I should say. So I guess I pull on like a core group of our teachers, the best of the best who develop the curriculum and maybe they have some education background. So I really work with them to develop it. They teach the teachers, the rest of the teachers, how to teach the curriculum.

So there's kind of this whole process of trickle down. And you mentioned robotics and programming. And I think I saw game design and music production, which isn't really a gadget, but it's kind of interesting. The communities get very tied, I've noticed. Yes, because we've had on the show, I think twice now, it, but you know, it's kind of interesting. So the communities get very tied. I've noticed. Yes. Because I mean, we've had on the show, I think twice now, the, the light based, um, theremin where you, you put your hand close and it makes a sound because it's a pretty easy thing to build, but it, it's musical. It's funny. You mentioned that, um, this last summer in our

adventures music production class, uh, they're messing around with garage band, I think. Um, but then we brought in, I brought in a leap motion were messing around with GarageBand, I think. But then we brought in, I brought in a Leap Motion. I'd pre-ordered the Leap Motion. So right when it came in, I brought it in. And there's the Leap Motion, if you're not familiar with it, is kind of like the Kinect, but smaller. So it's a motion, body motion sensor, but just to sit in front of your computer.

So you can hand gesture, kind of Minority Report style computer controls. And hopefully it will get us to that display we see on movies where you just kind of wave your hands and the computer does exactly whatever it was you were thinking. Yeah. Minority report is definitely one that everyone, that's the go-to for that type of technology. And that's, and it delivers that kind of experience. You can navigate around Mac OS, you know, I'm sure Windows too.

And, you know, it's interesting swiping, you knowiping desktop to desktop and Mac with your hands. But they have something very like a theremin, which I actually hadn't heard of until this summer when our music teachers saw the Leap Motion and they were like, oh, you could use that for a theremin. And I was like, oh. And after they described it, I was like,

I think there's an app for that. Sure enough, if I understand it right, there was like three-dimensional space and you could kind of move your hands around in the three-dimensional space and different quadrants elicited different notes and stuff. Does that sound right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So the leap motion can kind of pull it off with an app. And so did the kids see that? Oh yeah, they did. Yeah. We let them play with it and stuff. When they came back, this was just kind of at break, you know, geeking out with the teachers, which is really my favorite part of what I do. You know, we kind of work all off season, so to speak, all school

year to build up these programs and then summer launches. And it's like, all of a sudden we go from 20 people in a corporate office to 300 people on Stanford's campus. And it kind of is a lightning rod for geeks of all different types and they kind of mingle together. So you, you know, you come over with like a gadget and show that to a music person who's like, oh, I can do this with it, you know, and then we play with it and the kids come in and get all excited. And that's basically what I do for a living. Making kids excited about science and engineering is pretty cool. I'm in favor of that, of course. Right. So you work for Digital Media Academy, DMA. Yep.

And, and you're just kind of alluding to what they do, which is camps. Summer tech camps. Summer tech camps. Yeah, at college campuses all across North America. So we were at about 17 college campuses. Stanford's our biggest. We were originally part of Stanford 14 years ago

and separated off private about 12 years ago and have started spreading out to different college campuses. And sometimes they're home-based and sometimes the kids can stay at the college, even though they aren't college age kids. Right. Exactly. That is a kind of a big draw.

A lot of parents like to give their kids kind of the college experience a little bit. Is that what's happening? It's not just that the parents are going on vacation from having kids? I always thought it was the other way. But yes, definitely. They like the combination. I think they like the combination. Being in the environment, in the college environment, but also being with all of the other people who are learning.

Yeah. And learning about topics, you know, that they probably geek out about at home on the internet, but maybe only have a couple of friends at school, you know, and then suddenly you bring them all into a room and put them in one place. And it's really interesting, often from other countries and stuff, especially at Stanford. We get a lot of people in from Europe and Asia and seeing kind of them all mingle and geek out on one topic is really quite fun. That was exactly my experience when I attended college. Oh, really? Where was that? Oh, Harvey Mudd. It's a small engineering school in Southern California. Nice. And everyone was kind of like, finally, lots of geeks all around me. Oh, yeah. Lots and lots of geeks. Yeah. It is very different than normal. That's been my experience, like with Northern California in general, you know, I'm

from kind of the Midwest, and it was in the East Coast for a while. And, you know, I can't believe how many like embedded systems people, for example, I've met, like in the last two weeks, you know, whereas you find maybe one every couple of years, you know, where I was from. Yeah. And it's a small Valley. Uh, it really is between all of the billboards having URLs and ending up working at the same people, with the same people from company to company. It's, yeah, it's, it's an ivory tower and a microcosm of something, but, But let's get back to the kids. Fair enough. So you have camps for teenagers and for 6 to 12-year-olds.

Is that right? Yes. And the 6 to 8 are kind of on their own. You know, we do deal with the age range thing quite a bit. So 6 to 8 is what we call junior adventures. And they have a couple of programs that are geared toward, you know, students who are still figuring out the basics of math and writing and stuff like that. Um, and then our eight to 12 year olds, uh, or nine to 12 year olds kind of all go together, um, in our adventures program, we call it, and then there's our teen

program. And then we even have a small program for adults. I think maybe I want to go to the small program for adults, which, and, and you have like double E on Arduino is one of your camps. Is that right? Yeah. So that's an interesting one. That's kind of how I got into the position I'm in now. When I was freelancing, there were two courses that I wanted to develop. One was Minecraft and the other was Arduino.

Minecraft as a course. Let's stop there and really absorb having a video game be a course. And I see your shirt. It's the periodic table of Minecraft. So which of those elements do I need to do to make metal pants? I've heard a lot about the metal pants from the people I know who play the game.

Yeah, so metal pants. So you can't make items out of the blocks. You kind of make the world out of the blocks. And if you want to make a different type of attire for your avatar, then you have to do a texture pack. So you maybe, you open up the game and you open one of the files in Photoshop and you repixel art it.

I should have asked. You said Minecraft is a class. It should have occurred to me that you would be able to go on for this. No, it's going to be a few classes this coming year. No, no. Okay. So, so Arduino, let's go that direction instead. They're related with Redstone. Just real quick, last thing. Are you familiar with Redstone? I know that it's special. I mean, I know that when you hit a load of Redstone, it's like a big

thing. From working in an environment where most of the people played Minecraft sometime during the day. And I could hear when they got excited and they'd all rush over to one area. Redstone, let's mine it up. Well, that's because they wanted to run circuits.

You were probably working, were you working with embedded systems people? And electrical and mechanical, yeah. Yeah, so they wanted to run circuits. So Redstone is the virtual circuitry. So you've got basic logic gates you can play with in Redstone, you know, and or gates and stuff and you can build the others.

Oh, and somebody made a whole microprocessor. Yeah, they've made universal Turing machines. They've gone as far as making universal Turing machines. And I witnessed an 11-year-old who can make a calculator from logic gates inside of Minecraft. 11, I don't think I could do that at 11. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I was impressed.

So we'll move on from Minecraft, but it actually is related to EE a little bit. And we've thought about ways to kind of mix the two. For example, imagine if you could run some redstone circuitry in Minecraft and that would actuate Arduino in real life. So there could be real life consequences, you know, to the virtual game that you were playing

and kind of start to mix the realities a little bit. So we've looked at, we'll probably at least play with that, you know, with the kids a little bit. That may not be exactly in a class. But then to transition totally over to Arduino, that class was really just about making robots. So it was supposed to be kind of a higher tier offering to our Lego robotics classes that Eva's involved in. So that's part of why Eva and I were there that day at Hacker Dojo, where we met your friend.

Well, let's actually start that story just over a little bit. Jen, who's been a co-contributor on the show a couple of times, was at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, one of the creator spaces in the Silicon Valley. And you pay your bucks, or sometimes you don't have to pay any bucks, and you can use the facility to meet people and to talk and to work. They have a soldering station and whatnot. And Jen emailed and said, you need to talk to these people.

And it was Eva. Eva? Carinder. Carinder. Eva Carinder. Yeah. And so she does, she's been doing robot,

teaching robotics to kids for longer really than there has been a good way to teach robotics to kids since the late 90s. She was really a pioneer of figuring it out. And so Jen hooked me up, and I'm hoping Eva will be on the show sometime soon. And that's the little story there. So you and Eva were talking,

and Jen was actually supposed to be working on her startup, but we'll hassle her about that next time she's on the show. We distracted her slightly, but we may have hooked her up with one of my DMA kids to be her intern at her startup. So she was also getting a little work done for that. She needed one, too. Yeah, so potentially a QA engineer coming on. So Eva and I were sitting there talking about how we connect our programs, basically, because she'd been doing Lego robotics at DMA for seven years, and I'd been doing Arduino robotics at DMA for one year. So we were trying to figure out how do we elegantly get these kids. Our two classes were in what's called an academy, which is just a mashup of two of our classes kind of packaged together because they lead one into the other pretty well.

And so it went from her Lego robotics class into my Arduino class. And we kind of did it haphazardly, and we didn't connect all the pieces exactly together, you know, like Legos. So we were working on how to do that and how to really have an integrated program that also took advantage of the EV3. So the EV3 is the new Lego Mindstorms brick that is much more like a real computer.

It's a real Linux box. It's a 300 megahertz Linux box. Yeah, that you could load pretty much whatever you want onto it. That's the new brain of the Lego robotics system that just came out. So we're looking at how do we incorporate that and leverage that to transition kids into Arduino

and maybe even things like the Raspberry Pi. So that's what we were basically dealing with. And going over, for example, some really interesting creative stuff coming out from the maker community, like the Brick Pi, which takes a Raspberry Pi, puts another logic board on top of it that connects it to all the Lego robotic sensors and actuators and motors and all that stuff. So now you can use an 800 megahertz Raspberry Pi to drive all these incredible Lego accessories that are out there and easy to use. I like the way you get from Minecraft and Legos to logic gates and serious programming. Your camps have to be fun.

Yep, that's exactly it. It's not school. Right. They're all project-based learning. So we have to, our whole methodology, our whole teaching and learning methodology is to get the kids hooked on an exciting project that's going to drive them to want to learn, you know, through their own motivation, not just give them the tools to do that and giving them an exciting final project. For example, in Arduino, it was a final robotics competition. You know, they eventually, they built a robot, they hooked it up so they could control it with their computer, and then they competed. And each kid kind of designed their robot in a different way. So the whole time, all throughout the week, while we're sitting there, we're like, hey, you're going to compete competing with that guy over there. Look, he's got a claw. That one over there has got like a circuit breaker. The kid called it, it was a spinning, um, it was a spinning screwdriver

that he was using to rip up like the cables and wiring of the other computers, you know? So you have this like competition, but a pretty friendly competition, you know, going on all throughout the week and then finally culminates the last day right before they go home, they actually compete, you know, and one kid comes away the winner. So competition, um, that is a pretty big topic in, in teaching robotics because there's the first competitions. There are a couple other robotics competitions as though that's the only way you should do robotics. But most of the robots that I've ever built really didn't have to compete with anything. They just had to get the job done. And so, and, and I, I guess I'm the sort who, if you give me a competitive project, I will either compete or I will fail to compete and

just have fun. And really I'd rather have fun. And I, I guess I've learned a lot during my competition times, but I'm a mean competitor. Well, that's maybe even a life lesson that can be taught along the way. That's true. Share your toys. I've heard, yeah, I've heard interesting parallels brought up between geekdom and let's say sports culture, where dealing with those kinds of things is embedded in sports culture and how you kind of raise kids and train them as a coach. And, you know, have we always modeled that over on the geek side? You know, so compare the professional esports, the gaming, you know, as a sport that's popping up, like these kids, they learn their skills while being alone in their living room with no support,

you know, maybe 12 with headphones on Xbox, screaming expletives at the people they're playing with, right? That's like the, you know, and they're not necessarily taught the same healthy patterns that other people who are part of a community with older adults, you know, and stuff like that. So that's part of what we're kind of trying to hope to bring is to get these people in places and put them in competitions and teach them life lessons, how to work together, sometimes cooperative competitions, how to deal with success and failure and build on it and stuff like that. Those are some of the underlying lessons, you know,

that we really want to teach. It's not just about technology. It's, it's about socialization as well. Yeah, it is. And about, you know, socialization into a very interesting world where some of these kids are going to find themselves as 16, you know, better with modern technology than their parents. I mean, some of them by, you know, the time they graduate high school, able to command a fairly impressive hourly wage, you know, with skills, programming skills and whatnot that they've learned from the time they were little. Like, you know, there's a very different kind of world, you know, that they're coming out into. And a lot of these kids are going to be, I really believe are going to be inventors of this technology. I mean, we really just see incredibly brilliant kids come through this program who think of things I never would have thought of, you know. And so, yeah, we consider that a big part of our mission

is helping these kids develop, I guess, creative confidence as well as character building in general, certainly teamwork, cooperative ability. Most of this stuff occurs within the context of a team and collaboration. And so we're trying to bring more elements of that. For example, the Minecraft class, we had them do design games within Minecraft, and we had them break up into all the roles a game design team would typically have, like your programmer and your artist and your game designer, your architect kind of world builder. So we split them up into these roles so that they would learn those kinds of skills.

So when they go into a real development team, it's not just they know how to program, but they actually know what the process is like, what it's like to try not to overwrite someone else's files, even simple things like that. But those are the simple things that if you're just sitting there learning to program on, you know, Code Academy, you might not run into. So it sounds like you're getting kids who are already very technically minded. There's a wide variety. That's one of our biggest challenges. We definitely are

a magnet for those types. But then there's also plenty of kids who are coming because they want to be there. Maybe they just thought it sounded like a really cool summer camp to learn, to make music or something. And they're new. Right. They're noobs. Yeah. No, you've got, especially in the Minecraft class, that was a major issue, right? Cause you've got these gamer personalities coming in, right? The griefer, the flamer, the, you know, the troll, like all of these, you know, the, the, you know, the troll is someone who kind of messes with someone, the flamer is just kind of screaming expletives, and the griefer is the one that's blowing up your castle.

They go about destroying stuff, yeah. Yeah, they go about destroying things. They are the Loki of the Minecraft world. One of my god sons admitted that to me, and I explained it to me, and I said, that doesn't sound very nice. And he says, but it's really fun. And he's gotten thrown off a couple of servers. So I think, right. Yes. How do you get rid of the griefer syndrome?

Check this out. This is one of my favorite strategies. Um, so some of the kids, cause they get intense about security. Like if someone unknown pops into their world, like they'll all of a sudden warp to that person and be there. And often they've controlled the server. So that person comes on with less privileges. So they might all warp around sudden warp to that person and be there. And often they've controlled the server, so that person comes on with less privileges. So they might all warp around the person in a circle, warp them underneath the bedrock and leave them there and warp back up to the top. So every time that person returns to their server,

they're just stuck down under the bedrock, unable to mine and get to the surface. Well, that takes care of one server and one guy, but it doesn't teach them any lessons. It teaches them information security. Because there's other ways to do it, too. They can start running their own servers, which we did teach them to do

and we're going to do even more of this coming summer, and teach them how to put security plugins in that assign different roles, security groups, security roles. It's amazing what these Minecraft kids are getting into. They're learning about client-server architecture, security roles and stuff on YouTube videos, and then applying it to their own servers so they can play with their friends.

Wow, this is really big and an excellent way to get into computers. It is, yeah. You know, people, Minecraft, it's a game, metal pants. Right. But there's a lot more to it. There is, yeah, and a surprising amount of gadgetry, really, you know, when you get into it. Working with the kinds of technology you would use at least, you know, when making

gadgets. Neat. Yeah, for sure. So the Minecraft has worked well and Arduino robotics has worked well. Worked well as well. Yeah. And so, and we had pretty much a game at the end of that, you know, originally you were asking like, Hey, how does this competition thing go? Is this really the best way to be teaching kids? And why do we do it? And honestly, we put games, um, at the end as the carrot at the end of a lot of our classes. Um, because a lot of kids either want to create games or create a new way to play inside of one, you know, the robotics class, the Arduino robotics class basically became a video game in real life. They were hitting WASD on their keyboards, the same keys they use for Half-Life. They were using to drive a robot around in real life. And there were so many, there were so many eyes lighting up moments. There were so

many eyes lighting up moments as they went through the process, getting the robot to move, getting it to be controlled, getting it to be controlled correctly, getting it to not mess up, getting it to put balls into cups and stuff like that. There are tons of little eyes light up moments all the way along until they were finally able to compete. So I guess the bottom line is games drive motivation and they drive behavior. It's to some extent gamification. And, you know, my favorite quote with gamification is that games are the easiest ways to get people to act predictably without force. So if you want a class to kind of run on rails and have everyone on the same page, you know, I'd love to have a class where I could have a mentor for every single student and one could build a robotic arm and another could bring build home automation and another medical device and another musical device, you know, but that's very difficult to support. So but every kid can get on board with a game. So if you need a kind of quick, simple way to teach a lot of these things

to kids and to get them going, I highly recommend games. You do want to be careful of the negative sides of competition, but in general, it's a great way to motivate kids to learn technical skills. Yes. Uh, in part, I mean, even with adults, it's not just kids. True. You want to talk about gamification, you start looking at Fitbit and all of the different ways that they've tried to make health a game to adults, I think is pretty cool. Yeah, gamification is definitely spread. Games are not for kids. Yes.

Not just for kids anymore. But gamification is sometimes considered bad for girls. Oh, really? Because they don't like to compete. They'd rather cooperate. It's a very big stereotype, but it's a pretty entrenched stereotype. So I'm sticking with it for a little while. Well, let me challenge one part of it, at least.

I have heard, and I need to do my research on this. We should follow up with some research and maybe put some links in. But I've heard there are more female gamers than males and the stereotype is propagated for the same reason there's the stereotype they're quote no girls on the internet a quote that circulated a while back and the reason is is that in a lot of the online gamer communities if they admit to being girls they get hazed and so therefore they don't admit to it so there becomes this sense that it's masculine dominated when supposedly the stats say there's equal or greater female gamers out there playing these games. So I think in many cases they are just as competitive. And then the second part

of the answer would be that gamification can be more about cooperation. It just depends on how you design the game. It's true. I actually got to play a lot of one of the Mario games because there was a cooperative mode, and I collected little star bits. Exactly. So you do look at that aspect, the cooperative play as well as the griefer play.

Yeah. So, for example, when you're talking gamification, a lot of people challenge the leaderboard. The leaderboard is your traditional school-like competition. And when you think about it, we put all our kids into a game basically with school, right? They're all trying to get points. They're trying to score points on tests so that they can earn a better degree and therefore a better lifestyle than the kid next to them, right? So they're all playing this game with basically a leaderboard and that has come into gamification as well. But a lot of people do question, yeah, in many cases,

maybe the leaderboard's not the right way to do gamification. Well, and it depends on what the leaderboard is scored on. If it's scored purely on the amount of gold you've mined or redstone, that's a different thing. If it's scored on the number of people who come to your server because it's a safe and fun place to play, that's a different score. Exactly. There are different criteria for success.

And so leaderboards should, there should be 10 leaderboards, not one. Right. Yeah. So you could map them to different elements. And actually that idea you gave is one I might very likely use. And it can also, but even there, what I was talking about is it can be, like instead of a leaderboard, it could be a cooperative meter, let's say,

where like everyone in the class gets rewarded if they're friendly and lots of people come to their servers. So there could be like a player satisfaction meter or something like that. And that could be gamification and they're working on it individually. And maybe you don't even know who actually contributed. You know, they're just all on the hook. That's one type of gamification. Like gamification is a platform, a framework. Um, it doesn't need to be used in

these like super specific ways that can drive certain negative behavior and stuff. Um, so you could have them all, uh, for example, actually I know an embedded systems guy, um, Kent in Carlsbad, uh, CEO of M craft and he's been bringing Minecraft to the classroom to teach server skills. And that's exactly what he's trying to pull off is he's trying to leverage the excitement of playing a game at the end to get them in to building out the server and setting up the security roles and doing all of those things. But it's but it's very cooperative in nature. And he's let them kind of pick their final project. And so what they want to do is create a business around their Minecraft server. And I already know teenagers who do this.

I know a kid from France who does it. And they try to make their server really friendly for people to come in because they want lots of people to come and spend money. There's a plug-in for Minecraft called BuyCraft that integrates it with PayPal. And suddenly you can monetize your server. So this kid in France, people come to his server and they buy, they get some money to start virtual currency. And so they buy some land and they build something beautiful there. And if it's beautiful enough and the community likes it, then they buy it back for more money. And you can buy a bigger plot of land and make more beautiful things. So he's kind of gamified to drive beauty.

And this class wants to try the same thing and make a monetized server. And so there it's quite simple. If you grief at people who come to your server, no one's going to come to your server, you're not going to make money. So he can put up a little customer satisfaction meter almost and do exactly what you're saying to kind of drive cooperative behavior toward not being bad to people basically well there's also another aspect of gamification that you haven't mentioned and

that's a pet pedification where like tamagotchi that got you to take care of it and so there are some games that you have to kind of provide some ongoing attention, not necessarily affection, but you end up building affection and that gets you more hooked in to keep going. Farmville is a good example of that, although to me it's kind of an annoying one because you don't end up with anything good at the end. But that's more where Fitbit is going.

There's the competitiveness of Fitbit and Fitbit makes the internet pedometer. If anybody doesn't know that, but then there's also the people who say, I have to feed my Fitbit and that means I have to go for a walk and, and it's cute. And you get used to having a toy tell you what to do in a good way. That's a game, except it's not a game where there are winners or losers. It's a game where there's a happy little device in a good way. That's a game, except it's not a game where there are winners or losers. It's a game where there's a happy little device in a game where the device is crying. Oh, poor gadget. Well, so it's a single player game. It is. Yes. Yeah. It's a single player game. So yeah,

you're not trying to compete with someone else out there. You're just trying to make something grow or kind of nurture it. In that case, it's indirectly trying to get you to nurture yourself by nurturing this little device. Do you have any programs that use the pet aspect? Yours are all pretty short. That's usually a long-term bonding thing. That's interesting. Do we use games that kids kind of nurture?

I mean, in my Minecraft class, you could say yes, in a meta way. And that is their game was the game of the class was to design a game. Um, so I guess like, I don't know, is that a game, but we tried it. We treated it like a production studio. We came into the beginning and said, this is not a class. This is a production studio. You're on the hook to build a game this week. I expect a game from every group. They were split into groups of four, you know, like we expect you to play your role and build this game. And so we kind of were playing house at being a game production studio, you know, and so they nurtured and built their own game. Um, and each one of those had a different bent. Some were single or multiplayer, but yeah, they had to nurture and develop that product. Um, and eventually at the

end of the week presented. So their finale was either making a little bit of machinima movie inside their world, a game trailer basically for it. Um, or they just could present it directly and show it off, you know, and present it to their parents and stuff. So they had to kind of like nurture this project. So I guess in a, in a way, that's actually the, the way every DMA class works because they're all project based classes. That's the thing. Like we don't just kind of like teach you some stuff and then you take a test and go away. That's never how our classes run. You're always building something. It's I will create the next blank, you know,

so you come to create something. So really you nurture it all week. And it is at its core about the creative aspect. And the games just kind of come along with it, just like the Fitbit health is what you're going for. And the games just kind of come around to scaffolding. So they're not necessarily always even primary. They're just kind of there because they help when they're there. I can see that. I can see how the product ends up being less important than the learning because that's what you're there for.

Right. The journey is the destination, kind of. You've been teaching these classes for a couple of years. Are you starting to see repeat learners and actual progress between years, between camps? Yeah, that's a good question. We definitely do. We do have people who come back year after year. We have our staples. I can think of one kid, one of our game development curriculum developers has been teaching this kid, I think, for six years now. I think he's probably an upperclassman in high school and he's been coming to teen game design classes for six years. And yeah, the stuff that he can accomplish a week is very different than someone, you know, that can show up, shows up the first time. I mean, these kids start to be kind of student leaders. You know, they hang around a lot.

In fact, they often end up TAing with us. I was thinking camp counselors. If you're sticking to the camp metaphor, you reach an age where you stop going to camp and you start counseling at camp. And you're not necessarily a teacher. You're just helping. Yeah, so we have had some kids help like that. But actually, the vast majority who, quote, intern with us become TAs. And they actually really are TAs, and they do serve the function of them quite well.

I mean, if they've taken the class for a couple of years, they're probably very qualified to be a TA compared to, you know, a random college student, you know, that we just pull in. And, you know, even if they have some skills, these kids have been through the class. They really know the material. And I bet it's really good for them because the best way to truly understand something is to try to teach it. Yep. That's exactly it. The best way to learn is to teach. That's exactly it. And those kids, so those are the kids I think of that are most advanced, you know, um, for example, the kid who was our youngest ever TA, um, was a TA when he was 14 actually. And that was our youngest ever. And he's been TAing for about three years now. He's 16, owns a film production, his own kind of film production studio where he's

been, you know, really getting work for about four years now total. And so, yeah. And like, you know, he was, for example, unschooled and his parents have been very supportive and really helped him, you know, learn quickly and pursue his dreams with his extra time and stuff like that. And he's pretty much moved through high school and it's almost like, what's next, you know, learn quickly and pursue his dreams with his extra time and stuff like that. And he's pretty much moved through high school. And it's almost like what's next? You know, these are those kinds of advanced kids I'm talking about that they took DMA classes for years, then they taught DMA classes for years, they're pretty much done high school early. And it's like, where do they even go? What college is even ready to teach them film, you know, or something like that, that they're already an expert in, you know, and I think we're going to

start to see this in EE as well and computer science, um, especially as high school start teaching it more. That's less, let's us push even further. So that's the other thing. I guess these kids are getting better year after year because tech is getting bigger. They're getting better at it. They're more digital native. The schools are including more tech education. Um, and when they're not, there's more tech education online, even for free. Good point. Code Academy, for example. Yeah. And the multi-online Udacity. Udacity, the MOOCs. Yeah, the massively open online courses. Those are really amazing. I'm continually surprised at what's available for a click

of a button. It's not even what's available for $1,000. Or Georgia Tech has that $7,000 master's degree that's all online. I've been eyeing it up. Pretty cool. I might very well apply. That's much, much cheaper than, I mean, $50,000 isn't unheard of for a master's degree. I think they themselves said it's the equivalent of about a 40K degree. I think if you were to take it, they said it's the equal educational experience to their 40 degree, sorry, 40K normal masters, but for 7K online. I'm not sure I agree with that entirely because most of the schooling I've had, I mean, Mudd was fantastic for making me able to drink from a fire hose of information.

But the contacts I got there, the people, some of the courses do have a community component and you do get to know the other learners and the TAs, but I don't think you get to know them as well as if you're sitting next to them. It's not the same. Yeah, I agree. And there's been a lot of talk in the community about e-learning. I mean, we've been studying and researching e-learning and there is a lot of debate right now. Um, I would say it's kind of parallel to when everyone thought they were going to be able to work remotely. You know, when we first started like saying, Oh, we'll save a bunch of money if everyone works remotely. It's like, yeah, but then you're not in person. You're

not really collaborating. You're not seeing the person's reactions. It's not the same. Um, we started to realize something is lost and. And when you get real people together in the real world, some cool things happen that don't necessarily happen online. And, you know, lots of people admit to, hey, I don't really do the work for e-learning, I just kind of figure out how to get through it, like, that kind of stuff happens. So it's a model, you know, that is trying to figure out exactly where it stands. And my personal opinion, and you know, some of the stuff that we're testing at DMA is in line with the belief that there needs to be a hybrid approach, which a lot of people are saying

is that e-learning is great, but it doesn't entirely replace the need to gather together, you know, at least until we have better vr technology well in the need when you're doing robotics and learning hand skills putting together skills those are a little hard to get online sure a couple youtube videos on soldering will make you a better solder if you're a beginner but right if you are the sort that just holds it wrong and are never going to notice you're holding the iron wrong you're not going to get as good as you want to be. Because a teacher may watch you. If a teacher can watch you in person, you know, and be like, oh, no, this is slightly off, you know, and kind of give you that little advice from watching you and being there with you.

Yeah, that's really hard to replace. I mean, you could try with webcams, right? Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and my producer, I remember took a course, a drumming course that was online and the teacher would actually were webcams and they looked at each other and themselves on webcams. And I was pretty cool. VR is getting better. Um, but it's definitely only for people who can truly self motivate. Right. There's that too. Uh, which

sounds like most of the people, most of the kids you're working with are already go-getters, go motivate, want to go to a technical course during the summer instead of hang out at the pool or the beach or whatever. Absolutely. Yeah, no, many of them are, and they are very interested in driving forward as you know, we can, we can barely keep up with them at times. So are you looking at freeing any of your curriculum, making it so that other people can do some of this, looking at your own multi-online course? Yeah, so funny you ask that. We've been getting increasing requests as STEM education has gotten bigger in the schools

and has become more of a buzzword that every school administrator is at least thinking about. And as you've already tried to make it fun, which is what STEM education has been missing in the last 20 years. Once we, once they stopped letting us blow things up in chemistry class, I don't know why anybody would take that class. So you're making it fun again. And I could see how people really want that. Yeah, they do. And the teachers do. And the school administrators do. I think there tend to be STEM champions, you know, in a lot of schools and those are springing up pretty consistently. And they are coming to us and they're asking, you know, if they can use our curriculum. And the basic answer is we've never packaged it up in a usable form, kind of outside of our very

specific model. And in a consistent way that I think, you know, would be really useful to the community. So we are now looking at doing that and I can't promise exactly when that's going to become available. Um, but we would like to make some education materials free, um, you know, at least those who aren't making profit off of it, you know, so all the schools and whatnot, um, I'm sure it'd be some sort of creative commons license. I don't know which one, um, but we would probably license some of our stuff once we've packaged it up for that. And I am working toward that. That's one of the reasons I'm working with the guy Kent at MCraft is that he's trying this in an afterschool program using Minecraft to teach server administration.

And so we're looking at how we can maybe package that up together and make it useful to something, you know, make it useful to other schools. So that's a massive need. I think it's one of the biggest ways we can have a real impact. I really do because we can bring however many thousand kids into our classrooms, but there's a significant limit to that. If we can push what we've learned over 10 years or more, if we can push that out to all the schools, then they can hit millions. So it's, it's certainly something we're paying attention to and we want to do right. But when we're ready to do it right, and I hope that soon,

we will definitely make that stuff available. Well, cool. That's exciting to hear. DMA is a small endeavor still and you can't promise to do everything right now. But I like it when people who are trying to figure out how to teach something start to then share that information. Because teaching is tough.

Pedagogy is the word where you're developing a method to teach something. And, you know, I think that's what's changed over, God, over the millennia. I mean, at one time, the calculus that we teach in high school and the chemistry and the physics and the reading, all of these things were each individual lifetimes. I mean, Newton did not, he did an incredible amount of stuff. He was strange in his lifetime. But Leibniz was the other calculus guy. And he did a few other things, but he was mostly the math and the calculus and getting it sorted out.

Yeah. And now we teach it to 16-year-olds. Yeah. Or they can learn it themselves. In like a year. It's not a lifetime anymore. And so how you teach something is so important. And so I, how you teach something is so important and I'm glad you guys are working on that. And we are. And so we are working on our

pedagogy. Um, and I can give you a little insight into that. Um, we are working with the Stanford D school cause one of our curriculum developers goes there and as a part of that program. So the D school, yeah. So the D school is Stanford's design school. So it's applying design thinking to kind of everything and it's interdisciplinary. Um, you know, my friend Seamus was in their documentary filmmaking program, but they take, and he's become kind of the storyteller of their team. Um, but they're pulling people from all the different departments. Um, there's lots of people there. Uh, there's a fab lab right nearby and stuff. Um, but the D school is really largely whiteboards and post-its and it's an ideation lab. And, but There's a fab lab right nearby and stuff. But the D school is really largely whiteboards and post-its and it's an ideation lab. And, but there's a philosophy behind it. And so we're

pulling some of that philosophy of design thinking into our curriculum and how to get kids, you know, fully engaged and learning really quickly and pulling the stuff off in a week. Because we need really a new way of thinking and doing like what um, what in the maker community you might think of, uh, is like rapid prototyping, right. Is essential to keep pace. Now you can't not, you can't do the 10 to 20 year cycles. You don't know what's coming in 10 to 20 years. Like you have to, you have to rapid prototype. And so the same thing's happening in education. The stuff's all a moving target. We have to apply. There might be a session. I go to, uh, instructional design conference on applying agile methodologies to curriculum development.

So agile is a programming development philosophy how you quickly basically rapidly prototype software and get it into development and iterate it from there and stuff and trying to take that and bring it in. So we're trying to bring this design thinking and iterative thinking and agile and these things and bring them into education especially tech education because it's changing so fast. But how do you decide which programs are valuable and worthwhile?

I mean, some of that is the iteration and being able to do that quickly. But how do you judge a class on efficacy? You mean our courses? Like, how do we judge our own courses? Sure. Or courses I might take. Well, I was thinking more for your courses, the courses you offer. Right, the right the course we offer well so it's interesting you asked that because right now we're going through the process of evaluating all our courses and choosing new ones like literally i

think today might be the deadline um and uh i like to be topical yeah very relevant because uh we release our summer 2014 course catalog on novemberst. So we're at under a month now till our course catalog gets released. And most of those decisions have been made, but we're still just kind of fleshing out the details. But there's a lot of ways, you know, we look at it. Certainly registration is a big one. I mean, demand is this really what the kids want to come and take? And then of course, satisfaction, you know, we definitely do all the surveys and we'd say like, well, were they satisfied? Did they clearly, they read the description and thought, yeah, this is relevant. Like either the kid thought I want to learn this,

I want to make this or the parent thought like my kid, you know, needs to learn about this. If he's going to, you know, have a good job or something in the future. So clearly they like that. So that's one side of the story. And then the other side is, you know, what they got out of it. Um, and then the third way is more qualitative, which is, I just got done, you know, what they got out of it. And then the third way is more qualitative, which is I just got done, you know, all my instructor debriefs where basically all the courses that fall into my category, I just gathered as many of the curriculum developers, especially in the teachers and even some TAs as I could like into a virtual meeting. So we could debrief and talk about, you know, how it went and stuff like that.

So, I mean, there's no, there's no real easy answer. You just kind of have to use qualitative and quantitative. Um, and yeah, I don't think you're going to be able to get these kids star test results in order to figure out if attending the camp made them better in some way. Oh, I see. Yeah. Well, the other way I think to look at that is what they made, you know, when I'm interviewing someone to see if I want them to teach one of my classes, I have a simple question. Okay, you want to teach Arduino? What have you made with Arduino? Tell me about some projects you've been involved in, stuff you've made.

Right? So these kids come away with stories. So I would say to some extent it's these stories they can look back on. And so we've recently created createthenext.com where they can post up their profiles and show off what they've made, what classes they've taken, even things they've done outside of DMA. I was going to ask, do the kids keep working on their projects outside DMA? Yeah. So a lot of them do. And we want to really give them a place to talk about that so we can see what they're doing. Yeah. We really want to engage with that and see what they're coming away with. Especially one of my favorite things about Arduino is it's cheap. So the Lego.

Yes. Oh, this is what I love about Arduino. So the Lego kits, like the kids come and play with them and then they go home with all these skills they can't use unless their parent can drop, you know, $400 on a Lego kit. Um, and Lego has done amazing things making it accessible, but Arduino is so cheap that we can just charge a hundred dollar lab fee and the kid can go home with the kit. With the Arduino board, with the breadboard, with a couple of little toys to play with. And then for five bucks every week, they can get a new motor, a new this, a new that. And you can build something pretty awesome after. Yeah.

Once they have the foundation, right. We want them to go home with things they can tinker with. And so the price point on this stuff is just getting mind blowing. I started to look at the microprocessors as well. Of course, the Raspberry Pi down as low as, I think, 25. The BeagleBone Black, a major step up for 45. Oh, I've been trying to decide which of those I'm going to get.

And I think the Beagle is not just because I have a Beagle dog, but also because it is a beautiful piece of technology. It's definitely my favorite of the two. And Raspberry gets a lot of press, but wow. It was first to market. It was first to market on really making microprocessors accessible and easy to use. And they got out in the community, and I appreciate what they did. However, they're not on a completely open source stack.

Exactly. Yeah. So the hardware is not all open source. BeagleBone just puts out all their schematics and you can do whatever you want with it. Um, so that's one of the major reasons. Uh, it's also twice as fast. That helps. Um, but I think you get 720 video instead of 1080. Um, it's one of the big kind of downsides. Right. But yeah, so if you're not a video person. Yeah. Right. So, um, yeah, I favor the BeagleBone as well. I think it answers a lot of the problems that the community had with the Pi, even though, again, love the Pi. Yeah.

Yeah. And now there are even some devices coming out. I've seen a quad-core processor with two gigs of RAM for about $100. I saw a board that I could not believe. Don't you just want to take that back to 1985 and say, here is your future? Right. Absolutely. For me, what it is, it's like an echo of what I went through.

Almost like in mobile and web, we had like an echo of the old gaming industry. So with this kind of hardware, it's like an echo of the computer hardware I was playing with as a kid. You know, what we were playing with as a kid. What we were playing with in a desktop then, we can play with in the palm of our hands now, basically. And now it's actually, gosh, when you talk about a quad core with two gigs, that's only, what, five or ten years ago? So it's not even that far back now. So I think we're about to wrap up the show.

I do have one more question for you. Outside your school, outside the camps, where can parents start? How can they do some of this? And especially the non-technical parents, it's hard to say, go buy an Arduino and have some fun if you're not the sort of parent who knows how to do that. Yeah, absolutely. So there are a couple of answers. I mean, one is there's lots of programs out there where you can go educate yourself, of course. But there's, I think, a deeper answer, which is if you really want to illustrate to your kid how to engage with this stuff, then you do need to some extent become a maker yourself. And that doesn't mean you need to learn to program, though I think almost everyone should

probably try to learn a little bit. It's so important. But there's lots of ways to be a maker. And if you kind of catch the spirit and get into the community, then you can share that with your kid, you know, take them to Maker Faire, introduce them to other, you know, adult mentors that maybe have those skills, bring them to programs like DMA, after school programs. There's a lot more out there than there used to be. And then, you know, the age old answer of Google it. I know that's silly, but like, that's almost everything I know how to do started with a Google search. You know, a lot in a lot of these avenues, the things that I'm teaching kids these days, wasn't my major, it was what I Googled, it was what I was interested in. And once you get in the habit of that, and you start

following really good online resources, it's amazing what you can pull off without actually being an expert in the tech itself. into basically to learn how to develop the course. And there's really great materials out there, much better than there used to be. And I think you need to engage with it yourself and get passionate about that and then pass that passion onto your kids. And you'll barely be able to hold them back. They'll be figuring it out on their own. They'll be teaching you. You know, one thing I saw on a TED talk, this guy was getting Indian children with no access to technology to figure it out basically on their own. And the only thing he did was set up a computer in these little villages. He called it like a hole in the wall or something. And then it kind of worked. And the one thing he did to make it work better was you would find kind of a quote grandma in the village. He called it, he would find someone who would kind of like go up behind these kids and go, Ooh, that's interesting. What are you doing? Oh,

what are you making? Oh, what does that do? And just, oh, wow, you pulled that off? Wow, that's impressive. You know, just that kind of encouragement, just being into it, drove these kids that much further. And then they started figuring out really impressive things on their own, just with the internet. Very cool.

Well, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us. Yeah, for sure. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. And you've been listening to Jordan Hart as he teaches me that Minecraft is the new Apple too. This show making embedded systems is expertly produced by Christopher white

this week and every week. Thank you particularly to Jen for connecting me with Jordan and thank you for listening. My producer, uh, says to me that I have to apologize to Mr leibniz he did a lot more than i gave him credit for so those of you who are leibniz fans i do apologize we'll have a link to his wiki page how amazing he was and i will read it i promise please send your questions

comments and not your hate mail about leibniz to me via the contact link on embedded.fm or through the email show at embedded.fm. One last question for those of you still listening, something I've been pondering for myself, trying to find an answer. What do you want to be when you grow up?