The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Computer Science without a computer (Interview)

Episode Date: June 20, 2018

Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo talk with Tim Bell, the founder and creator of CS Unplugged, a collection of free teaching material that teaches computer science through engaging games and puzzles. They talk to him about where this program came from him, the need for computer science in today's K-12 education programs, how CS Unplugged fits in, and how you can get involved.

Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at Changelog because of Rollbar. Check them out at Rollbar.com and we're hosted on Linode servers. Head to Linode.com slash Changelog. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Airbrake is full stack, real-time error monitoring. Get real-time error alerts plus all the info you need to fix any error fast. And in this segment, I'm talking to Joe Godfrey, CEO of Airbrake, about why getting to the root cause of errors is so important. Look, Adam, to me, root cause is everything. All software has bugs. We all know that.

And when you find a bug or when you can't find a bug, the amount of time that typically gets spent trying to chase around and figure out how to reproduce the problem and what's the cause of the problem, even like what part of the code kicked it off or what sort of actions drive it. I mean, that's hours and hours of time wasted spent chasing your tail

instead of actually fixing the problem, improving the customer experience and getting back to building more features, which is really what your company is all about. So to me, being able to really understand like what is the root cause of this problem is the key factor to being able to solve that problem and get back to doing what's most important, which is building new features and improving your product. And quite frankly, fixing the customer experience is broken as long as that bug is out there. All right. Check out Airbrake at airbrake.io

slash changelog. Our list is controlled Airbrake for free for 30 days. Plus, you get 50% off your first three months. Try it free today. Once again, airbrake.io slash changelog. Welcome back, everyone. This is the changelog, a podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of open source. I'm Adam Stachowiak, editor-in-chief the changelog a podcast featuring the hackers the leaders and the innovators of open source i'm adam stachowiak editor-in-chief of changelog on today's show we're talking to tim bell the founder and creator of cs unplugged a collection of free teaching material that teaches computer science through engaging games and puzzles we talked with tim

about where this program came from his passion for, the need for computer science in today's K-12 education programs, how CS Unplugged fits in, and how you can get involved. So, Tim, I think the way to start this might be one day we were in what I would consider an after show. We were recording a podcast. It was over. We were all chatting afterwards. And the conversation came to be essentially, how do we share software development, programming, computer science with kids? And I was like, I don't know where to send people. And someone linked up CSUnplugged.org.

And I was like, wow. And so I immediately was like, we've got to talk to whomever's involved in this. And we emailed and you responded back. Now here we are. So that's essentially how I found out about this, this awesome thing you're doing, but your story goes kind of far back. So maybe kind of tee up what this program is and, you know, kind of who you are. Okay, cool. So yeah, I mean, basically it started because I had exactly the same question. But for me, it was when my son was five years old, which was back in 92, which many of your listeners might remember. But in 1992, he was five, they were having parents

along to their classes. And just to talk about what we did for a living. And at the time, and I still am a computer science researcher and lecturer. But the week before me, they'd had a cop along who brought along a cop car, which the kids got to play off the sirens and all that kind of stuff. And before that, they'd had a nurse. I'd heard from my son. And she'd brought along fake blood and bandages. And the kids had all got wrapped up and all that sort of stuff. Hands-on stuff. Nice. It was, yeah, and the kids were raving about it, and it was really fun.

And then the next week, the parent to come along was me, a computer scientist. And at the time, and for a long time after that, my main research area was data compression and, you know, how to make data smaller and all that sort of thing. And I thought, how do you explain this to kids who don't even know what data is? Back then, didn't own a computer, nothing like a data projector in the room or anything to demonstrate things. And so I don't know why, but I just had this idea, well, let's not worry about the computer at all. Let's try and get to the heart of what I think about, what I care about when I'm solving problems, when I'm trying to develop a new program for something.

And so I sort of peered things back and I thought, well, what are the key ideas here that we're looking at? And just looked at a whole lot of topics that exercised my mind as a researcher in computer science and tried to think, well, how could that be transferred into a game or an activity or something like that? And came up with, I don't know, three or four activities. Went along to the class. And it was just, so it was using nothing but cards and paper and string and chalk and things like that.

And we had a great time at the class. In fact, it went so well that they invited me back, which was a very pleasant surprise because I thought it might have been one of the least interesting talks that the kids might have had. And so I ended up going back regularly and developed a whole series of these things. And then back then I came across a colleague on the internet who had been doing the same thing in Canada, Mike Fellows. And Mike and I pulled ideas, we put them together, and we said, oh, we should get together. And so I went over to Canada for a month, and we sort of tried to put it all together in a book, and came up with, you know, about 20 activities like this. And sort of, it seemed really good. And so we sent it off to some publishers and said, you know, here's something a bit different. What do you think? And we actually sent it.

It was rejected, I think, 27 times by publishers, which is the best thing to happen. And the reason was that they couldn't place it. So we sent it to a computer publishing place. And they say, well, you're not using computers. It looks really cool. And by the way, can I keep a copy to do with my kids? But we can't publish it to a computer publishing place and they say, well, you're not using computers. It looks really cool. And by the way, can I keep a copy to do with my kids? But we can't publish it in a computer book. And why don't you send it to our education department?

And so I send it to them and they'd go, well, it's obviously about computers. It's got computer in the title. And so, you know, and anyway, we got sent around in circles and we got more rejections than Harry Potter, which I'm very proud of. But the cool thing about that is that in the end, we thought, well, because back in the 90s, open source and publishing on the internet wasn't a big thing. And in fact, the web was really just starting to become a thing. And the public didn't really have access or teachers and so on. But we put it up on an early form of the web and just said, well, help yourself, everyone.

It's free. We think it's a good idea. And it just sat there for probably about a decade. And a bunch of people around the world started using it and came across it one way or the other. But round about, I think it was 2003, the ACM, which is the national body of computer scientists that set curricula and things like that, started looking at K-12 curriculum. And kind of almost unknown to me,

they probably emailed and asked me about it, but they published a thing about saying, we think there should be a K-12 curriculum for schools. And by the way, here's some examples of what to do. And about two thirds of their examples were straight out of our material. And so suddenly everyone was contacting us and saying, oh, tell us about this method and tell us about your philosophies and so on. And of course, at the time, we'd just gone back to our day jobs and weren't particularly working on this. And so the things suddenly started taking off. And then even more so, I guess, in the last eight years or so, because all around the world, countries are starting to say, well, how do we introduce computer science or computational thinking into schools? And this became a really easy touch point for that because of not using

computers, it took us a while to realize exactly what we've done, but it means that it's using things that teachers are familiar with. And so when you say, oh, put this on a card and draw this on the ground and all that kind of stuff, they go, well, I can do that. But if you say, oh, you're going to teach computer science, particularly if you think about primary school teachers, elementary school teachers, they go, well, hang on. I haven't been trained in this. It's probably all this thing called coding,

which sounds really mysterious. I'll probably have to install something on a computer. And when I install it, it probably won't work because then I'll have to install something else and reboot. And then I need permission from the school to install it. And I can't be bothered. But when you say just print out these three cards and start doing stuff with them, then it sort of becomes a very easy entry point. So it's sort of evolved from an outreach thing for academics like me to go into a school and just talk to our kids or, you know, try and drum up a bit of interest to something that is being offered for teachers who have been told that this is now part of your curriculum.

This is basically an accident. It is, yes. But intentional, but it kind of accent to how you got to where you're at. I think the, since you mentioned Mike Fellows, the quote that, from what I understand, was a breakthrough quote to get teachers and administrators to kind of understand what you were doing. Like you said, there's no computers involved. It's, you know, no computers required. The quote was, computer science is as much about programming as astronomy is about telescopes.

And I think that makes complete sense because you don't really need a computer to do this. You can just simply have the printable materials and different stuff like that to hand to educators and reduce all those barriers. I think that's such a happy accident, honestly. Yeah. And I think Mike's quote has been a really useful one for helping people understand what we're on about. And by the way, probably some of your listeners are thinking, hang on, didn't Dijkstra say that? Because quite often it's attributed to Dijkstra. So just as a little side thing, Dijkstra did say it, but he had actually met Mike quite early on and had that discussion. And Dijkstra never claimed it was his own quote or anything, but when you're famous and you say

something, everyone attributes it to you. So that's kind of the history of that quote. And Mike, his analogy actually went further too. He said, in as much as chemistry is about test tubes or cooking is about stoves and things like that. But yeah, I often draw that out because if you think about astronomers, they're always using telescopes, they're buying telescopes. They want money for telescopes. They become experts in telescopes. And so you might think that they have to be good at telescopes. You know, that's really, really important. But it's probably not why they're astronomers.

You know, they might be the odd telescope geek who goes, oh, I have to do these star charts just so I get to use a telescope. But, you know, we suspect that most of them are in it because they want to explore the universe. And it's the same with computer science. You know, of course we do programming all the time. And programming is how we put wheels on the great ideas that people have. And, you know, in those couple of decades since we started doing this, there have been all sorts of great ideas that have happened, you know, search engines that search billions of pages in a fraction of a second or sites that store videos, you know, any video that anyone wants and, you know, social networks that let people communicate at, you know, anywhere around the world and podcasts and, you know, just so many things that people have come up with. But the things that make them work, sure, you need a program that's actually making it happen.

But if you do it the wrong way, then it won't be a thing. And a good example is the most popular website in the world, which is Google. It's just a text box and a button. So from a programming point of view, that's not very hard to implement. But we know that what's behind it, the computer science, how do you search billions of things in a fraction of a second? You need to start thinking about different algorithms and processes. You need to think about communication protocols, security.

How do you stop people trying to bring your site down or trying to make their website the most popular one on the search engine and things like that. And so suddenly there's a huge amount of stuff that you need to know or trying to make their website the most popular one on the search engine and things like that. And so suddenly there's a huge amount of stuff that you need to know that you're going to program. Yeah, so the telescope analogy often, you know, for the general public, I think, helps quite a bit there. And it's not to say that, you know, it's anti-programming or anything like that,

but it's simply, I think traditionally for computer science, we've used programming as the gateway to computer science. So, you know, enroll for computer science and you'll learn a whole year of programming and then we'll start showing you some cool stuff you can do with it. And it would be a little bit like saying, this thing called astronomy, you probably don't know what it's about, but trust me, it's really cool. But first of all, learn about telescopes for a year or two, and then we'll tell you what it's actually about. And so what I've come to realize that Unplugged does is it kind of skips that and it says, let's have a look at some stars. Let's have a look at what's really going on.

Is that cool? Okay, now you're going to have to suck it in and learn how to use a telescope or learn how to program to really make stuff happen and and i think one of the important social things there is that um with the traditional view of we'll learn coding learn programming first and then we'll show you some cool stuff is that it it blocks out a lot of people who can't see the point of programming or coding uh and whereas if you can show them the point, then they go, okay, I will. This is worth learning. It makes the journey worth it because you can kind of like deal with the pain because

you have some sort of motivator. Yeah. Yeah. And also I think one of the things that, of course, we get a lot is that the gender difference and also cultural differences and who gets involved in this. And we tend to filter out the people who aren't so interested in the machine and aren't so interested in programming. And one of the mantras that I try to push particularly with teachers is that we don't

write programs for computers. We write programs for people on computers. And so the people who will write good programs are the people who understand people. And then suddenly that changes some of the stereotypes a wee bit. And because, you know, the assumption is that if you love computers and you're really good at programming, then you'll write great programs. But in actual fact, they might be terrible for people to use because you haven't thought about the person. You need people who are good at both. Yeah, so that's a big story coming out of the telescopes. But it is a very useful analogy. It's highly relevant.

I mean, it makes sense because you remove, one, a huge cost burden, especially if you're targeting primary, like you said, K through 12 or bringing it to a younger audience or that kind of thing, you remove a ton of, at least I'm assuming, a ton of the cost because computers cost a lot of money. Not computer-acquired, yeah. Buy and maintain, it's a lot of expense. Well, that's right. And I think especially with it coming into school curricula and it's happening around,

someone told me there's 50 countries around the world that are introducing this into their school curriculum you know their grade school and the a lot of when i talk to people who are doing it they go oh now we're going to have to buy a computer for every kid and so on now again you do need a computer i mean in the end if you're not writing programs then you know you you haven't quite got your fingers dirty and you're not really getting the whole thing. But one interesting bit of research that came out recently is that people, they tried, I can't remember the exact numbers, but I think it was something like a series of about eight

weeks on programming for young kids using a language called Scratch, which is really popular for younger kids. It's a block-based language. And they tried two variations. One was to spend the full time doing nothing but teaching them how to do things in Scratch. And the other variation is they spent about a third of the time doing nothing but unplugged material and then the remaining two-thirds teaching them about Scratch and programming. And at the end, they found that both groups were equally good at programming,

but the group that had done unplugged first used a wider range of blocks or commands from the system and had a much better understanding of just some of the deeper elements of what they were doing, which actually was, again, not an intentional thing, but it kind of makes sense because the unplugged thing gets people thinking about what's the big purpose? What are we trying to achieve here? And I think often when kids get put in front of a computer, they just go, OK, tell me what I have to type. Show me the model. I'll copy it onto the thing and it's finished. And then I've done what I'm required and I'll move on.

But by getting them away from the computer, you're actually getting them to think about the big ideas. And I think one of the key things with Unplugged, too, is that, I mean, we're not getting them just to sit. People go, oh, that would be so cool. You could have one kid could be the CPU, and one kid could be the input-output unit, and they could pass this on to that.

That's so boring. And being a computer is quite boring. I don't know if you've ever tried it, but it's quite a repetitious sort of job. And so the unplugged stuff really turns things inside out. It'll be a magic trick. It's things where there's an intriguing puzzle and the kids are...

And very, very simple instructions too, which is one of the really important points is that often, you know, so for binary numbers, we just say, look, here's some cards. They can either be up one way or the other, can't have them halfway up. Now I want you to do, you know, show me this. That's the entire instruction set. And so it's a relatively simple puzzle, but it gives the students a lot to think about as they work through it. And so then we, you know, searching is probably another good example since I mentioned search engines before. I mean, one of the ways that we've done that is we get a bunch of cups and they could, you just paper cups or something and we put numbers underneath them and they basically lay out about say 30 cups on the table and just say okay I want you to find

the cup that's got number 83 underneath it and of course if the cups are in random order the kids go oh that's you know they have a they lose point or in fact, sometimes we give them a lolly, a candy that they have to pay for each one they look at. And they go, oh, I'll never find it. You know, there's 30 there and you've only given me four candies to, you know, to buy, you know, a viewer underneath the cup. And so, you know, it's sort sort of shows the frustration of a linear search. But then we simply say, look, okay, here's another set of cups. The smallest ones on the left, the largest ones on the right, they're in order. Here's your four candies. Are you feeling lucky? And we don't say anything else. We don't tell them how to do it or anything like that. And the kids, you know, some kids will

start at the left-hand side and, you know, they'll go, oh, it's number three, it's number six, it's, oh, hang on a minute. And then they realize that if they're looking for 83, maybe they should look more towards one end than the other. But very often, particularly with, I don't know, kids around eight to 10 years old, they'll go, oh, hang on, the middle one would be a really good one. And they look at that and physically they realize they've just eliminated half of the cups at the cost of one candy. And then they get to divide it in half and they're away. But they have invented the algorithm themselves. I mean, it's a well-known algorithm, but suddenly they see the power of it.

And then the next question is, well, that was 30 cups. What if I'd given you 60 cups? And they go, oh, that'd be twice as hard. And then they think about it. The very first candy reduces the 60 cups down to 30. And so then we start looking at that exponential growth or actually technically logarithmic power of a binary search because, you know, what if I give you a thousand cups? And they go, oh, that's, oh, hang on a minute. And then they start to realize that that's only 10 candies

and a million cups is only 20 and suddenly a billion. And there's a lot of humor here as well. Like imagine a billion cups. You know, that's quite a lot. But it doesn't take too much to reason that you just need to look under 30 of them and you've found something. And now we've suddenly shown how you could search a billion things, like a billion web pages.

It's not quite that simple, but you could search a billion things by only looking at 30 of them. And I suddenly realised that this is quite a different kind of thing to just doing a linear search or having to go through every single one. So it's, and that's it. The kids have come up with the idea. I think a lot of the point of it is that these systems seem magic too. And especially through the early 2000s, people kind of locked out of knowing about things,

you know, shiny gadgets came out that you, you know, iPods and iPhones and things like that, that if you looked inside, it would void the warranty. And in fact, with a lot of them, you couldn't even write your own program for them without getting it approved by Apple. And so they were kind of saying, just trust me, there's magic in here. You're not allowed to look. You're not allowed to change it. We'll sort it out for you. And it sort of turned people into users instead of developers.

Whereas, you know, back in the 80s, if you bought a computer, you switch it on and it says type of command. You know, it's the first thing you have to do. And it's quite a different kind of invitation. So we end up with these devices that seem like magic. I mean, they are kind of magic. But if we can undo some of that magic and let kids look inside and go, oh, okay, I could understand how that works, then that gives them some of the insight.

And I think especially for teachers too, because, you know, more lately as teachers get into it, they go, well, this stuff is a great mystery. Only a few very clever people like, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs understand it. And they're out of the business now anyway. So it's all the magic's locked up. Whereas it's actually, no, it's stuff that, you know, lots of people can understand at some level. This episode is brought to you by DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is a cloud computing platform built with simplicity at the forefront.

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We work fastly and more enjoy simple, predictable pricing, sign up, deploy your app in seconds, head to do.co slash change log. And our listeners get a free $100 credit to spend in your first 60 days. Try it free. Once again, head to do.co slash changelog. I love the first of all I love the angle of of the starting with no computers and these

cards and puzzles not just because it gets the kids excited but because it actually it reduces the anxiety on the teachers to not feel to feel like they have to be computer scientists in order to teach this stuff and so that's that's awesome um thinking about what you said there like was starting with kind of the fun the intrigue the excitement and really getting people engaged into the ideas of thinking these ways before you get to the programming languages and and those kind of things there's been a lot of efforts around, not just with kids, but also with adults or young adults trying to get them into coding. And a lot of times there's, when we start with the computer, there's two things that

we normally try because we're also trying to get that fun, that immediate feedback, you know, like the early wins to get them hooked. And the two things that usually are used with varying levels of success is, is games like actually creating video games, which gets everybody excited until they, until they realize that's actually like really hard to do without much skills. So it's,

it's difficult, right? There's a high level of, of entry there. And the other one is the web. And one that I've seen a lot of success with is just allowing people to see you know you you pull up their favorite website and then you show them how they can actually manipulate it themselves right by opening up the dev tools or or creating something very quickly

and and putting up on the internet and they can they have something that they've built before so those are ways i'm just trying to think of like how you would bridge the you know from a child's perspective of this same way of going about teaching to an adult perspective. And I guess all that is a long-winded way for me to say this is obviously focused on teaching kids computer science or the foundations of it. Could we take the same methodology? Maybe take out the puzzles and the crayons. Well, leave the puzzles in. Maybe take the crayons out. But could we use this, broaden it, and teach adults in the same manner that CS Unplugged teach kids?

Absolutely. And although it was written for kids, it's been a big surprise to me how valuable it is for adults. And we've talked about how particularly for teachers who – I mean it's essentially change management or it's a psychological process for a teacher when they're told, you know, I signed up here to help kids read and write and maybe do some math. And now I have to do this thing called computer science or computational thinking. It's very, very scary for them. And so, you know, it's useful there. But one of my favorite audiences for this is senior citizens. And I don't know if you have that over there, but in New Zealand, there's some very popular lecture series for

senior citizens where they get people from universities to come in and just talk about anything, the environment or politics or whatever from an academic point of view. And it's a wonderful audience because these are clever people who have achieved a lot in their lives and so on, but don't know nothing about this. And it's very empowering for them, too, because often they end up finding out stuff that their grandkids don't know about. I mean, often people say, oh, young kids, they know all about computers. computers and you know you sort of you feel like saying well ask them what algorithm google uses to you know find something amongst a billion pages or ask them you know what is the security that's used when you do online shopping or something like that it's more like saying these people understand microwaves you know because they grew up with microwaves and so they can control a

microwave but that doesn't mean they understand right that doesn't mean they get computers just because they can use an iphone iphone and they can use snapchat there's a big difference there there is there's time on task um which is a big part of it and and actually the time on task then kind of takes me back to what you're talking about with with programming i mean there's some wonderful sites that um give kids a positive experience with programming in a very short time and you know most most famous would be Hour of Code. So in one hour, you get to write a program. You get some insight into what a program actually is. But, of course, you can't learn all about programming in an hour.

And it's a bit like with music. I could teach a kid to play a simple tune in an hour. And if they were eight years old and they turned up to their parents and played that simple tune, the parents would go, oh, that's wonderful. You're a musician. You're a pianist. I'm really impressed. But if they continued doing that and became a concert pianist playing that same tune that they learned in one hour,

then they're not going to do terribly well. And we know that there's thousands of hours of practice and learning and work to become a great musician. And there's thousands of hours of practice and work to become a great programmer. And so one of the risks with anything, whether it's unplugged or programming or whatever, is that we say, well, you've done an hour or two on this, you're doing great. And sometimes students can see through that and they go, well, I can't possibly be, well, either if it's that simple, you know, what are we all missing?

Or maybe I'm not doing that great or maybe I'm just getting started. So I think we really need to emphasize we're saying, look, we're just lifting the lid back a bit and we're showing you what it is, but we have to be realistic. There's hours and hours and hours of work to do to really be good at this stuff. And although, again, when it gets into schools and particularly into primary schools, I think if you think of an analogy with maths or something like that and what a 10-year-old can do in math is, as far as someone who has to do math all the time for a living, is pretty basic.

But on the other hand, they are gradually building up those skills over a period of time. And we know where the destination is, even though a lot of kids and possibly even some teachers can't see the point of it. And so, you know, a lot of it is to try and keep the end goal in mind with this teaching. And, you know, no matter how you're doing it. So there's a whole lot of stuff going on in there. You're not trying to make computer scientists with this curriculum. This is an approachable curriculum for a certain level of introductory to it. You're not going to come out the end of it with a degree and start programming.

You're going to come out with at least some curiosity, maybe some familiarity that gets you to the next step. Exactly. And of course, the original thing was actually analogous with the science shows that you kind of get in science centers and so on, where people will explode a balloon and smash a banana and things like that. And it's like, you know, just saying, look, there's stuff going on and, you know, maybe there's some surprises in here you didn't expect and so on.

And this is my passion. And I think a lot of it originally is just for someone to come in and say, you know, I'm passionate about this. This is really interesting. And, you know, two months later, all a kid's going to remember is, oh, some person came in. They were called a computer scientist. And I think it was kind of cool what happened. I can't remember what it was exactly, something about cards or numbers or something. And realistically, that's probably what the case is going to be.

But as kids get more experiences and as they get deeper and deeper learning, then they start to discover their own passion. And, of course, the other side of it too, particularly with school, is that the goal is not that everyone becomes a programmer or a computer scientist, but simply that people get the opportunity to find out what it really is. And again, this is kind of retrofitted, but over the years, what I've discovered

is that as a university lecturer, particularly the women who get through our courses, at the end of it, talking to them, over and over, I hear the story that they got in by accident. They said, look, all through high school, there's no way I wanted to be seen dead with computer scientists. Everyone knew that it was a social suicide to be a computer scientist and so on. And then they accidentally got into it and they said, it is so cool. Why didn't someone tell me how cool this is? And so the question is, how do you communicate this to young people that actually, for some of them, it's so cool? And also vice versa, because I think some kids get into computer science because it's got computer in the name or programming because it uses computers.

And they love computers. They love playing games. They love watching stuff on computers and so on. And we get this. They turn up and they go, so when do we start writing games, by which they mean when do we start playing computer games? Exactly. And we go, well, we'll teach you a whole lot of stuff so you can write secure online games with multi-users

and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, sure. And they go, oh, that's not really what I signed up for. And so I'm personally quite happy if it actually helps a few people to go, oh, maybe it's not quite my thing. Maybe I should get a job as a tester, you know, game tester or, uh, you know, something, something different, but just help people find their way. You know, part of the point of, well, I think a lot of the point of education is just to

help kids find their passion, um, figure out what they really want to do in life, um, rather than just fill their heads with lots of information as well. Maybe a topic that, this is something that came up actually in this post conversation that started my journey to understand CS Unplugged was, you know, this concern of people getting into, or children or young adults or anybody like, you know, let's say 18 or younger getting into computers too soon because you'll spend the rest of your life on one. It's the way of our world. Eventually you'll have this. Obviously they're going to have iPhones these days, but essentially saying, let's not get them in there too early. What are your, what are your thoughts on that, Tim? Like, is it too early? Obviously you're going with the unplugged version, so you're not requiring a

computer, but it certainly would eventually lead to one, which might just be getting them onto a computer or onto a device sooner rather than maybe later. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we do sort of see the unplugged stuff as a kind of a gateway drug. But I think a lot of it is about balance because parents are rightly concerned about screen time. But again, we have to think, are kids on computers consuming and being a user? Or are they there creating and thinking and so on? And even with programming, if a kid is writing programs and creating things, there's quite different things happening in their minds than if they're sitting there watching stuff or playing things and so on.

And that's one of the things about computers is that the same device can be so many different things to different people. And so that's one element of it. But I think because it does take time on task and also when I was talking about trying to get kids, so pre-teen, the main thing about getting pre-teens involved is that once they become teenagers, the hormones kick in, and particularly with young women, their opinions will depend, in general, will depend a little bit more on what their friends think than what they actually think is cool. So they might actually quite enjoy something, but friends have a lot of influence through the teen years.

And so whereas with pre-adolescent kids, if it's cool, it's cool. They just get in and do it. So it's one of the reasons that we do want to start young, but absolutely there needs to be a balance. And, of course, there's physical issues, posture. You know, sitting in a beanbag typing all the time is probably not great for your bone system. And so kids need to learn about those sort of balances.

But I think one of the things with Unplugged is that – and, by the way, I think it's best used in schools sort of alternated with stuff on the screen. It's not like do five years of unplugged and then finally get onto the screen. It would be do a bit of stuff unplugged and a little bit of stuff on the screen and so on. It's just keeping it in balance. But a lot of our activities do involve a lot of running around, like physically running around in the playground if you can. We mark out big things with chalk and following lines and that sort of stuff. And I thought, once you do it once, that's enough. But kids love doing this stuff over and over. And we've come up with lots of variations and different ways it can be

used. So the kids actually come in out of breath, sort of blood flowing through their system and their brains operating and that. And then we say, right, now get on the computer and do this. And so just physically, it actually seems a lot better anyway. But also you really got to get that balance between what are you using the computer for. I think more and more the computer, of course, is being used for education as well. You know, no matter what you're teaching, if you're teaching math or English or science or whatever, it's very tempting to say, well, just go on the computer and work through these exercises or watch these videos or work through this website. And so sort of ironically, it's probably not the computing classes, the computer science classes that are giving kids all the screen time, but it actually may be other ones.

And there are schools around the place who have gone paperless. They say every kid has a device and they can do everything and it's the way of the future. And maybe that's okay, but the whole point is how do we balance physical activity, social activity, and the so-called screen time, which I think needs to be broken down into different types of screen time. Screen time is a big deal. Do you get involved with, I mean, since you're a professor and you're an educator and, you

know, very schooled, basically, as I'm saying, you're a very smart person. Have you ever gotten into or dabbled in any research around brain neuroplasticity, neurobiology in your studies? You ever do it for fun or just read a book? Yeah, not seriously at all, but it's obviously concern that comes up. And I think a lot of the science around that is still not well understood. And obviously there are very passionate advocates in both directions as well in terms of whether it's good or bad and so on.

And I think like a lot of things, we'll eventually figure out that it's about moderation and doing things sensibly and all that kind of stuff. And of course, there are concerns from the past about the fact that if it was an actual CRT screen, then you actually got radiation directed straight at you and all that sort of stuff. And there's a whole lot of concerns and, you know, I think, you know, even Wi-Fi, for example, is, you know, that's a strong radio signal that's floating around. That's true. You can't avoid it. It is there. It's surging through my body as we speak right now. Well, I like the fact that you got all this activity, though, which is certainly great. I was just curious if you had, since your focus is on the younger generation with this particular thing, if you had ever looked at the ramifications

on the brain. That's obviously the thing that controls us. Brain science folks, they are really big on screen time and the limitations of it and how, you know, how, you know, our society and brains have actually changed because of being, you know, a far more technological screen time, you know, society. And I just was just curious. How, you know, if since you said kind of rewinding back into your story, you know, with not getting published and it was kind of like stagnated for a bit and then got picked up, you know, the kind of the idea of like K through 12 schools using this. What's the state of that? Like, is is this widespread? You know, is this curriculum being used in places?

What's the what's the state of this actually in school systems? Yeah. So unplugged in particular, I mean, we always see it as a supplement or as a pedagogical technique. And that is a part of it. So it's not a curriculum in itself. You know, it's a bit like peer programming or using python or something like that you wouldn't say okay our entire curriculum is built around we're going to teach java that you know you but you'd say and in fact that's one of the important things is you know we don't teach java hopefully we teach programming using java or using python or using scratch or whatever it is and so what's what are

you trying to teach we're trying to teach? We're trying to teach programming, we're trying to teach big computational thinking. And then how are we going to do it? Well, one of the tools is unplugged, one of the tools is writing programs. And there's other tools, watching videos of people and all sorts of things like that, and using a mixture of those. So it seems to become quite popular in that kind of role. It's been translated into about 25 languages. There was a period where just about every month I'd get an email from a different country saying, can I translate it? And the answer is, well, yeah, it's Creative Commons. You can do anything you want with it, actually.

And so although we usually provide a bit of support, and so very widely used around the world. And what I've found is that as curricula appear in schools, people very quickly latch onto this for the reasons we're talking about. It helps the teachers to get involved. And once people start using it, they actually see the engagement of the kids. One of my favorite quotes was from a teacher in Japan who said, now I see the children's faces instead of the back of their computer screens. And it's just, it's a way to really get kids thinking. And certainly, I mean, I've found

when I get invited into a school, a couple of times I've been invited in and people have said, the computer guy's coming in. And so they put me in the computer lab, which is about the worst space for doing the unplugged stuff because you need lots of empty space and get kids thinking. And whenever I've been put in a lab with students, it's like there's rubber bands from their fingers to the keyboard. And they come in and the model they have is this guy from the university is going to say something boring for 10 minutes. So we'll ignore that. And then he's going to give us something we have to type.

And so we'll type that and then we'll be done. And it's so hard to get, you know, you say, oh, hey, everyone, what do you think is happening up here? What do you think? And they're kind of going, yeah, I'm just busy ignoring you. What do we got to type? Come on. what do we got to type come on um and and so it it's actually a great thing to do you know out of the normal setting um which actually also means that it um it's quite good for improvising it's also great when the data projector dies you know at uh i don't know how many seminars you've

been to where people spend 10 minutes trying to get the data projector going or something but it's uh for me that's actually a big bonus because i just go well actually this makes my point right everyone i want some volunteers let's try this um so yeah in terms of how it's used around the place it does seem to have been quite useful um for getting teachers on board for getting and officials actually. I mean, a couple of times, including at this experience myself, actually, I was speaking in Wellington, our capital city, to a group of officials. And one of the things I tend to do is I like to do stuff and then talk about it. So rather than saying, oh, we should be teaching our students

about algorithms and programming and things like that. And So rather than saying, oh, we should be teaching our students about algorithms and programming and things like that, and the officials are going, yeah, yeah, they're big words, they must be important. I actually just jump in and say, okay, I'd like some of you to pretend to be eight-year-olds.

Could you stand up the front and do this with me? Then they sit down and we say, okay, that was an algorithm or that was data. That's what, you know, even people talk about digital technology and you say, those were the digits. That's what, you know, even people talk about digital technology. You say, those were the digits.

That's what digital technology is. It's just digits being manipulated. And you can see the light go on. And one time I was doing this, almost randomly, our Minister of Education turned up unexpectedly, and she volunteered and got up the front and did these things and so on and afterwards had this experience where she was saying that's that's really cool we should be teaching this in schools um and and i think rather than because also an officials gloss over the surface and they

say yeah we're all you know the business is telling us we should do this or teachers are telling us we should do it so maybe we'll do it one day. But actually, in five minutes, you can actually do some computer science with them that's meaningful and they can see the education in it and they can see the thought processes and they can see it's appropriate for kids and all that. And several times I've either had that first-hand experience

or heard other people who have actually had officials get quite excited when they realize it's something understandable rather than something mysterious that could be done to kids. This episode is brought to you by our friends at GoCD. GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server built by ThoughtWorks. Check them out at GoCD.org or on GitHub at github.com slash GoCD. GoCD provides continuous delivery out of the box with its built-in pipelines, advanced traceability, and value stream visualization.

With GoCD, you can easily model, orchestrate, and visualize complex workflows from end to end with no problem. They support Kubernetes and modern infrastructure with elastic on-demand agents and cloud deployments. To learn more about GoCD, visit gocd.org slash changelog. It's free to use, and they have professional support and enterprise add-ons available from ThoughtWorks. Once again, gocd.org slash changelog. so Tim we talked a little bit about uh one of the algorithms the searching algorithms

lesson with the cups um I have tons of questions I have children on my own I'm trying to teach them certain things I'm trying to get them into computer science and I've done the hour of code and I've done a few things and, uh, nothing's quite stuck yet, mostly because they want to make video games and that's really hard. Um, but this looks like awesome for them and they love, uh, puzzles and games and lots of stuff.

But I struggle to even just describe certain things to them. I feel like I'm too close to it or maybe I'm just too, uh, bad at describing these things. But like, I've had the question, like, you know, what is data dad, you know? And I'm just too bad at describing these things. But like I've had the question like, you know, what is data, dad? You know, and I'm just like, OK, what do we do here? And I start talking about music or, you know, pictures that you've made.

Anyways, I won't tell you how I describe it because it's not very good. But help us out with in addition to like how to search things, what are the other aspects of the topics that CS Unplugged, you know, has in its curriculum that you think are foundational to teaching kids computer science and maybe give some examples of how it goes about teaching those things. And then how do you describe data to kids? So there's kind of two aspects. One is that the unplugged thing kind of dives in headfirst and covers a lot of broad areas of computer science that you might not think you'd expose kids to. So one of the things Mike Fellows was doing is he'd just say, what are my post-grad students doing? I'll go and do that with six-year-olds. But I'll try and think of a way to explain it to them.

And so we have things like finite state automata, you know, formal languages, a lot of computational problems that are intractable, just to get the idea that there's stuff that computers can't do, that sort of thing. But when it comes down to it, and we've had to think about this hard when we're designing

curricula for for school is that computers really only do a couple of things they they have they store data as you point out and they apply algorithms to that data and the way you apply an algorithm is you write a program to implement the algorithm so essentially you can boil it down into understanding algorithms, data, and programming. So we're a bit more focused on algorithms and data. And of course, the simplest form of data is the binary numbers. And again, people would say, well, kids don't really need to know binary numbers.

And in fact, if you ask anyone involved in technical computing, they probably haven't converted a binary number for years. But they do need to know the difference between a 16-bit and an 8-bit representation or 1,024-bit security and the fact that 1,025-bit security would be twice as good and things like that when we're dealing with binary numbers. So it's the patterns in them that matter more than just knowing how to convert numbers. But it is kind of fun. So one of the activities, one of the early ones that was developed, and it's a real hit, is you just, to get kids engaged with binary numbers, get about five cards and put dots on the card. So the first card has one dot on one side.

The next one has two dots., the next one has two dots, and the next one has four dots, so it corresponds to the binary digits. And the rule is simply the card is either upside down, you can see the dot, or you can't see the dot. And so you lay these out on the table, and the challenge to the student is, I want exactly 11 dots visible.

And you might need to scaffold it, but you say, so this card with the 16 dots, do you want that visible? And they'll say, well, no, because it's too many. The one with the eight, and they'll look at it and they'll go, well, should I take the eight dots? If they look at the rest of them, they'll see that there's only seven left. I wanted 11 dots. So, yep, I'll have to take the eight. Do you want the one with the four dots? Well, no, that would be too many. Do you want the one with the two? Yes. The one? Yes. And then just to point out to the student, what they've said to you or whoever it is,

is that they said, no, yes, no, yes, yes, which is communicating a number only by saying yes and no. And that's the whole point of binary, of course, is that we only need to store two different values. And why do we do it? Is it because people are just geeky or it's a secret code or something like that? Well, the reason is much simpler, of course. It's just easy to build stuff that stores two values. And sometimes I'll ask them to do the multiplication table,

zero times zero, zero times one, one times zero, one times one. And we stop there and we say, that is the entire binary multiplication table. And often kids will go, oh, can we just use that one? That's so much better than the one we have to memorize. But it kind of makes the point about why binary would be easier to build a machine that works in binary. But the activity itself, it's just full of questions you can then ask, like, what's the lowest number? And the kids will yell out, oh, one. And then they'll think about it, and they go, oh, no, it's zero. And the fact that most programming languages count from zero

kind of ties back to the fact that the easiest number to represent is zero, or the lowest number. And what's the biggest number? And there's all sorts of patterns there, like it's one less than the next bit and all sorts of things like that. And adding one bit doubles the range and whatnot. And so there's endless follow-up activities. But the other one is to use different representations. And kids can use sound, high and low notes, which, of course, ends up basically being a modem.

And by the way, on the website, if you dig deep enough, we've actually got some songs that have got high and low notes in them. And if you decode them, they've got messages hidden in them. Nice. But the point is, if you're only allowed two things, you can represent anything. And quite often I'll say, oh, look, I'll tell you what month I was born in. And it's no, yes, no, yes, no. And they think about it and they go, oh, it was October. And suddenly they've realized that I've actually represented a month of the year.

And then we could represent a letter of the alphabet, you know, as a number and so on. And yet we might jump in and try and use ASCII code, but it's actually better just to let them come up with the code. Because the point is no one needs to know ASCII or Unicode or something like that particularly. I don't know if many people have memorized it. But it's just the idea that as long as I've got a number for every letter, then I can represent letters of the alphabet. And then you can get into, well, how would you represent a color or a sound and so on? And it goes on endlessly. So that's an example of one of the activities where with just basically five cards

with a few dots on them, we've suddenly explained a lot of, you know, very fundamental stuff that's going on within a computer. Absolutely. And at an even more basic level, for certain kids, depending on the age, as I see on binary numbers, you have that ages 5 to ten so definitely at this point even introducing them to the to the thought that they are non-ten based number systems is like hugely mind expanding i remember when i was a kid and i when i first learned that there were negative numbers i had like a breakdown i mean i mean a good breakdown like i was like holy cow like my whole world just so, you know, kind of going back to the idea of teaching

this computational thinking and really the advantage of having this in, uh, in school rooms for everybody, not just for people who are going to be programmers is that you're expanding, you know, you're expanding their mind and teaching them brand new ways of thinking, right? Yeah, and I think that's a great example of engaging kids who might not have otherwise wanted to be engaged in this whole thing, as they start seeing these patterns and so on. And certainly learning another number system, it's like learning a second language. You learn so much about your first language when you learn a second language. Yes.

And so just trying to get kids to think about things differently. I think also the other thing I found with binary is particularly for adults, the word binary is often that mysterious thing that only the elite could possibly ever know. They see it as used in the context of the super secret stuff that I could never understand. And when 10 minutes playing with a few cards and they completely get it and they completely see the power of it and so on, it kind of just shatters all of those walls that might have been between people and getting involved in this stuff, particularly for teachers and for senior citizens who I've worked with and so on as well. They just go, oh, is that all it is? It's something that a human can understand. Versus a superhuman. I mean, I

think that we, you know, I'm not sure exactly what it is that is the intimidation, but there's definitely an intimidation of that's just for somebody that's super smart, was somehow born with this knowledge, and they get it. And that's just not the case.

You know, in a lot of cases, it's curiosity and unraveling the onion, you know, by a career. You know, you spend your whole career doing that, not just, you know, a little bit of time and suddenly you're an expert. You're always chiseling away at being an expert. You never really, I guess you probably are at some point, but the point is that you're always learning. Exactly. And I think a lot of it's time on task. And again, sometimes the people who become experts are simply the people who have been attracted to it one way or the other and get drawn into it and spend a lot of time on it.

And they don't notice the time going past. So they don't realize how much they've learned about it. Uh, and so drawing people in, I think is, is, is a key part of it. And this reminds me of a funny story from when I was at university with regard to number systems. So I had a computer science, uh, professor who was, uh, let's just say harsh, like kind of scary. I learned a lot from him. So I don't begrudge him this. But he had office hours and it was always like everybody was very intimidated to go in and ask him questions because he would be very hard on you.

And one time I had finally got the guts to like take my question because you want to make sure your question was good before you asked it. And I was like, I'm pretty sure I'm stuck and I can't get through this. I'm going to go ask him. I thought, you know, I've tried all the obvious stuff. I'm walking up to his office and there was the student in there before me and the door was cracked so I could hear what was happening. And, uh, there was a loud smash as a book hit the wall. And I heard him say, if you can't think in base eight, you can't be a programmer. And, uh, the kid walked out. Well, kid, he was the same age as me. The young person walked out all just completely defeated. And I was sitting in the chair to go in next, you know,

I'm thinking, I can't, I don't know how to think in base eight, you know, like I can't be a programmer. And I just turned around and left. So what a bummer, dude. It was. He's kind of perpetuating that myth of like you have to be like this brilliant, like be able to just change the way you think about numbers in your head or you can't be a programmer. And I guess I'm still a programmer to this day. I still can't think in base eight.

So I think I was wrong. Good job. One of the gurus in computer education, Seymour Pappert, talks about a low floor and a high ceiling. And so you want a low floor when kids turn up. That professor was setting a very high floor. You have to be at least at this point before. And I guess a lot of what we're talking about here,

whether it's a programming language for kids or whatever, is that low floor where they get some instant, you know, achievement and, and it's not hours and hours of study before they even see the point of it. But the high ceiling says, by the way, we can keep pushing this as far as you want.

It's not, it's not just a little one-off activity that can't go anywhere. So you have, in terms of topics, there's binary numbers that you talked about. You talked about searching algorithms. I'll just list a few more. You have kid bots, which is like, there's 50 different challenges in that one, sorting, error detection and correction. Y'all have put lots of time into this. And if you check out the website, it's even like,

there's a classic version and this new version. And so, as you said, these are things that you've been honing and changing and optimizing over the years. Tell us about, you know, CS Unplugged in the meta sense, like you, who's working on it with you, you know, what have you been doing through the years? And we already asked a little bit, like what primary schools or, you know, is this gotten into schools? And it sounds like it has but maybe not in like formalized like we use the cs unplugged curriculum because it like you said it's more of an adjunct or attachment to other things but tell us like how how you're interacting with educators and um you know making cs unplugged better for them yeah it was you mentioned the classic site and that's the one that we had up to about a year ago.

It was aimed more at people who were already involved in the industry or academics and so on, and assumed that you kind of knew what it was about, but said this is how you could break it down for kids. And that's got quite a few activities on it, covering a big range of computer science. But as it got into schools um we're really fortunate to get funding actually from google and microsoft both independently approached us and

said look this seems to be widely used we'd like to see it grow it's great that it's open source can we um you know just support you and so uh which not very i actually got an email from microsoft saying hey congratulations we've decided to give you some money, which I almost deleted of course, but it was for real in this case. Like one of those forwards where Bill Gates is going to give away his fortune. Like one of those things that people used to forward around. Exactly. So, so there's a branch of Microsoft called Microsoft Philanthropies who look at,

who actually support a lot of organizations who are reaching out to kids in all sorts of different situations all around the world. And they had found that a lot of people were reporting to them that they were using Unplugged. See, one of the trouble with Unplugged, because you don't go online and use it, you download it, print it out, and then you never go back. We don't get to see who's using it. Although one of the best ways we've discovered recently

is just the Twitter feed, hashtag CS Unplugged. And following that, just every day a different language or a different country, someone pops up saying, you know, I've been using this. So it's a good way of tracking it. But until a couple of years ago, it was basically Unplugged was me and a couple of students who would happen to be doing projects on it or something like that but we've actually um now grown to probably three or four full-time people who are working on different aspects of it although a lot of this is now sort of driven towards um creating you'd think we'd be creating more and more new activities but actually people want the same things repackaged differently for schools, for primary schools. And then there's a version of it, which is not totally unplugged, but it's

called the Computer Science Field Guide, which is aimed more at high schools. And it's aimed more at the students. So the unplugged stuff is written for the teacher, says this is how you could teach it with lesson plans and so on. This computer science field guide is aimed more at a student saying, you're a teenager, here's some stuff that will help you understand some of the big ideas in computer science. And so there's video, there's stuff to read, there's examples and online stuff that they can interact with. And if any of your listeners want a quick taste of that,

one of the fun things to go into we were talking about data before um there's a chapter in the field guide on uh data representation and it's got a thing an interactive where you can drop your own photo into it and zoom in but instead of sort of blurring it or limiting it when you zoom in it actually goes right down to the pixels and shows you the numbers that represent those pixels, the RGB values. And it sounds quite simple, but it actually, it's quite an aha moment for a lot of people where they go, hang on, that's a digital photograph. It's actually got, it's made of digits.

Who would have thought? And so it's got lots of interactives like that, and we're busy preparing those sort of things. But a lot of introductory stuff, just explaining to teachers what this is about, why they should care about it, how it affects the real world. Yeah. So we've ended up with quite a reasonable-sized group working on that.

And then within New Zealand, we've got a new curriculum in schools for this stuff, and so we're also doing a lot of work to support local teachers. We've got tens of thousands of primary school teachers in New Zealand that we're helping to get up to speed with this new curriculum and so on. And it's a lot of fun, but it's a big job, and that's just for one country. We're equivalent to the size of one state of the US. So there's a lot of work to be done around the place in helping people get up to speed in this area. So you mentioned these independent sponsorships, Google, Microsoft,

and then the UC Computer Science Education, which I assume is that the university that you work at? Yeah. In fact, that's the name of my research group. Gotcha. Gotcha. So while we're the people that develop it, there's actually a lot of volunteer hours going to it as well. Until not long ago, it was entirely voluntary. But even to this day, of course, a lot of students who work on it are effectively paying us to work on it because they're doing it as part of their study and so on. So over the years, there've been dozens and dozens of people who've contributed to it in one way or another. Are those sponsorships come with any strings attached or like,

are you have to write reports back or like, are those just completely, you know, like the funds are up for you to use however you see fit or how does that work? Yeah, they're very open. And one of the key things is that all of the material that we develop is Creative Commons. It's available for people to use. I mean, they help us set a little bit of a direction because obviously, I mean, their goal is not to advertise the company in particular, but simply to grow the expertise. Of course, at the moment, we have a desperate shortage of people who have this expertise. And we know that there are people who would be good at it who are missing out because

they don't get involved. So it makes sense just to support schools and to support the system. But the Creative Commons license also just really frees things up for teachers a lot because they're not worried that they'll get a bill for it or that they'll get copyright infringement or something like that. They can just download it. They can copy it. They can republish it on the school's website if they want, print it out. They can edit it if they want to change things. And in fact, recently, we even removed the non-commercial restriction because a lot of people were coming to us and saying, well, I run an after-school class and parents pay $10 a session to come along and I'm using your material. So is that – I'm making money out of it. Is that fair?

Is that in the spirit of the license and so on? And all people would be putting together kits of equipment ready to go, which – and selling it. And so anyway, we thought long and hard about it, but we've removed that non-commercial restriction, which means theoretically people could sell it for whatever they want. But of course, given that it's available for free online, you'd be pushing it. Your reputation wouldn't be so good. It's not a good business model.

No, no. But it does just make everything a lot easier. In some countries, teachers much prefer to buy a published book than download something off the web and things like that. And so it frees it up that someone could translate it and publish it as a book. And that's fine. And often when people have done that, they've given us donations back to, you know, support the work that we're doing. And so, you know, it all works out really well. How much of your time goes into this? Let's say like the 40, you work each week. If you work 40, how much goes into this?

Yeah, probably about 45 hours. It's become a big thing out of 40. Yeah. I do have a day job. I, I, I, I do teach as well. So, but well but at the moment with all the curriculum change happening around the world there's a huge amount of interest and so I'm spending a lot of time travelling around New Zealand and just working with people in New Zealand on this but also

I guess over the last five years there's been a lot of international interest and as people have developed curricula I get an email saying, hey, would you fly over and talk to us about this and, you know, help us to, you know, work out what we should be doing locally and so on. So it's actually involved quite a bit of travel as well,

which, you know, I quite enjoy. So that's fine. But we're just at a point in history, I think, where, you know, 20 years ago when we were developing this, I remember Mike Fellows especially, he'd go to schools and they'd just shake their heads and say, this is never going to happen. And now we've finally got to this point where schools all over the world and school systems and countries are saying, how do we do this? This is really important. We have to get into it. And so it's kind of been a 20-year dream that finally we're at a point that we didn't even imagine that we would be at sometimes. So it's kind of neat that it's all happening at

the moment. I think in a few years, hopefully everything will settle down and people will know what they're doing and it'll just be a part of, you know, a natural part of society and education and all that sort of thing. Not so much unplugged, but just the whole idea that we actually empower kids to get involved in the whole area of computing, digital technologies, computational thinking. And at that point, yeah, I'll take a day off. Can't close the show without closing the loop on this one thing that you mentioned

early in the show that was the motivation for you to do this what uh i'm not even sure what year it was but you mentioned 92 okay 92 your son was seven i believe or five you did this because you know your motivation was you know your you know your children i'm assuming like your son and potential others but what's their what's their status in computer science? So in general, we don't get a lot of feedback, but I've been mentioning a few students have come up to me and said, you know, 10 years ago I went to this thing and that changed my direction, which is amazing. That's awesome. I have two sons who have grown up with this entire thing happening around them all the time. So the 31-year-old is basically he runs a recording studio and has ended up, his entire life is digital, of course.

He just produces bits and puts them on the web. But he's ended up doing a lot of programming and stuff is what he does. But his career is in music, which is fantastic. But my wife is a music teacher. And so as he went through and did a music degree and so on, she kind of put a little one nil on the refrigerator. And then our second son went through and he did a music degree as well. And so it was sort of two nil at one stage. But at the end of it, and I think one of the problems, you know, the children of people who do a

particular area, they make a decision, I don't want to be like that you know i don't want to just because my dad does it i shouldn't have to do it um but he ended up doing um a little bit of programming at the end of his music degree and got so interested in it finally uh that he did an entire computer science degree and now he works as a software engineer so it's it's actually it's it's now one one one all so it's actually, it's now one all. So it was worth it. Yeah. Right? I mean, you're changing the world, obviously, outside of your own family. But to see the dividends paid direct, that's awesome.

It has been good. But the thing that really means a lot to me is when I particularly see kids that would have been excluded, and I'm particularly thinking of women and people from other cultures who don't see themselves as part of that. And when they get really engaged and are really enjoying it, and then they close the loop because they go, I need to help you with this stuff because we need to get into schools and get more girls involved and get more, you know, people like me involved. And it's just neat seeing that feedback loop happening and that it's just so genuine. It's like, this is a cool career and I, you know, I really want to share it with other people. Let me give you this one here too, because part of that conversation that spurred me learning about this in the first place was because I was concerned how I can share this with my daughter and my niece, who I very much care for. And they're both very smart in this direction. They just need that, you know, that aha moment, the spark. And I'm like, how do I, I don't even know the things that I need to know. So I'm that, you know, would be teacher to some degree. So I was like, what kind of resources are for me to hand to or, you know, guide through my daughter and my niece? And, you know, that was my motivation. My son could do it as well. And that's part of it, too. But my thoughts were on those two because they're so skilled with it, but there's no there's no clear on ramp for young girls. Yeah. And of course, the other thing is that I think it's really important. I mean, we don't want everyone to become a computer programmer. It would be a very boring

world. But it's important that young people understand this digital world that they're growing up in. And there's going to be more and more happening to them and around them with AI and privacy and algorithms that make decisions for us and things like that, where even just a little bit of understanding of what these things might actually be rather than just something mysterious that the technocrats have to sort out for us, then that's empowering them as a member of society to function well anyway.

So I'm perfectly happy if people learn this stuff and either go, well, that may be useful when I'm campaigning against some particular thing or for some particular thing. Or even, well, I'm glad I know what it is because I definitely don't like it. But hopefully, more and more, we are getting people going, actually, that's a lot more interesting. There's a place for me at this table. Any words of advice to the educators that maybe, you know, let's say somebody's listening

to this and they're thinking, man, I, you know, I'm not an educator, but I know somebody or I've got kids I want to influence, you know, any advice or any first steps for them to take to, you know, take the first step with using Unplugged or even the field guide? I mean, I think the key thing is to let the kids do the thinking. Remember the goal isn't, particularly for younger kids, the goal isn't that they know all this stuff. The goal is that they engage with it. And so very much, it's called constructivism, where the kids construct the knowledge themselves. So you just say, okay, here's the small challenge. How would you do this? What's happening here? How's that working? And give them time to think about it. Let them give wrong answers, let them reflect on the wrong answers, let them, you know, come to the right answer with a bit of help. But it's very

much about letting them explore it so that they're kind of empowered to go, oh, I actually worked out how that works rather than, okay, I've been given a whole lesson of what to do and exactly what to do and now I can do the thing that that adult wanted me to be able to do well Tim it's been uh it's been fun going down this lane with you uh I'm very appreciative of your motivation for your sons and obviously the payout for the rest of the world is as part of it this 20-year journey for you and and Mike and the rest of the team I'm sure is just profound because you know it was a happy accident at first and now it's just you know lighting things on fire so people are excited about it. So thank you for your work and your motivations toward this and obviously sharing it freely

and even allow people to make money if they need to, to do the work to educate children. You're very welcome. Thanks for the chance to share. Thank you, Tim. Thank you for tuning in to today's show. If you enjoyed it, do me a favor, share it with a friend, go on Twitter and tweet a link, go on whatever podcast client you use and favorite it or like it or whatever they let you do, make a rating on iTunes. All that stuff helps us grow this show and share it with more software developers. Of course,

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