>> It was an 8086.
At the time, 8086 was already out of date,
but I had one.
It wasn't until about senior year in
high school when I realized what I could do with it.
I have a little brother, and so I
made it so that when he tried to log into the computer,
it would just beep really loudly.
And then it would put up
this huge ASCII warning error that
was like "Intruder, intruder."
>> "Intruder alert. Intruder alert."
>> "This intrusion has been logged."
It wasn't actually logged, but it looks scary.
>> Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind The Tech.
I'm your host, Kevin Scott,
Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft.
In this podcast, we're going to get behind the tech.
We'll talk with some of the people
who made our modern tech world
possible and understand what
motivated them to create what they did.
So, join me to
maybe learn a little bit about the history of
computing and get a few behind-the-scenes insights
into what's happening today. Stick around.
Today, I'm joined by my colleague, Christina Warren.
Christina is Senior Cloud Developer Advocate
at Microsoft. Welcome, Christina.
>> Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here and I'm
excited to learn more about today's guest.
>> Yes. So, we're having
Alice Steinglass on the show today.
Alice is the President of Code.org, which is
an organization doing stuff that's
super near and dear to my heart.
So they are trying to teach every child how to program,
and they partner with teachers
in K through 12 across the country and
increasingly across the globe to try to help
make computer science a part
of the K through 12 curriculum.
>> You have a lot of similarities with Alice because
you also have an organization that has a similar mission?
>> Yeah, I do. So, one of
the things that I've been trying to do,
and like this podcast is a little bit
of a reflection of that,
is to show the truly diverse set of faces and tell
the diverse set of stories that lead
people into computing and what their careers look like.
Because when I look around me and like I
see all of the amazing people who
are helping to build
the technology that we all depend on,
it's not this monolithic thing.
There are just so many different folks,
genders, and ethnicities,
and folks who came from like their parents were
college professors to folks like
me who no one in their family went to college,
and it was an interesting quirk
that they ever found their way into computing.
One of the things that we know both
from my work, the Behind The Tech, and
my family foundation is that
the earlier that you set the spark of interest in
a child and the
more of the barriers you get out of their way
to pursuing that is
an interest and maybe ultimately as a career,
like the happier, more successful they'll be.
>> Definitely. I think a lot of people
have an orthodox path into getting to tech.
I got into it because I had that sheer force of will.
>> Yeah.
>> But I think about kids that
I went to school with and if they'd had
those opportunities that were accessible to them
like the way that code.org is
making things accessible now,
how different things might be.
>> Yeah. Sometimes your journey can
be sensitive, so to speak.
So, like one thing can completely change your path.
Like with me, I was lucky enough to get into
a science and technology high school when I was a senior.
If I hadn't had that experience,
I don't know what my career would have looked like,
whether or not I would have chosen
computer science as a major
when I went to college or maybe
even whether I went to college at all.
So I think what that tells me is let's do everything
humanly possible to expose
kids to as many of these opportunities as possible.
It's not that I think everybody should
be a computer scientist,
but you should at least have the opportunity.
>> Definitely.
>> Thanks for chatting, Christina.
We'll reconnect later at the end of the show.
Coming up next, Alice Steinglass.
Alice is the president of Code.org.
Her teams build curriculum tools and software to support
introductory computer science classes
for students from kindergarten through high school.
They also partner with
education and software companies across
the industry to run the Hour of Code,
a global movement reaching
tens of millions of students in over 180 countries.
Alice, welcome to the show.
>> Thank you.
>> So, one of the things that I would
love to start with is your journey.
So, how did you get into computing?
>> I'm so lucky to be here, but my journey
was not the journey that a lot of people had.
I didn't play with computers from the time I was little.
I didn't take them apart for fun.
I actually got into
computer science because my school taught it and-
>> This is your high school?
>> Yeah, my high school.
I didn't really know what I was signing up for.
I was into math, I was into other things.
I said, "Okay, I'll try this.
I hear you can make things with it."
I took a class and I loved it.
I had a final project, where I built a game called Snake,
which similar to Tron
what everybody built it back then.
But I finished it, it was fun.
I tested it, I tested it,
and then my teacher ended up staying up like all night
testing it and found out
that the high score could go even higher.
It broke if you had more than
like five digits in the high score and I said,
"How did you find that?"
He said, "We were playing it all night."
What other class do you get to
make something where your teacher plays it all night?
>> Yeah. So, was it the whole thing,
was it the technical challenge of writing the code,
was it the fact that you made something that
someone was a little bit addicted to?
>> I think it's all of that.
I think for me it's like the
best of Math and
Art and English, and all of that put together.
I always liked Math, but Math,
most of the problems have
an answer. There's no creativity.
Here's a challenge, can you figure out how to
find the tip-top of this curve or something?
In computer science, it had that same logical backbone,
but the problems were open-ended.
You're never done with a project, and even in real world.
When we're building software, we're never done with it.
So, we're always making it better,
you can always improve it,
and there's this blank slate aspect
where you can create something.
I loved art, I love creating,
and I think computer science is like creating both logic,
and then it gets to move at the end, which is cool.
>> Yeah. It's super cool.
So, when did you get your first computer?
>> When did I get my first computer?
I had a computer when I was younger. I was lucky.
My father's office was selling off
cheap computers, older computers.
So they sold them to
the employees for I think it was
like $50. He got me an old computer.
>> Wow.
>> It was an 8086.
At the time, 8086 was already out of date,
but I had one and it just sat in my room.
I didn't code it. I didn't program it.
I used it. I've wrote papers on it.
It wasn't until about senior year in
high school when I realized what I could do with it.
Once I figured out computer science,
I did go back and code it, but I'll have to tell you.
So, one of the first programs I wrote for it,
I had a little brother and I made it
so that when he tried to log into the computer,
it would just beep really loudly. And it would
put up this huge ASCII warning error
that was like, "Intruder, intruder."
Then, of course, it named him because there's
no other possible intruder in
my house other than my brother.
So it would say, "Seth,
you were trying to break into this computer.
This intrusion has been logged."
It wasn't actually logged, but it looked scary.
>> Yeah. This is the thing that
really amazes and interests me about computing.
There's this notion I think in the minds of a lot of
people that there is one stereotypical path
that you're like a nerdy teenage white boy
and you get your machine when you're 13 years old, and
you start writing your first code.
This notion that you have to be
a prodigy to get in to compute.
But when I actually talk to people,
everybody's story is so different.
Anders Hejlsberg, who we interviewed
in a previous episode,
he didn't start coding until he was in college.
So, some people early,
some people late, and
the motivations are all over the map.
Some people just love the creative aspect,
some people love the fact
that they can make the machine do something.
My kids love that. It's like,
"Okay, I can tell the machine what to do.
I can't tell mom and dad what to do,
but the machine will listen to me."
>> Yeah, absolutely.
I think it was a little intimidating for a while
because there's this language that goes around computers,
and there's this barrier where
you feel like if you don't speak
the language then you
probably can't learn computer science.
But the truth is you absolutely can learn it,
and the language is just a false barrier.
I went to college.
I heard all these guys talking about things like
bulletin board systems in the '90s, and it was
like a thing then. They were all on it,
and I have never been on a BBS in my entire life.
You think, "Okay, BBS is some technical world,
and I can't possibly code if I don't know what a BBS is."
It turns out that a BBS is
just like Reddit, but in the '90s.
>> Yeah.
>> You absolutely don't need to
use Reddit to do computer science.
I mean, I love computer science. I love the logic.
I love the challenges. I love building.
But to this day, I still have not
done BBSs, and it's okay.
>> It's super okay.
>> Right, and it's this language thing.
It's this language barrier that just,
it makes you feel like you can't but you absolutely can.
>> Yeah. So, from your senior year where you
took your first computer science course, what was next?
>> So, I went to college and at that point,
I was already into it.
Actually, that's not just me, that's really common.
What you see is that
women who take AP Computer Science in
high school are 10 times more
likely to take it in college.
That's one of the reasons we're fighting
so hard to get computer science
offered in high school is because
it helps dispel these notions.
It helps make you feel like you can do it.
So, I went to college and I knew
I wanted to take Computer Science.
I majored in Computer Science in college.
I did the typical startup on the side.
>> What was your startup?
>> It was dynamicfeedback.com.
Yeah. We partnered with a professor who is
doing management consulting and worked
on how do you help people take
360-degree surveys to
learn how to be better in the workplace.
It was interesting, it was fun.
Like everybody's first startup,
we totally underestimated the amount of code
that we need to get
written to do what we thought we
would need it to do, we worked all night.
Part of it for me was the experience of
learning that a company is more than just code.
We had to figure out things like
customer support and lawyers,
and I had to find a space.
>> Really unsexy stuff.
>> Yeah. Where we actually go to sit.
So, that was interesting.
I ended up coming out to
Microsoft after that and I worked on.
>> How did you decide on Microsoft? What year was this?
>> This was 2001.
>> Okay.
>> I was working on the first version of Xbox.
>> So, super exciting.
>> It was super exciting, and then I got to work
on the first version of Xbox Live.
What's weird is I'm not a hardcore gamer,
but it was still a really interesting set of problems.
I think, sometimes not
being a hardcore gamer actually helped.
I was working on the high score system for Xbox.
I kept talking to people and everybody
had a way we should do high scores.
They have to work like this because
they work like this is my favorite racing game.
They have to work like this because they work
this way in my favorite shooting game.
Coming in as a neutral person I said, "No,
I'm going to look at all the games and
understand how high scores work across everything."
I went and played 50 games and learned about
how high scores worked in
every game and talked to a lot of people,
and then, designed a system to allow
any game on Xbox to use the Xbox high-score system.
So, it was interesting.
>> Yeah.
>> Interesting work.
>> Did you have a course charted as you
were going one thing to next?
The reason I ask is, I think,
everybody has such a different path
through their career in computing,
and they're all good and interesting.
>> I think in retrospect, I could
probably tell you a story.
But the reality of it is
that I think a lot of it is happenstance,
a lot of it is you don't know.
>> Yeah.
>> You try something and you find
out you like it or you don't.
The one thing that I would recommend
to young people who are starting
their career is to try some different things.
I think you can get stuck in one thing pretty
easily and not even have a plan that
that's what you're going to do you just end up doing it.
The easiest time to switch and
try some new things is in your 20s,
when you're not an expert yet in one particular field.
So, one of the things I did do
was I tried different technologies.
So, I worked in Xbox,
I worked on Live, I worked on Services.
I was in charge of all of the APIs for
Xbox Live across the board,
which is really interesting.
I went from that to looking at the Toolchain that
developers use and working on XNA before it was XNA.
Then I went from there, I said,
"What's the opposite of everything I've ever done?"
Right. I've been working on more the APIs,
I haven't touched enterprise software and
enterprise services and I just
want to know what the other side looks like.
>> Yeah.
>> So, I went to Office, I went over to
Microsoft Project partially because
it was just a very different space.
I figured this was a good time to
learn about a different space.
I had a lot of people who thought it
was the most insane thing they'd ever heard.
Right. Why would anybody leave Xbox on
purpose to go work on Project?
But I actually found it
really fascinating and interesting.
Understanding about how do companies make purchases,
and what does it mean to sell and to enterprise sales,
and how do we make workplaces more efficient,
and what is business software look like.
I thought it was a really fascinating space.
>> It sounds like one of the things that has driven
a lot of your journey is just curiosity.
You've explored a bunch different things, startups.
>> Yeah.
>> Ton of different things at Microsoft.
Were you the kid that was taking all your mom's stuff
apart, or asking five million questions?
>> I mean, yes, but I think we all are.
>> Yeah, you think so?
>> Yeah, I think kids are naturally curious.
I think we all want to learn.
I think we all want to do that.
I think there are barriers that hold us back, and some of
those barriers can feel more
real than they are, especially in tech.
It's a booming space.
There's a million jobs right now.
Everybody's looking to hire.
When I'm mentoring people I feel
like talking to young people in tech.
Sometimes they're afraid to make the choice,
to try something new or to change.
But, it's a false barrier they've put on themselves.
>> One of the things that really
strikes me about the industry over the past,
let's just say, 10 or 15 years is,
I think, in some ways we've gotten more complex.
The number of programming languages,
the number of frameworks,
the whole ecosystem is just bigger.
But, in a very real sense it's easier than it ever has
been to go make something with code or with technology.
When I was in college,
folks had this notion like, "Oh, my God.
Coding is so hard,
you have to go get this degree,
you have to practice."
To get really great at anything, all that's true,
but my kids can go
make interesting things right now without
a Computer Science degree because
the tools that they have are so powerful.
Is that something that you're seeing helping
students get into computing?
>> Absolutely. There's a level of relevance, right?
>> Yeah.
>> When I was a kid,
I made a game from my calculator that was [inaudible] .
I made a game and I also made it
formula solver cheat sheet kind of thing.
>> Right.
>> But helped you with your physics formulas.
This wasn't going to be the thing that took over America.
>> Right.
>> But it was popular,
among all the students in my class. Right?
I think there's the same thing today.
We see kids making games.
There are some of those things are just
not that complicated, right?
>> Yeah.
>> So, students have the potential to make
things that are definitely cool.
They're not as complex as an Xbox game, but they're cool.
But, you also see that there's a lot of
space for things that are locally relevant.
Some of these kids' apps,
there's one with their teacher's face,
you could feed the teacher ice cream,
but the teacher got a kick out of it,
and it's fun, and it's cute,
and it's relevant in that classroom.
It's relevant in that school,
your friends are all going to try it out.
I think it gives you a taste of something without
having to be an amazing artist,
just like anything else, there will be steps.
>> Also, talk a little bit about what you do right now.
So, you're the President of Code.org.
So, tell us a little bit about what Code.org does.
>> So, we build
curriculum, we do
professional development for teachers,
we do advocacy work,
but our goal is that every child should have
the opportunity to take a computer science class in K12.
I was shocked, especially from the tech industry.
I was shocked to hear that
most schools today don't teach computer science,
and it's not even that most kids don't take it,
it's their school doesn't teach it at all.
So, even if they want to take it, they can't.
This disproportionately affects students
in high need schools.
It disproportionately affects underrepresented minorities
and women who are discouraged from taking these classes.
And the result is that
because they never get this introduction in K12,
it's really hard to start after that.
It's really hard to start in college.
So they may never go into the field.
And even if they go into another field,
they don't have that background in computer science.
So, our goal is that
every school should offer this course,
so that every child has an opportunity to take it.
At this point, we're
the most popular computer science platform curriculum
in K12 in the country.
About 25 percent of students
actually have an account on Code.org.
So, we're reaching a lot of students
but there's a long way to go.
>> Yeah. So, how early should
we be teaching kids computer science?
>> So, this is totally different from how I started,
but our recommendation is actually to
start in elementary school,
and there's some good reasons for doing this.
Let me start by talking about how we
teach about biology today,
because I think it's a really good analogy for
how I think about computer science education.
So, every child when they go to
elementary school gets to learn that they have bones,
they have a digestive system,
just the basics of how does my body work.
We don't do that because they're all going to be
doctors or nurses or EMTs.
We do that because they're going
to live with that body for
the rest of their lives and
they should know how it works.
When they go to
middle school maybe they learn more about it.
In high school, a kid can take Biology or AP Biology.
Even after they take all of those courses,
all the way through K12,
they're still not qualified.
I don't trust a high school student who's
taken AP Bio to do anything to me.
So, there's still more work if they
want to be a professional in the field,
whether it's a nurse or a technician or anything.
Computer science is the same way.
Every kid is going to be
surrounded by technology their whole lives.
We have our phones in our pockets,
who knows where they're going to be when they grow up.
The same way we get to
know that we have a digestive system,
they should understand, what is the Internet?
What is the Cloud? What is data?
How does this phone work?
It's not a magic box that does magic magic.
It's a computer, and what is a computer, right?
These are just basics that should
be part of our education system.
>> Right.
>> So, I think of it in a very analogous way.
In K5, we get to teach the students,
what are these things? What is technology?
Then, when they get to middle school,
maybe they take more.
If they're interested, they can take
an AP Computer Science class in high school,
and at the end of that, they're still not a programmer.
They're going to go on and take a two-year degree.
They could take a four-year degree.
They can become a lifelong computer scientist.
But, no matter what they do in life,
it's useful to know how computers work.
>> Yeah.
>> So, the same way we teach our kids how the body works,
that's how we think about
teaching it in elementary school.
There's another reason to start so young,
and that has to do with supporting
diversity in computer science.
What we see is that women tend to become less
interested in the STEM fields
around the middle school, early high school.
In computer science, it's between
about 12 and 14 when they lose interest.
So, what we want to do is reach them before that year,
so that while they're
still interested in learning these things,
we can show them what it is,
so that if they're interested,
they can keep going.
So, there's a bunch of pieces here, part of it is
encouraging them, thinking that they'll
be good at it, getting that encouragement.
If they're very confident in their ability to do it,
they're four times more likely to go into
computer science or take
computer science classes than if they aren't.
Girls, right now, oftentimes,
they don't get this opportunity in elementary school,
and so what happens is,
when they're thinking about taking it
in high school or middle school,
they do it just based on the zeitgeist
of what people tell
them that they're going to be good at.
>> Right.
>> Right? Unfortunately, what we
see is that they're often told they
won't be good at computer science.
Teachers are two and a half times more likely to tell
a boy that he'll be good at computer science than a girl.
And it's not because they're against it.
These teachers are supportive, they care,
it's just these cultural norms
are embedded in our society.
>> Well, and kids are also pretty good pattern matchers.
One of the things that I've noticed
disturbingly with my own kids,
I've got a eight-year old and a 10-year
old right now, and very,
very early when they were three, four years old,
they would look around at the world and start
making these classification decisions.
It's okay, this is a boy thing and this is a girl thing,
and this is without anything in their household telling
them that thing A and thing
B has a gender association with it.
It's just them sorting things out.
One of the things I love about what you all are
doing is there's this bootstrapping
problem that I think you have to solve
where we just need more three and
four-year-old seeing seven and eight-year-olds
being successful in a computer science curriculum,
so it helps them
decide to do that when they're just a few
years older and up the entire stack.
>> That's absolutely true,
and you see it when you go into the classroom.
So, you take a bunch of second graders.
They don't have a stereotype
yet that computer science is a boy thing.
>> Yeah.
>> Right? They're too young to think
computer science is a boy thing.
>> Yeah. They probably don't even
know what computer science is, right?
>> Right. They see like,
"Hey we're going to make some stuff today,"
and they're so excited about it.
Our classes, when you look at
those elementary school classes,
they're half female, the kids are all excited,
they're super into it.
We have a little tool at the end,
what we call our funnel meter.
They can give it a thumbs up,
thumbs down at the end of every activity,
and the girls actually give it higher
funnel meter ratings than the boys do.
The girls are into this and they're into it young,
and so when we can get them
before they've got those stereotypes,
they can make a huge difference in terms of giving
them the momentum to keep going afterward.
I see the same thing you see with my own daughter.
But, she's also excited about
computer science because she
doesn't see it as a boy thing.
>> Yeah.
>> Even if you look back in history,
computer science used to be a female thing.
>> Yes.
>> It's just flipped, right?
>> It's about from the very beginning,
the first programmer was a woman.
>> The first programmer was a woman,
Ada Lovelace about 100 years ago,
and then you look in the '50s,
in the '40s, computers were
women and computer science was a female,
the stereotype would have been women.
>> Yeah.
>> Then, it's men, and we
can get back to a place where it's both.
We can get back to a place where we
look at it and we say, "No,
no, computer science, it's something that everybody does.
There's no reason it's one or the other."
But, it's not just teachers,
it's also parents, it's social, it's friends.
Let's say there's an after-school program,
you can just see this.
Mom says, "Oh, look,
some after-school classes.
Bobby, looks like there's
a coding class after school on Thursdays.
Do you want me to sign you up?"
Right? "Emily, it looks like
there's a dance class on Tuesdays,
do you want me to sign you up?"
It's so easy. They're not thinking about it.
They're just trying to find activities for their kids.
So, when we do it after school,
what we see is that same skew
where boys are more likely to
get signed up after school for computer science.
If we do it in school,
we don't see that.
So, that's why we want to start in elementary school.
>> Yeah, which I think is awesome because
sometimes when you're focusing later,
it's just really, really hard.
I had this friend call me up.
He was like, "I'm trying to get my daughter to
stay enrolled in her AP Computer Science class."
She was a senior in high school then.
She just didn't want to be in this class
because she was the only girl in there.
>> That's so hard.
>> And this isn't Silicon Valley.
>> Yeah.
>> What wound up working was connecting her with a bunch
of really successful women computer scientists,
software engineers, who were having
a really great time in
their career. And she stayed in AP Computer Science class.
She went off to university.
She majored in Computer Science,
dean's list student, is now in a professional,
so she's a software engineer at a tech company.
And that whole thing is hard to scale.
What you would want to do is do that for everyone.
But, it's so hard when you're starting
later, whereas starting earlier
you can maybe get to the point
where just naturally you're
not having a class full of boys
in 12th grade in this AP Computer Science.
>> Absolutely. We just hired
a woman for our engineering team a
couple of months ago who's
studying computer science in college,
was one of the only woman in her class,
dropped out because she felt she didn't belong,
but liked computer science.
She liked it. She just didn't feel she
should be in it because
there weren't any other women in it,
and finished college still regretted it.
Still wanted to do computer science.
Ended up doing night classes and
side classes and learning it after work,
eventually did a boot camp, learned computer science,
moved into the career,
worked as a computer scientist,
and just recently joined our engineering team.
>> That's awesome.
>> But, you know that's the hard way.
>> Yeah. That's the hard way.
>> It would have been easier if she had just been
able to stay in those classes in the first place.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Tell us a little bit about Hour of Code.
>> So, Hour of Code has just become a phenomenon.
It's exceeded our expectations.
If you're not in school right now,
you may not have heard of it.
If you're in school, you probably have.
It's like Earth Day,
but for computer science.
>> Yeah.
>> It's a national holiday.
I don't have the exact numbers
or the number of which schools participate.
But, as far as I can tell,
everybody I talked to, their school seems to be doing it.
>> I realized there was a bigger thing than
I thought when Steph Curry
was posting on LinkedIn about him doing his Hour of Code.
>> Oh, yeah. Oh, hey, if you're into sports,
then Steph Curry did it.
If you're into other things,
Barack Obama's done it,
Justin Trudeau's done it, Dave Cameron,
that we've had about eight world leaders
who've participated.
We've had musicians. We've had actors, actresses.
But, I think the most important thing is
the schools and the teachers are doing it.
>> So, tell folks what the Hour of Code actually is.
>> So, the idea is that I can tell you,
until I'm blue in the face, that
computer science is going to be fun, that you can do it.
There's nothing like actually trying it.
So, what we do is we get students and
teachers to spend one hour trying computer science.
We've built scaffolded activities
that make it easy for beginners.
In one hour, they can actually build something.
You could actually build a little, mini game,
something you can share and be able to say,
"Hey, I did that," and
you actually learned some computer science.
I mean, you don't learn all of computer science,
it's one hour, but you learn a concept or two.
You might learn about if statements,
you might learn about loops and how they work.
So, the students get to try it, they get to try one hour.
It's a great introduction.
We did a survey last year looking at thousands of
students before and after they tried the Hour of Code,
and what we found was that
it does increase the amount that they say,
"Hey, I like computer science or I'm
interested in computer science."
But, was especially cool for
me was that the group that was the
most impacted by doing this was high school girls.
High school girls were probably coming into it thinking,
"Hey, this is not something that I'm into."
They try it and then they're into it.
At this point, we've had 500 million hours of
code around the world and it's been in 180 countries,
it's in 50 languages.
It's a huge event every December.
We do it for CS Education Week,
and basically it's just a way to
introduce students around the world to computer science-
>> That's incredible.
>> -by actually building something.
>> Yeah. It's really incredible.
>> Yeah. it's not just us,
this is one of those things that we
do in partnership with
about 200 different companies and
organizations that run it and do activities.
Microsoft has partnered with us
on the Minecraft Hour of Code for
the last few years which is
our most popular Hour of Code activity,
and students and teachers love it.
It's an opportunity to use these characters
they're familiar with from Minecraft,
but to learn computer science with them.
>> So, what's the dream for Code.org?
If you had a magic wand to wave over the world,
and you can achieve
whatever success you wanted to achieve,
what does that look like?
>> I think it looks like every child
has the opportunity to learn
computer science and that the students who are
learning it look like the world.
That the diversity matches,
so that when we look at the workforce 20 years from now,
whether somebody is in education or marketing or retail,
they're going to be using computers.
It's going to be a part of their lives
and everybody gets to understand
things like how the Internet
works and how computers work.
And that when we look at the tech workforce,
that the students who are prepared to join this,
that they look the population,
and I get to look around and half my team is female.
I want to state that we're
working on one part of the problem,
which is the K12 education.
That won't solve the tech workforce by itself.
There are definitely issues around hiring,
retention, workforce bias,
all of those other pieces which also need to be solved.
But, I think if they we're working on
one really important part of the problem.
>> Yeah.
>> We do need to bring more diversity into
the tech workforce and I think education is critical.
>> Yeah, I think it really is.
The thing that keeps me up at night
about our future is I just look at
every year technology has
a bigger and bigger impact on the world
and the trajectory tells us that
that's going to continue for the foreseeable future.
And in a whole bunch of different ways
you want as many people and as representative a set of
people as possible participating
in the creation of this technology.
You want all perspectives, all backgrounds,
all ethnicities, you want it to look like the world,
which I think was beautiful way that you said it.
But, you also want
society at large to be well informed because a lot of
the funky stuff that's going
on today we're going to have to
make an increasingly large number of decisions,
policy for instance,
in ethics and the laws that we pass and the regulations
that are put into place to
govern the intersection of society and technology.
You want people super well
informed when we're making those decisions,
and you want them represented--it's like everybody.
>> Absolutely. I mean,
it's just critical that in this world,
everybody has this opportunity.
>> Yeah.
>> At Code.org, what we do is we make it
as easy as possible for schools to teach this.
We offer free curriculum,
we offer free professional development
for these teachers,
we help teachers who don't
have a computer science background.
>> Yeah.
>> Because the teachers don't.
I mean our schools don't teach it.
They didn't learn it when they went to school.
>> Yeah.
>> So, giving the teachers
the opportunity to learn to teach computer science.
They're History teachers,
English teachers, Math teachers.
>> Learning to teach computer science,
as you pointed out earlier,
is different than even knowing computer science.
>> Right. It is different. That's funny.
We actually find that it's not
the computer scientists make
the best teachers of computer science.
It's teachers teach computer science
the best because they're good teachers.
What we've found is that experienced teachers with
no background in computer science make
excellent computer science teachers
because they know how to teach.
>> Yeah.
>> If we give them the tools and
the resources and the curriculum,
they're fantastic in the classroom,
and their students do really well.
So, that's what we're working on doing.
I mean, these schools teach computer science.
>> What are some ahas that you've seen over
the past several years trying to
teach computer science kids?
>> Oh, there are so many.
I'll give you a personal one to start out with.
So, I came into
this thinking I was a good computer science teacher,
and it turned out surprise,
surprise, I was not.
I love teaching. I think a lot of people like me,
they enjoy it. It's fun.
I taught in college,
I started a program to bring students
into local schools to teach computer science.
I was TA, I was
a teacher, and I always got good reviews.
I always got high scores on the
which TAs are the best,
which teachers are the best.
So, I had this misimpression that I was good at teaching.
It's been fascinating getting to work with
a bunch of pedagogy experts on how do you
actually teach because what it turned out
was that I was entertaining in front of a room,
which is different from being a good teacher.
>> Yeah.
>> So, when we teach networking,
we have a thing called ABC CBV,
which is you do the activity before the concept.
>> Yeah.
>> You do the concept before the vocabulary.
It's not about a teacher standing
in front of a room lecturing.
It's about letting kids discover it on their own.
The art of teaching is stepping back. It's doing less.
It's not being entertaining.
It's not being this person who's like super energetic,
exciting person to watch.
It's about crafting experiences where the student
is going to get to figure
it out without you being involved.
Because if they figure it out themselves,
they're going to remember it.
So, let's say, we're teaching TCPIP.
We pair them up and we say, "Hey,
you guys got to figure out how to send
some messages back and forth."
We have this little software that lets them
send these little packets of messages back and forth.
But, our software is going to
drop some of those packets on the ground.
We're just going to lose them.
We're also going to send some of them out of
order because that's how the Internet works,
and they've got to figure out,
"Okay, I'm sending you messages,
some of them come on out of
order and some of them get dropped.
How am I going to deal with this?"
I don't care how they deal with it.
Some of them will send
five copies of the packet
because there is going to be like,
"Okay let's just keep sending them
because they're going to keep dropping them."
Some of them will number them,
some of them will send back [inaudible] to say,
"Yeah, I received or didn't receive your packet."
It doesn't matter what method they come up with.
The important part was that they really
understood the problem because they tried to solve it.
Then, after they've done that we say, "Okay,
that thing that you just did, that's called a protocol."
>> Yeah.
>> The protocol the Internet uses is called TCPIP.
Now, what did the teacher do in that whole lesson?
They facilitated the communication with the students.
They got the students paired up,
they helped a student who was
blocked get to that next step.
But nowhere in that lesson that the teacher stand
up in front of the room and draw a picture of TCPIP.
>> Yeah. I've had similar sorts of
problems with my kids and it was the same thing for me
at my goal in life was to be
a computer science professor from
age 16 to 31 when I left academia.
I taught undergrads for years,
I taught grad students,
and now I'm trying to teach a couple of
really young children about
these computer science concepts.
And so I'm sitting down at
a restaurant and teaching them about binary search,
and that will give a total win.
I think they got it right
away because I made it into a guessing game.
I'm going to teach you a trick for how you
can get someone to play this guessing game with
you where you can find the number that they guess between
zero and 128 in seven steps or less.
You know they're like, "This is great."
But, then I wanted to teach them
how to do search, and there are like
these little things about teaching
search that sort of hard.
One of the things is, if you just take
a bunch of numbers and write them down and say,
"How would you sort these?"
One of the things that's interesting is
human beings can see all of the numbers at one time.
So, they're cheating in a sense when
they're imagining how they're sorting.
And so I devised this thing
where I could give them a bunch of blocks
where the numbers on the blocks were covered up and,
so they could go examine
the number on the block one at a time,
which is how the computer goes and does things.
I just really realize that I was
all kinds of wrong about how good
I was going to be at teaching
little children these computing concepts.
>> Actually, the way you ended up doing it is
very similar to how we do it in our class.
So, what we do is we give the kids decks of cards.
They're only allowed to lift two at a time to
compare them because that's how a computer would do it.
>> Yeah.
>> They can't look at the cards when they flip on.
They show him to the other student
and the student says which one's bigger.
>> Yeah.
>> So, they get to pick two at
a time and see, and then actually,
one of the things that's cool about that
and a lot of our lessons is they're not on a computer.
They're actually using physical cards in the classroom.
>> Yeah, which I think it's actually great.
>> It's great. Yeah. Because you
know when you say computer science,
I think, sometimes people think, "Oh,
it's all on a computer," and
really about half of our lessons are off the computer,
and it's about interacting with other students.
It's about internalizing the concepts by working with
the actual concepts and the logic
outside of the context of the computer.
>> Thank you so much for doing this work.
I couldn't be a bigger fan and I think you guys
are having an enormous and amazing impact on the world.
Thank you for taking time to be on the show today.
>> Oh, no, thank you,
and thank you for Microsoft's support.
>> Well, thanks for joining us on Behind the Tech.
I'm back with my colleague, Christina Warren.
Some of Alice's insights were pretty
awesome. What stood out for you?
>> So, one of the interesting things
I thought about your conversation with Alice,
and we talked about this a little bit before,
was hearing her story and hearing about
the atypical journey and how
she got involved with technology.
>> Yeah, I think there's
an incredibly diverse set of folks in tech,
just sort of based on the path that
they took to get into the industry.
I've had the great pleasure of being
a computer science teacher and being
an engineer and engineering leader
for a really long time now,
and have just come into contact with
tons and tons and tons of engineers.
Each one of their stories is a little bit
different and some are sort of stereotypical image.
But there are all sorts of other folks like Alice,
who discovered computer science
in their senior year of high school.
There are some folks who discover it in college.
There are some folks who actually go off and
have a career in some completely different thing
and decide that they want to get into
computing later in their life or later in their career.
The thing that I'm seeing now is that,
it's increasingly easier to make
those transitions because the tools and capabilities and
sort of richness of
our programming environments and the way that we build
software just sort of allows
more and more people to get
bootstrapped more and more quickly.
Part of that's a byproduct of the open source wave of
software that we've been
witnessing over the past three decades.
>> Yeah, definitely. One of
the things I love about code.org is that,
even if the kids who are
going through this programs, even if, say,
they don't choose to study computer science in college,
they still have that foundation.
>> I think it's a really important thing
that everyone in society understands a little bit about
computing because computing and technology is
having a bigger and bigger impact
on all of our lives all of the time.
So, being informed about
some of that stuff and having an idea
in your head about how things
work is going to help you be a better citizen.
>> I feel like that's the only way that
our products get better is by having
more diverse viewpoints
and different types of people coming into doing things,
because you never know what someone's
perspective is going to bring.
I love what code.org is doing
in bringing more and more people
into the fold and letting them know,
"Hey, you can do this and it's fun."
>> Yeah, tons of fun actually.
But I have a biased opinion there.
I think that whole pedagogical framework for
teaching computer science to kids is really great.
I think it's actually going to prove to be
great not just for kids but for adults.
When I was a lecturer at
the University of Göttingen in Germany,
I was teaching a class
on programming languages and the theory of computation,
and some of that is difficult material to teach.
That certainly challenged my ability as a teacher
especially because I was lecturing in
English to a class full of non-native speaker.
>> Yeah, I was going to say, so you're
doing this in Germany,
teaching English and then there are non-native speakers,
although I guarantee that they
understand English far better than I
understand German, but still.
>> That was always embarrassingly true for me.
Their English was way better than my German.
In some ways, it's a different challenge to
really bring someone up from the ground to how
do you get over this beginning set of conceptual hurdles
so that you can then get
into the computer science curriculum?
By the time I got them,
they knew sorting algorithms,
they knew if-then-else statements and while loops
and all of the basic things
of how you construct a program.
I think at least until I had kids of my own,
I took for granted how difficult it
is to teach the "quote unquote" simpler stuff.
I think the lesson for me is appreciate
my teachers even more than I already did.
We should all appreciate those teachers who are out there
loading knowledge into the heads
of our future fellow citizens.
>> Absolutely.
>> Well, thank you so much, Christina.
This has been a great conversation,
and I look forward to being
back with you again in the next episode.
>> Me, too. Thanks so much.
>> Next time on Behind the Tech,
we'll talk with Andrew Ng,
the co-founder of the Google Brain project, Coursera,
and most recently, deeplearning.ai and Landing.ai.
Andrew is one of the most influential leaders
in AI and Deep Learning.
Be sure to tell your friends about our new podcast,
Behind the Tech, and to subscribe. See you next time.
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