>> 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already out of date,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.
