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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-11-13
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jRREn6ifEQ
who is the next universal language in the seventies it was punk music that drove the whole generation in the eighties it was probably money but for my generation of people software is the interface to our imagination and our world and that means but we need a radically radically more diverse set of people to build those products to not see computers as mechanical and lonely and boring
and magic to see them I think that they contain current and turn around and twist and so forth my personal journey into the world of programming and technology started at the tender age of fourteen I had this match teenage crush on an older man and the older man in question just happened to be that then vice president of the United States Mr Alec or and I
did what every single teenage code would wanna do I want to somehow express all of this love so I built him a bedside it's over here and if he doesn't run there was no T. H. out there was no tumblr there was no Facebook there was no Pinterest's so I needed to learn to code in order to express all of this longing and laughing and that
is how programming status for me it started as a means of self expression just like when I was smaller I would use crayons and legos and when I was older I would use guitar lessons on and theater of place but then there were other boys there where other things to get excited about like poetry on a knitting socks on and on conjugating French irregular verbs and
coming up with make believe wells and and Burnage Russell and his philosophy and I started to be one of those people who felt the computers are boring and technical and lonely here's what I think today little girls don't know that they are not supposed to like computers there goes our amazing date they are really really good I %HESITATION like concentrating on things and I'm being exact
and they ask amazing questions like what's and why and how when what if anti don't know that they are not supposed to like computers the parents who do it's us parents who feel like computer science is this esoteric of weird science discipline that only belongs %HESITATION to the mystery makers are that is almost as far removed from everyday life I say not clear physics and they
are partly right about that there's a lot of syntax and controls and data structures and algorithms and practices protocols and paradigms in programming and we as a as a community we've made computer smaller and smaller we've built late years and layers of abstraction on top of each other are between the man and the machine to the point that we no longer have any idea how computers
work or how to talk to them and we do teach our kids how the human body works we teach them how the combustion engine functions and even tell them that if you want to really be an astronaut you can become one but when it comes to us and asks so what is a bubble sort algorithm or how does the computer know what happens when I press
play how does know which video to show up dies internet appliances we adults me grow oddly silent it's magic some of us say too complicated the other side well it's neither it's not magic and it's not complicated it all just happened really really really fast computer scientists built this amazing beautiful machines but they made them very very foreign to us and also the language we speak
to the computer so that we don't know how to speak to the computers anymore without offense user interfaces and that's why no one recognized that when I was conjugating French irregular verbs I was actually practicing my pattern recognition skills and when I was excited about needing I actually risk following a sequence of symbolic commands that included loops inside of them and the burdens Russell's lifelong quest
to find an exact language between English and mathematics found its home inside of a computer I was a programmer but no one knew it the kids of today they tap swipe and pinch their way through the world but unless we give them tools to build with computers we are raising only consumers instead of creators and I believe that if javascript is the new lingua franca instead
of grammar lessons we should be teaching poetry this whole quest kind of led me to this little girl her name is ruby she's six years old she's completely fearless imaginative a little bit bossy and every time I would run into a problem in trying to teach myself programming like what is object oriented design are what is garbage collection I would try to imagine how a six
year old little girl would explain the problem and I wrote a book about her and I illustrated it and things will be taught me go like this you've taught me that you're not supposed to be afraid of the bugs under your bed and but even the biggest of the problems I just a book group of tiny problem stuck together and will be also she also introduced
me to her friends a bit bit sort of colorful side of the internet culture he has friends like the snow leopard was beautiful but doesn't want to play with the other kids and has friends like their green robots that are really friendly but super messy but she has friends like me look the penguin who was really ruthlessly efficient but somewhat hard to understand and idealistic foxes
and so on in ruby swelled killer technology through play and for instance computers are really good of repeating stuff so the way rule be would teach Lopes goes like this this is robust favorite doesn't look it because clap clap stomp stomp clap trap and dumb and you lead for loops by %HESITATION counter aloof by repeating the four times and you let fly loops by repeating that
sequence while I'm standing on one leg annually and on T. loads by repeating the sequence until mom gets really amassed you landed composition skills by problem solving flow charts and seeing what went wrong and will be is friends I practicalities you learn that algorithms they are really much like a cupcake recipes and most the fall you learn that there are no ready answers when coming up
with the curriculum for rubies well I need to really ask the kids how they see their world and how what kind of questions they have and I would organize playtesting session and I would have these I have brief little stories for you from those playtesting so I would start by showing the kids these four pictures I would show them a picture of a car a grocery
store a dog in the toilet and I would ask which one of these do you think it's a cool puter and the kids would be very conservative and go like ha ha none of these is a computer I know what a computer is it's that glowing box in front of which mom or dad spends way too much time in front of but then we would talk
and we would discover that actually a car is a computer it has a navigation system inside of it and a dog a dog might not be a computer but it has a color and the color might have a computer inside if it and grocery stores they have so many different kinds of computers like the cashier system and the book burglar alarms and keeps you know what
himself turned toilets are computers and there's even hikers hike that and we go further and I give them these little stickers with an on off button on them and I tell the kids you know what today you have this magic ability to make anything in this room into a computer and again the kids go sounds really hard I don't know the right answer for this but
I tell them that don't worry your parents don't know the right answer either it just started to hear about this thing called the internet of things but you kids you're going to be the ones who are really going to leave path in a world where everything is Peter your of washing machine your tool fresh even your milk bottle and that you're the last generation that will
remember the computer as a glowing box and then I had this little gal who came to me and took a bicycle and his that if this bicycle and if it where a computer it would change colors and I'm it's a really good idea what else could it do and she thinks that she thinks see ghosts high if this bicycle and for a computer we could go
on a biking trip with my father and we would sleep in the tent and the spice it up biking a lot could also be a movie projector and that's the moment time looking for not the moment for the kid writes the perfect rule BR a the moment when the kid realizes that the world is definitely not ready yet that's a really awesome way of making the
world more ready is by do it by building technology and that each one of us can be a part of that final story we also build a computer the glowing box that are quite glowing vox and we get to know %HESITATION the posse CP used on that helpful Raman from the help it remember things on after we'd assembled our computers together we also design an application
for it my favorite story is this little boy he six years old and his favorite thing in the world is to be an astronaut and the boy yes this huge headphones on and he's completely immersed in his tiny paper computer because you see he still his own integral lactic planetary navigation application and his father the lone astronaut in the Martian orbit is on the other side
of the room and the boys important mission serving the father safely back to earth and these kids are going to have a profoundly different view of the world and the way we feel that with technology finally the more approachable the more inclusive and the more diverse we make the world of technology the more colorful and better the world will look like because disruption it doesn't stop
with technology disruptions thoughts with people with a vision a computer science and programming and technology the very DNA of on the face things his humanity computers after all they used to be humans where require really really good at calculating things and still today programmers they don't fight the cold only for the machine to execute it they write the code for other programmers to read and build
a fun so imagine with me for a moment a world where the stories we tell about how things get made don't only include the twenty something year old Silicon Valley voice but also canyon schoolgirls and notify region librarians imagine a world where the little and a lovely sees of tomorrow who live in the permanent reality of ones and zeros they grow up to be very optimistic
and and brave about technology they they embrace the powers and that the opportunities and the limitations of the wealth of world of technology that is wonderful whimsical and a tiny bit too weird when I was a gal I wanted to be a storyteller I love to make believe wells and and my favorite thing to do was to wake up in the mornings in Wyoming valley I
it's afternoons I would roam around the top two leads and in the evenings I would go to sleep in Narnia and programming turned out to be the perfect profession for me I still create worlds instead of stories I do them with quote programming gives me this amazing power to build my whole little universe with its own rules and paradigms in fact to seize create something out
