A delightful way to teach kids about computers

Code is the next universal language.

In the 70s, it was punk music
that drove a whole generation.

In the 80s, it was probably money.

But for my generation of people,

software is the interface
through our imagintion and our world.

And that means that we need
a radically, radically more diverse set of people

to build those products.

To not see computers as mechanical
or lonely or boring or magic,

to see them as things
that they can tinker around

and turn around and twist,
and so forth.

My personal journey into the world
of programming technology

started at the tender age of 14.

I had this mad-teenage crush
on an older man,

and the older man in question
happened to be

the then vice president
of the United States, Mr. Al Gore.

And I did what every single
teenage girl would want to do,

I wanted to somehow express
all of this love,

so I built him a website,
it's over here.

And in 2001, there was
no Tumblr,

there was no Facebook,
there was no Pinterest.

So I needed to learn to code
in order to express

all this longing and loving.

And that is how programming
started for me.

It started as a means
of self-expression.

Just like when I was smaller
and I would use crayons and legos

and when I was older I would use
guitar lessons and theater plays.

But then, there were other things
to get excited about,

like poetry and knitting socks

and conjugating French irregular verbs

and coming up with
make-belief worlds

and (?) and his philosophy.

And I started to be one
of those people

who thought that computers
were boring and technical and lonely.

Here's what I think today.

Little girls don't know that they're
not supposed to like computers.

Little girls are amazing.

They are really, really good
at concentrating on things

and being exact and they ask
amazing questions like,

"What?", and "Why?" and "How?"
and "What if?"

and they don't know that they
are not supposed to like computers.

It's the parents who do.

It's us parents who feel like
computer science

is this esoteric, weird
science discipline

that only belongs to the mystery makers.

That it's almost as far removed
from everyday life

as, say, nuclear 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 community, we've made
computers smaller and smaller.

We've built layers and layers
of abstraction on top of each other

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 fuctions

and we even tell them that if
you really want to become one.

But when the kid 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 it know what video to show?"

Or, "Linda, is Internet a place?"

We adults, we grow oddly silent.

"It's magic," some of us say.

'It's too complicated," the others say.

Well, it's neither.

It's not magic and it's not complicated.

It all just happened really, really fast.

Computer scientists built
these amazing, beautiful machines,

but they made them very, very
foreign to us

and also the language we speak
to the computers

so that we don't know how
to speak to the computers anymore

without our fancy 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 knitting,

I actually was following a sequence
of symbolic commands

that included loops inside of them.

And that Bertrand 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 fo creators.

This whole quest led me
to this little girl,

her name is Ruby, she is six years old,

she is completely fearless,
imaginative and a little bit bossy.

And ever time I would run
into a problem

in trying to teach myself programming,

"What is object- oriented design
or 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 the things Ruby taught me
go like this.

Ruby told me that you're not
supposed to be afraid

of the bugs under your bed.

And even the biggest problems
are a group of tiny problems

stuck together.

And Ruby also introduced me to her friends.

The colorful side of the
Internet culture.

She has friends like the Snow Leopard,

who is beautiful but doesn't want
to play with the other kids.

And she has friends like
the green robots

who are really friendly but super messy.

And she has friends like Linux the penguin
who's really ruthlessly efficient,

but really hard to understand.

And idealistic foxes, and so on.

In Ruby's world, you learn technology
through play.

And, for instance, computers
are really good at repeating stuff,

so the way Ruby would teach
loops goes like this:

this is Ruby's favorite dance move,

it goes, "Clap, clap, stomp, stomp,
clap, clap and stomp."

You learn counter loops
by repeating that four times.

Then you learn why while loops
while I'm standing on one foot,

and you learn until loops
by repeating that sequence

until mom gets really mad.

(Laughter)

And most of all, you learn
that there are no ready answers.

When coming up with the curriculum
for Ruby's world,

I needed to really ask the kids
how they see the world

and what kind of questions they have

and I would organize play testing sessions.

I would start by showing the kids
these four pictures.

I would show them a picture of a car,

a grocery store, a dog and a toilet,

and I would ask, "Which one of these
do you think is a computer?"

And the kids would be very conservative

and go, "None of these is
a computer.

I know that a computer is: it's that
glowing box

in front of which mom or dad spends
way too much time."

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 is has a collar, and a collar
might have a computer inside of it.

And grocery stores, they have so many
different computers,

like the cashier system
and the burglar alarms.

And, you know what?

In Japan, toilets are computers
and there's even hackers who hack them.

And we go further and I give them
these little stickers with an on/off button.

And I tell them, "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, "Don't worry, your parents
don't know the right answer, either.

They've just started to learn
about this thing

called The Internet of Things,

but you kids are going to be the ones

who are going to live up in a world

where everything is a computer."

And then I had this little girl
who came to me

and she took a bicycle lamp

and said, "If this bicycle lamp,
if it were a computer,

it would change colors."

And I said, "That's a really good idea,
what else could it do?"

And she thinks and she thinks,

and she goes, "If this bicycle lamp
were a computer,

we could go on a biking trip
with my father

and we could sleep in a tent
and this biking lamp

could also be a movie projector."

And that's the moment
I'm looking for,

the moment when the kid
realizes that the world

is definitely not ready yet.

That a really awesome way
of making the world more ready

is by building technology

and that each one of us
can be a part of that change.

Final story, we also built a computer.