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
and lonely and boring and magic,

to see them as things
that they can tinker

and turn around and twist,
and so forth.

My personal journey into the world
of programming and technology

started at the tender age of 14.

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

and the older man in question
just 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 Bertrand Russell and his philosophy.

And I started to be one
of those people

who felt that 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.

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 want to really be an astronaut

you can 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, 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 of 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 like,

"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 of the 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

that are really friendly but super messy.

And she has friends like Linux the penguin

who's really ruthlessly efficient,
but somewhat 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 jump."

You learn counter loops
by repeating that four times.

And you learn why while loops
by repeating that sequence

while I'm standing on one leg.

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
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 it as a collar

and the collar might have
a computer inside of it.

And grocery stores, they have so many
different kinds of computers,

like the cashier system
and the burglar alarms.

And kids, 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 hear about this thing

called The Internet of Things."

But you kids, you're are going
to be the ones

who really 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.

And we got to know the (?)
and the ?)

that help it remember things.

And after we've assembled
out computer together,

we also design an application for it.

And my favorite story
is this little boy,

he's six years old

and his favorite thing
in the world

is to be an astronaut.

And the boy, he has these huge
headphones on

and is completely immersed
in his tiny paper computer

because he's built his own
intergalactic planetary navigation application.

And his father, the lone astronaut
in the Martian orbit

is on the other side of the room

and the boy's important mission
is to bring the father safely back to earth.

And these kids are going to have
a profoundly different view of the world

and the way we build it with technology.

Finally, the more appraochable,
the more inclusive,

and the more diverse we make
the world of technology,

the more colorful and better
the world will look like.

So, imagine with me, for a moment,

a world where the stories we tell

about how things get made

don't only include the 20-something
Silicon Valley boys,

but also Kenyan school girls
and Norwegian librarian.

Imagine a world where the little
Ada Lovelaces of tomorrow

who live in a permanent reality
of 1s and 0s,

they grow up to be very optimistic
and brave about technology.

They embrace the powers
and the opportunities

and the limitations of the world.

A word of technology that is wonderful,
whimisical,

and a tiny bit weird.

When I was a girl,

I wanted to be a storyteller.

I loved make-believe worlds

and my favorite thing to do
was to wake up in the mornings

in Morning Valley.

In the afternoons, I would
roam around the Tatooines,

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 code.

Programming gives me this amazing power

to build my whole little universe
with its own little rules

and paradigms and practices.

Create something out of nothing

with the pure power of logic.

(Applause)

Thank you.