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Hello and thank you for listening to the teaching math teaching podcast. The teaching math teaching podcast is sponsored by the Association of mathematics teacher educators. The hosts are myself, Eva, Sennheiser, dusty Jones and Joel amadon. Today we're talking with Chris bartlow from Wilson High School in Portland, Oregon, about empowering students in the classroom. Chris is a high school math and computer science teacher. Wilson is currently the only Portland public high school offering a comprehensive Computer Science program. I'm going to let Chris talk a little bit more about his introduction. But I wanted to mention that Chris one, amongst many other things, the Paul Allen distinguished educator award and their Presidential Award for Excellence in 2017. We're excited to speak with Chris today to learn about how he teaches in general and how he has adapted recently to the ongoing situation. Welcome, Chris. Hey, what's up, I guess I'll do a quick introduction of myself to know a little bit about me and my program. So, you know, sort of my main day job is I teach computer science at Wilson High School. And we really teach computer science with a focus on math, it's housed as a math elective. And so we really built a lot of Applied Math into computer science. But we also tie into career and technical education and sort of that job seeking aspect of the work as well. And then kind of my my side gigs are a lot around advocacy work and teacher training. So I do a lot of professional development, with K teachers with code.org. So I train elementary school teachers about how to bring computer science into the classroom. And similarly, I do that with cohorts of middle school teachers. So I kind of wear a lot of hats in terms of trying to help people learn how to be better teachers, and there's a lot of focus on equity work, and how our problem solving skills that we learn in math and computer science really apply to all the disciplines that we try to get kids to engage with. So yeah, and I guess, you know, education background, I used to do AI research. And I have three master's degrees from Portland State School. And, and I used to design slot machines and player tracking systems for casinos. And I even did some stunts and video games and things like that. So I have kind of a broad industry, academic education background check, which I think ends up informing a lot about how I run my class, and what I want kids to get to experience when I when I work with them. So Chris, can you tell us a little bit about the classes you teach, and the population of students that you work with? Yeah, so we're a normal public four year high school. And we're pretty unique, because you can take computer science all four years, we are Computer Science program, there's always been Computer Science at Wilson High School, I took it over about 11 years ago, is when I took it over. And originally it was sort of get capped by math, right. So it was a class for advanced math students. And I really saw it as a way to engage a wider range of kids. So we opened up the how people could take it. And so you don't need a math, you know, past, you know, basically pre algebra. And then you're ready to get into computer science. So our intro class is sort of a sampler, you do a little bit of HTML and CSS web design, which really is the focus of that is to get comfortable with syntax. And then it transitions into logic, which we use scratch or another sort of visual programming language for being comfortable with that. And then we do Python to combine the two of those things. And then the next year, we actually offer a dual credit through the local community college, Portland Community College. And that is like a kind of a classic c plus plus traditional, your first computer science class. And then as we go, kind of through the program, the idea is to get students to do more open ended projects on autonomously. So each year, like maybe the first year, you might have like a week or two to do independent projects. And then the second year, you might have a whole quarter to do like a real flexible project. And then they start learning agile development and working in teams and doing sort of big ambitious projects. So we've done a lot of really cool projects. Over the years, we've we actually made an app for the police department. One of my first years teaching we've probably our most famous app is we had a student develop an app to detect melanoma using the camera on your phone. So you could take a picture of your arm that used AI to in a big database, his mom was a dermatologist and had access to all these photos are able to do that into an app and he actually filed for patents and won a couple international awards for that. Sounds pretty cool. So we do these really cool in the upper level classes. It's about doing projects and pursuing student interest.

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Ultimately, we feel pretty strongly that when the students get to pursue their own interests, they will do much more ambitious things than you can like, comfortably feel assigning them, right, like, so if they're really passionate about it, they will work really hard, ask really hard questions and do all that good inquiry based learning, that is really how you learn best. So I have like 2 million questions I would like to ask, but let me start with, let's say, a math teacher has never done coding, but would like to incorporate some into their classes. What would you suggest is a good beginning? So I mean, I think that you can do a lot. I mean, again, it really has to do with your your resources and comfort level, I think that you can do a lot of great, what maybe people will consider computer science work. I think a lot of it really maps on to the standards of Mathematical Practice, right? So when I work with teachers, the most of the teachers I work with aren't computer science people, right? I'm training people that are math teachers, or English teachers to be computer science teachers, when I do professional development. And so it's all about finding what's the like the same or similar to what you do. All the stuff we do in our math classroom, we're trying to get kids to think logically and to connect steps and be creative, right? These are all things we get to do when we program. And so thinking about ways to think about process, think about creativity, think about problem solving in a really general way, like all of those are going to really transition nicely to actually writing code. And so I think that like when you do things like, you know, like formal proof work, or, you know, cool projects, where you have to like analyze the data. So like any sort of data analysis, stuff, that's sort of triggering the same things that are going to help kids be ready for that. So anything where you have to take apart a big complicated problem and break it into small chunks. You know, that's really like the tough work of programming. So if you're doing that in your math class, you're going to be able to have a really nice transition to pay. If you ever watched the right kid, we've actually been doing a pilot in our school for the last few years where we have the physics class do unit on Python, as part of every freshman does, like a three to four week unit of coding in Python. So freshman physics, every kid takes it, they do it, we have a nice little intro, you know, set of activities. It's kind of paint by numbers, like, hey, do this, do this, do this, get a little taste of it, but it's really worked out well. And it's increased our sort of interest and diversity in our classes. I guess an answer that question earlier, you know, our high school is, you know, it matches the Portland demographic pretty clearly, you know, we're about 70%, white, you know, 30% non way, we're about 30%, free and reduced lunch. So, you know, we're, we're kind of a middle of the road, sort of high school, where there's a lot, there's some, you know, but what we find is that kids haven't got exposed to the coding nearly as much as you would think, for being like a fairly, I don't know, suburban, like, you know, sort of high school. And so giving them a little taste of in different classes is a great way to get them excited, but also see that it's, it's a discipline that pairs well, with all the other things they're interested in, whether it's science, or math or English, you know, all these different disciplines. It's really, it's cool, because it's a, it's additive. And we do a lot with the music folks, we do this recent COVID break, we did a whole interactive fiction thing. We we coded up cool interactive fiction things so they could write about their experience during code. So let's say I'm a teacher, and just sounds like what I want to do. Hmm, where would I go to start some resources? So depending on your grade level? That's kind of a big question, right? I think that you know, I'll pitch code.org here. coda org has a lot of free resources geared and a lot of different age ranges. So like, if you just want like a, like a taster activity to maybe run in your class. code.org has something called the Hour of Code where they've put together a bunch of activities that take an hour, or maybe slightly more to do. And there's some pretty cool ones on there. There's, there's ones that have data analysis, there's cool ones, where you sort of have to program geometric shapes. Plus, it's like, you know, with the frozen characters, that's kind of fun. I think those are a great way to get your feet wet, especially if you're really new to it, because you don't have to learn anything. And that's the biggest, like mindset. I think we talked about this in math a lot, that we have to really work on getting kids to feel comfortable, sort of failing forward. As a phrase I really like it's like you're gonna mess up. And messing up is actually a good part of the process because it gets you to reflect. It gets you to try new strategies, and get you comfortable being creative and experimental in your work. You

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No, and I think coding is one of those things that really teaches that because you get such good feedback right away, when you throw out a little bit of code, and it doesn't quite work the way you want. So same thing for teachers, if you want to try this out, you don't need to be an expert for this to be a really positive experience for you and your students, if you kind of put on the hat of I'm gonna learn with the kids, and go forward, after you sort of maybe like dip your toe in with something like code.org and their various things. There's a great website called CS unplugged, which is added New Zealand, the Christ Church. And it's a really cool set of activities that gets into algorithms, it gets into how data is stored, all those great computer science topics that don't need a computer to run. And so these really cool hands on activities that you can run like, classic normal things. So it's like image compression and state machines and all this neat stuff. That's like very computer sciency. But it's also very mathy. Because it's really thinking about, you know, how do I represent things with numbers or patterns or sequences, which is actually, you know, that's good, practical mathematical application. So I really, I think those two are great ways to start, that are like not like, sit down and learn how to code Python, because you can go do that. But I don't know if that's the most engaging way, especially as a first taste to get kids, especially ones that aren't already chomping at the bit for this. So I really like those unplugged activities a lot. So I just opened that website while we were talking. And it looks like there's a whole bunch of activities. So that thanks for that resource. Yeah. Hey, Chris. My question is, like, you talked about using mathematics in combination with computer science. So you have this kind of unique insight into these two different types of teaching, teaching math and teaching computer science. What do you think is has one added to the other for you? Is it about this, you know, like failing forward being able to promote that more, or? I don't know, just curious about that, with that. So the unique mix there, one of the things that I think is really fun is that we get to as a high school math teachers, two great things I get to do with computer science is one, I get to revisit all this math that I don't think the kids learned well, right? Or like didn't like get the appropriate amount of like wonder and awesomeness about how cool this really is. So, you know, classic one is like, the factory in theory, like factoring theorem is like so like fundamental to answering all sorts of questions like, you can rephrase lots and lots of high school math as like, hey, just use factoring theorem, just use the green theorem. But a lot of the kids don't make that connection. But now you have this very practical thing, you're drawing something on the screen, or you have to break a problem down into little chunks. And then you realize, like, oh, wait a second, I just did the same thing. The distance formula playground theorem. Oh, wait a second. That's like they both Wait, got it. And so I think that there's there's that chance to reteach, like, one of the problems that I have them do, they have to make something that will add fractions, and print out the numerator and denominator. And so kids actually have to really think about how the fraction addition algorithm goes. And it turns out, that I would argue, maybe 60, or 70% of my kids, like, don't really know how that works. Like, they have some sort of way to do it, or they've sort of relied on their calculator, but they really haven't thought about, like, greatest common divisor of these common multiples, all these kind of cool, like number theory, ideas kind of come in, which gets into the second thing you get to do, which is they get to teach a bunch of math that I think is really important. That's not in the standards, the big ones like expected value, right? Like for me, like expected value is like one of the most like, essential go live your life kinds of math, and it's not on any sort of standard. And probability in general is very underrepresented in, in our math at the high school level. Similarly, things like game theory, you know, number theory, like I get to play with all that kind of stuff. You know, if I want to do a cool Prisoner's Dilemma thing, I can do a whole a really cool in class activity that I do with that we get to talk about trashing the commons, we talked about President Obama, you know, simulation. So we can do Monte Carlo stuff, we can talk about fractals? You know, there's all this like rich math, it doesn't fit into the math, like because you can't do like fractals in like a set theoretic way. Or like how you do it in analysis, right? Like, because they don't know any of that math. So it's like, but I can do fractals as a computer graphics thing and think about it as recursion or think about it is repeated patterns, right? And so I get to do all this really fun stuff. And then kids get all of a sudden get this appreciation that lightweight. Math is not about grinding out answers, massive and doing stuff. I had a big, like you're just opening something I'd like and maybe you've already thought about this before, but it's a big aha

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For me, but I mean with the way you're describing the students, and then like having them doing some of these exercises, all of a sudden, they're like, well, the connection between the, you know, the distance formula and a Pythagorean Theorem or not, or having to figure out like the numerator and denominator of a fraction, what does that really mean? It feels like you're moving them from acting like computers, which, you know, sometimes I feel like my own math education, I was treated like a computer, right? Here's an algorithm, execute it, don't think about it, just do exactly what you're told to bring about some sort of output, you having them thinking, like their computers to becoming the programmer, right to actually see and make sense of what's behind the scenes, I don't know, making something up. This is kind of like one of my big, my preachy things, which is, you know, we really need to move kids from consuming with technology to creating with technology. And when we create with technology, like when you have to come up with the algorithm, or you have to implement the algorithm, like you have to get a different level of understanding right? Now earlier, it kind of brought up this thing, like, what's one of the skills that we really get from math like, because extensively, like, why do we try to teach everybody math? Like, what's the cell that like, Oh, it's gonna make us good problem solvers. And math is this magical thing that does all this great stuff, right? But really, it's like, it only does all that great stuff, if you can be creative with it, if you can apply it to the problems that are sort of, like put in front of you, right? And most of the problems that we actually get in real life, are not ones that have like a yes or no answer, like, haha, correct. Right? Like, we have to be able to identify those complicated problems, break them apart, try to solve them and then have confidence that our answer makes a lot of sense, right. And, and so that's my pitch to the parents like it kind of this talk that I'm saying, right now, this is my back to school night talk, where I say, look like I'm not trying to make a bunch of software engineers, I don't actually care if anybody goes off in majors in computer science, what I want them to do is learn how to solve complicated problems. Because if they go off and run their own business, if they go off and be a physicist, if they, you know, go be a, you know, agent for movie stars, like, they're going to benefit from this way of thinking about the world and unpacking problem. So that's why I really think that Yeah, we're gonna engage kids in their math and what we find, and it's funny, I, you know, I'll brag on a student, I just had a student get a, you know, internship at palantir, that one with me, and she was like, kind of a brilliant math kid. her sophomore year, we were doing a lot of college level math. And she, you know, one of her side projects was making a, you know, visualizations of hyper cubes and graphics library, we were doing stuff like that. But it was cool, because she didn't really get programming. When she started it, she was always just a pure math kid. And then she got to combine those two interests. And then now she's gonna go. And she's like, involved in a startup. And she's involved in all these things. And she just has, like, so many different angles, to pursue that passion of math. And I think it It showed her that there's even more to her passion of math than there were because she got to see more pieces of math. So all those different things, I think tie into, you know, we can get kids that don't really love math, to appreciate math, we can get kids that already love math to realize math is even broader than they thought and even cooler than they thought. I feel like the synergy who they're so positive for both, especially if you teach it in a project based way in a student choice lead way, you know, you want to guide them to get some of these realizations. But when they come to them, honestly, on their own, then they stay so much more engaged. I was lucky to have a high school that's very small at one AP class, but for some reason, they had three courses in computer science. And it know that that was a big part of my development. So this is I'm flashing back here. So if I want to stall just for a second, just bear with me. So cool. I remember when I first learned to code, I taught my second day. Back in the mid 80s. We had faced

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I taught myself basic and that I would ask the teacher could I stay in from recess? This was in fifth grade. So I can work with basic and at first she was like, Yeah, okay, and then she realized, wait, he doesn't really want to go to recess. He just wants to code. And then when I was a talkative kid, and so I get in trouble for talking and have to write sentences. And so one day I said, Miss Seibert, could I just write my 50 sentences on the computer. She's like, sure. And then I did a for next loop and wrote one sentence, you know, and

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see and problem solving we want our kids to have

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I mean, I mean that honestly, it's like it's a good computer programmers kind of lazy, like you want to get away from the dumb work and get to the coolest stuff. And I think that that's something that we you know, as a math teacher, I put on my math teacher hat. You know, my biggest argument with my peers is that like you're not doing anything that makes

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People love math. When you talk to professors and people, you know what college math looks like, and things like that, grinding out, you know, solve for x stuff does not allow for math really generate, nor does it generate the skills that you need to really be a generative mathematician, right. And so it's kind of like, what is this actually? What purpose does that serve? So, yeah, and I was thinking also with a class I teach to undergraduates, we talk about determining whether a number is prime or not. And that's a really, I mean, there's some algorithmic processes that you can go through. And then you can kind of tweak it to make it a little, you know, faster. And I guess, really, people are working right now to try to determine, you know, even faster and better ways to do that. It's an unsolved problem. But I have a program on my ti 84, that I programmed, you know, a decade ago or more, that if I type in a number, it will give me the factors or it will tell me that the numbers prime and my students caught me using that program. One time, they said, Wait, you got to push a button on your computer. I said, Well, I wrote a program. I said, Well, if we write a program, can we use it on the test? I said, Sure. And now I'm thinking maybe I need to make that like, an assignment. Like, assignments. Yeah. So you're out how to write a program to solve this problem that's going to come up over and over and over again, to me, that's an example of a really rich problem that differentiates Well, that's another thing that I'm really interested in, cuz I really want everybody to get a chance to experience this stuff. And so differentiation, when you're working with technology, in general is very, very hot, right? There's a huge range of what everyone's been exposed to in this thing. So a problem like that is great, because there's like a basic way to do it. Right? where like, you try to divide by every number, you count up to the number you don't even really, like, get rid of the shortcuts here. But like, hey, like, if you got that down, that's like, level one. Great job super happy. Hey, can you make it a little bit faster? Okay, so then you get kids that figure out, oh, maybe I only have to check half the numbers or square root of the numbers. Okay, cool. Now we've that we've made a real big improvement. Okay, then you get some kids that are like, Hmm, okay, well, maybe if I build lists, and I could like, save off lists of numbers that I find that I could use the primes that I found that keep, you know, reducing it or something like, Okay, cool. Now you've, you know, so again, it's like, there's so many different ways for a kid to go into that. And you can sort of poke them according to your interaction with them to keep keep going. So that's exactly right. That's a perfect kind of question. Because it has some practical use, it really gets them to think about things like prime factorization later on, that that was a really good one connecting it to prime factorization. You know, there's some classic algorithms all of a sudden that you can get into, like ucoz, algorithm, things like that, that leads it to recursion. So again, it's like it opens up this cool spiderweb of way cooler math way cooler algorithmic thinking, and you don't have to go there if a kid's not ready for it. So you got this nice path that branches out. And there's not. Anytime I find a problem like that, like, I'm really excited, because I think as a teacher, that's the stuff that's like, kind of the goal is that you can have a bunch of kids engaged in it at different levels, because we are teaching mixed classrooms, and we don't know who's gonna be in our class at a time. So let's turn the conversation a little bit to what's been going on in the world lately, and having to have move everything online. How did that go for you? What did you do? And what suggestions would you have? Should we consider being online again, next year? Yeah, so I thought a lot about this, I'll say I was lucky, because I had already done a lot of flipped classroom based things. And so I already had like the gear, you know, just like the camera on the mic, and a little bit of comfort with some of the tools that I ended up using. I went through a few different phases of this. And I and I settled on something, the arguments in our school were around how much content to deliver, right? So like, that was like the big question, everyone's like, well, we got to hit the standards, or we need to have X number of hours a week, or whatever. And I kind of took it on another spin on like, what do my kids need right now, with their lives so disrupted and so I ended up talking to the school psychologist who has a lot of background in trauma informed care and trauma informed instruction, which said a lot about like, if kids are in a traumatic situation, they don't remember, their ability to remember content is actually very, very low. But their ability to remember how they felt during that time is very, very high. So I kind of took it is that I wanted to With that in mind, I wanted them to have a positive association with my class, because I wanted to say so I focused on buildings for the love of the game. Right? So I went through and I tried to find like, Cool stuff and computer science that was different, and so we didn't do a ton of coding.

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Um, and I'll talk about that in a minute. But so I did some things like I built a little, you know, we did a nice little bite sized, like kind of three hour chunks, like three hours per week kind of thing. So, you know, I did some stuff on some fractals, for instance. And I don't know if you guys have ever seen Ron eeig lashes, TED talk about, you know, African fractals, ethno mathematics. So I like introduced them to that. And that was really well received. There's like a cool revelation in that that talk that Boolean logic actually came from, you know, sort of mathematicians getting introduced to the sand divination technique done by sort of mistakes from Africa. And so it's like, hey, look, computers and history and all this stuff like ties together, like, Ooh, that was pretty fun. We did a cryptography activity and studied Alan Turing and son, one of the female codebreakers in America, during that time, you know, and then I gave them like activities to do at home with their parents. So that unplugged site, there's one about flipping coins and like error correcting. And it's like, it's like, you do it with a partner. So I'm like, okay, go do this with your parents. So it was like, I picked these little things that were like, I want you to interact with somebody in your house and have a conversation about this stuff, I want you to remember why you maybe took this class in the first place, you know, like, those were things that I thought were really, really important. And the response from the kids was really, really great, because

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the work was interesting, they actually wrote these really amazing reflections about it, I got really high quality reflections for my kids. But the surveys and stuff that I did was basically like, this was a work that I did to like, chill me out, because they knew that it was going to be engaging, show them something on a little bit different angle, and not be like, punishing, because a lot of people was pretty punishing, like, they were getting like 10 or 15 hours a week from you know, maybe one class that was trying to get through all the standards. So I think that like when we get into these, these situations, you got it, you got to really remember that the kids, you know, they don't have as many skills as we do, especially high school kids are already, you know, the restrictions on their freedoms, the, you know, social component to their lives, and things like that got really, really disrupted. And so, you know, you got to make a decision here about hitting every checkmark on the content or teaching the kids that you have. And so I always kind of try to pick teaching the kids that I have, because I think that always pays out better. So all those kids I think are going to be more ready to learn for me next year, especially if we go in the situation because they know I'm going to be fair, reasonable. And so hey, maybe I'll get to do more content, if we get into the situation next year. So it's kind of like the style of things I did. So I did a lot of small projects. So I mentioned a little bit earlier, but I did an interactive fiction project. So we actually went through and sort of poked around at some historical kind of choose your own adventure style games like desorbed. And Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There's some new ones that are pretty cool, like 905 and counterfeit monkey, that are sort of new spins on that genre. And then there's a cool tool called twine. This is like a project I actually did. There's a group called 865 National that does literacy things. And they asked me to design a computer science literacy unit for them that they ended up using down in LA, with the YMCA. And so I adapted that. And so we did some writing stuff, which was cool, because they were, you know, actually got to write and I think that's really important, especially writing for mediums that aren't like essays. So like technical writing, we do a lot of that in my class, and you know, writing like scripts and things like that. pretty important if you're going to, you know, work in industry in different ways. But beside interactive fiction thing worked out really well, because the kids got to share a lot of their experience I had a theme was something that describes COVID life. And, you know, it was really like inspiring, like, you could like kids, you know, shared like, all sorts of really interesting and creative ideas. But the other thing was, it was kind of bleak, like they were bored, they were feeling bad like and it came out in their in their work. And so getting to give kids work that shows you how they're feeling is really important in this time. And you can do that with the math activity. One of my buddies did some cool data analysis stuff, where he's having him go find data to help make arguments about opening or closing the school, you know, and the town and things like that. I think those were really worthwhile activities, because they felt like meaningful, like kids really rebelled against anything viewed as busy work. And so worksheets grinded out, kind of Khan Academy stuff, all that stuff was poorly received by kids, you know, making feels good. That's one of the ways to really

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Kind of soothe your soul when you're feeling bad and, you know, working with the sound engineering and music teachers, because we collab on a lot of stuff. And, you know, they were saying they were getting some some of their best music, because kids had a lot to put into it, and they had the time to actually do it. And so if you give a, you know, meaningful project, being mindful of all the other work that they have, you know, you don't want to do it every week. But you know, you can get some really meaningful, meaningful stuff out of kids. And I think one meaningful project that they feel really good about, is gonna go a long way for them developing as mathematicians and students. And before, just thank you for your perspective. Thank you for joining us on the podcast, this has been wonderful hearing just these different perspectives and bringing up some of these, like, you know, as I refer to earlier, like, in my own experience with computer science, I wonder if that how that informs how I'm teaching and thinking about, I just got lots of thoughts going through my head about thinking about how to do this with teachers. I guess that's one thing. So what is one thing that you would say, hey, do this with teachers would be a good step forward? Like in the context of like, all teachers should do this or teaching teachers like, yeah, like we were talking about teaching math teaching. So teachers, what's one thing that we should do with our to be in service teachers, but one of the things is, is that I would say, everybody, I think, should have, like, if you're going to go be a teacher, like, you should have like a math hero, right? Like, like, you should really have like a mathematician or like some somebody in the STEM field that you really admire, that you can use to anchor like a cool core activity. And so like, if I was training teachers, like one of the things that I would do is, I'd say, hey, you're gonna go out. And this is partially because I got a history degree too. And I like history a lot, and say, Okay, go find out a mathematician, that you just love what they did, and then build a lesson around their accomplishments, because you're going to be passionate about it, you're going to get to get into some interesting math, you're gonna think about the math that sets up the math that they did, you know, and I think there's two examples. So I, you know, so for me, like Alan Turing, in computer science and math, and Cobra is just, you know, his whole story is just like, crazy, you know, you get to get into, you know, sort of gay rights and things like that, you get to get into, you know, sort of patriotism, the whole history of the war. Plus, there's like, really clear contributions to the field that are accessible to fit. I did another one, because during this time, john Conway passed away, you know, and john Conway, wonderful mathematician, you know, kind of interesting character, but also he did cellular Tommen, on the game of life, which was such a great was like, perfect for COVID. Right. And so since I had this mindset of use a person to generate lessons, it was easy for me to make an immediate, relevant, practical lesson that was accessible to lots of kids, we did a bunch of cellular automaton stuff, and they played with Game of Life. And then we actually got to tie that back to the halting problem with Alan Turing that we talked about. So it was like, like, when you base like, we use history to help teach your math, you can make it so much more real. And it's way easier to build stuff. Because you're you're thinking about a person. And all the stuff that worked around them, just helps you with your lesson. So that's something I'd really recommend to any new teacher is don't be afraid to use your history. It doesn't have to, you don't have to be a master of all history. Start with one person that sounds super cool to you, and build off of that, especially with teaching elementary and thinking about the different all the different things that could tie into this. You know, so we're not just thinking about a math unit, we're thinking about the multi dimensional multi subject area. So yeah, awesome. Chris, I was wondering, as I'm thinking, listening to you thinking about all the different ways that I want to, you know, practice coding and things like that. I remember a few weeks ago, there was some like Google doodles that came out that my daughter who's going to be going into seventh grade, noticed, and then we both started kind of competing on these. And this is making me think of, is there a particular platform? And maybe it's maybe it's code.org? Or maybe it's some other programming language? I mean, I don't think basic is as hot as it was. When I was growing up. Is there one that you would say this is where like these, maybe, let's say, to pick an age, a seventh grader, I'm pretty language agnostic. One of my stories about learning how to program is I took a class at Harvey Mudd. And every week we had to program or homework in a different program. Okay, which was hard. And I was really proud that I got through that class and is sort of like in pre internet days, too. So it was really, really tricky, but the reason that I that has always stuck with me is that I learned very much it's like how you think about the coding

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Rather than the specific tool that you use, so like I love scratch, you know, like my kids do a bunch of stuff on scratch, and I actually use scratch with high school kids, I use it with elementary school kids. Why do I like it, because it's just a focus on logic, right? It's got a great platform, it's online, you can run it on a Chromebook. That's great. There's a cool little one that we played with overbraid called puzzle script, that's like a little bit more like a functional programming language. And really, it's just meant for making like really simple box pushing games, that's pretty cool. You can use something like raploch to code and like any programming language, you can sort of imagine, you know, and JavaScript is really popular with kids right now. Because then you can go and mod Minecraft, if you learn a little bit of JavaScript, and that's, that's a hot thing to do. And ultimately, I think that they're almost all the same. Like, you know, like, you know, c++ is kind of the granddaddy, or C, in that it, like a lot of things, if you look that have come out more recently are sort of like, hey, wouldn't it be nice if it would sort of work like, see, but it would have more built in stuff, or you didn't have to worry about variable types or whatever. And so, Python and JavaScript and things like that are sort of cleaned up nicer versions in terms of learning them. But it's hard to say one language is better than the other, you know, they all it sort of whatever, you know, floats your boat a little bit. But, you know, in terms of like my kids, like they do mostly the graphical programming languages. Now, they'll probably start doing Python or JavaScript this year. And so I guess my, you know, I have a rising sixth grader and a rising fourth grader. And that's probably what they'll start poking around with. And those are just because I kind of like those ones a little bit better. But I don't think that there's any right or wrong, and they've done code.org for years and scratch for years. And you know, there's so many like little apps, like the Lego Mindstorms. Yeah, things like that, that are, you know, and the kids, you know, it's really just about exposing them, giving them a little taste of the thing. It's like, hey, if that one didn't work, then go try another one, go try another one. So you find one, that's the right combination of Okay, I can do the things that I want to do. So if your daughter really wants to do graphic stuff, then hey, make sure your command line programming might not be the right thing. And right, scratch is better. So again, there's a ton of resources, CUDA or has a has a link to, if you go to their our code page, they actually have a big link to a bunch of resources that aren't even their own. They go out to a bunch of them. There's one called code combat, that's kind of, you know, fun, I think that one might be paid though. Now it used to be free. It's like a little game that you play. There's a lot of them like that, that are our games and activities for high schoolers code HS, which is put up by Google, and some other things like that. So it's really hard. I always like making my own stuff. You know, I used scratch, I use kind of more standard programming languages, because I never really found anybody that did it the way that I wanted to do it. And so of the sort of set piece ones and so it's really that's one of your other big questions is you want something that's kind of paint by numbers that's going to lead you through it, or do you just want a big open sandbox to play in? It's hard to just say, hey, this, this one does it. But ultimately, I recommend scratch to a lot of people just because it has a little bit of both. There's lots of great tutorials out there online. And it's a big open sandbox too. So that's great. I think that's a really great answer to my weird question. So thanks. That's all good. It's a common one. So not that weird. I mean, it's, it's actually a really nice closing out because you gave us so many resources to look up. That's amazing. Thank you so much, Chris, for joining us. Yeah, super fun. Yeah, you guys want to chat again, let me know. Alright. Thanks again, for listening to the teaching math teaching podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast. We hope that you're able to implement something that you just heard, and take an opportunity to interact with other math teacher educators. Hello, listeners of the tg math teaching podcast, we have some big news. Are you ready? The teaching math teaching podcast is starting in a summer book club. What better way to grow as teachers, math teachers and to engage in professional learning together, and we would love for you to join us. In June we're gonna be reading rough draft math revising to learn by Amanda Jansen. In July, we are reading high school mathematics lessons to explore, understand and respond to social injustice by Robert berry bazel Conway, Brian Lawler, john Staley and colleagues. The plan for the book club is to read the book throughout the month and host weekly interactions on Twitter and Instagram around the chapters for the week. At the end of each month, we will have a podcast that discusses what we learned from the book and how we can apply what we learned to improving how we teach math teachers. We also might be joined by some authors. In short, we're excited we hope you are as well follow us on social media at teach math.

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Teach on Twitter and at teaching math teaching on Instagram to stay up to date on how to participate in the teaching math teaching summer book club. Thanks again. As always, for listening to the teaching and teaching podcast, be sure to subscribe to the podcast follow us on Instagram and Twitter. And we hope that you're able to implement something that you hear in the podcast and take an opportunity like this summer book club to interact with other math teacher educators.