Speaker: Sean Tibor Alright. Well, I guess we are live. Welcome to the show. This is episode 72 of Teaching Python. My name is Sean Tibor. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes I'm a coder that teaches and my name is Kelly Schuster-Paredes. And I'm a teacher that codes. Oh, that feels weird. Sorry, that felt really weird. It's been a little bit of time. Speaker: Sean Tibor Yeah, well, there hasn't been as much teaching this summer, which is kind of fun. So Yeah, it's been a good summer. I feel like I'm getting to catch up on a lot of things that I have deferred during the school year. And I know you've been doing a lot of the same. So we figured, why don't we just talk about that as a show and catch up with some of the questions that people have for us and hopefully we'll get some on the live stream. Speaker: Sean Tibor Also. In fact, let me tweet out that we are in fact, now live so that everyone can join in. But Yeah, if people have questions, they can jump in. We have some queued up. But why don't we start with the winds of the week and I'll make you go first, Kelly, because we have no guest this week. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes Oh, cool. Oh my God. Where can we start? Well, we both got into that AWS scholarship opportunity, so that's a win that just take for both of us. But I think the win is actually the fact that I'm still chugging along with both of these courses, the Jet Brain Academy, which is a killer. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes And I just want to go back and see what my map is. I still need I still need 108 things to learn, just a few. It is ridiculous. I have started on the project one of 5 and it's beautiful soup. I've done it before and I think now I'm on bantering in my head about this tutorial. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Unknown What's it called tutorial death or tutorial paralysis? Probably. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes I've done beautiful soup. I've helped a student, but I've never, ever had so much theory. And Jet Brains is really going through the theory of things. And as well as this AWS scholarship AI, we took that AI course. I don't know, two years ago and I clicked the buttons and I was like, Oh Yeah, I did TensorFlow. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes Oh Yeah, I did these pictures and I can separate white wine and red wine. And it was great. But I had no understanding of the theory of AI and the back, you know, servers and clients. And I think I'm getting mixed up between when I learned that Jet brain, but I'm still going along. So that is a huge win for me. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor And it's been about about four or 5 weeks of learning chugging along every day, an hour on the AWS and at least 30 minutes on the Jet Brain. So I'm pretty proud of myself. I got asked the question if I was doing my pie bytes. Sean, I had to say no, I can't do any more than what I'm doing on top of working. Yeah, it's a bit right. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor It's kind of a lot to manage all of these different learning streams. And I think the more that you have, the more fragmented it becomes. At least for me, when I have too many things going on, too many streams, it really screws me up. Well, I think this is the AWS. Machine learning is a great compliment to web scraping. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor It's given me this understanding of how the request library works and how it pulls out information. I think it would be a nice compliment of how you can do a basic machine learning task, either categorized or Uncategorized. Listen to me. I know all these words now. With multiple syllables and everything. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Yes, I didn't have to write it down in my notes. I remember this, but it's it's really incredible what your brain can accomplish when you have this focus learning and this opportunity to have a diffuse time afterwards. So I learned for the morning, and then I am full on project management with my kids or working on task for school. So that's awesome. So just to give her one a little bit more details. Speaker: Sean Tibor So this is an AWS machine learning course on Udacity. So it's a full course with videos and content and quizzes and knowledge checks and the whole range. And this is like an intro course, really. It's a fundamental course. But I think they said they have 50,000 people sign up or apply for the course and got accepted. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor And then at the end of it, they're awarding, I think, 400. And if not, 425 4 25. Okay. And you also pass the test. Right. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor And you're being judged on how well you pass the test, the examples that you give. So it's a really competitive scholarship. And honestly, I if I get the scholarship for the Nano degree, that would be amazing. But to be honest, I think just finishing the fundamentals course is a really great Foundation for a lot of other learning. Sean, being able to actually explain some of these things that we're doing in school, I don't need to go in depth with the theory, but by me learning this theory, I'm able to extrapolate my understanding and put it into a better metaphor for the kids to understand. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor So it's kind of nice to get this background after learning for three years, all the stuff that I've been just copying and pasting and looking up and Googling. So it's nice, Sean. I think it's going to serve us well in a couple of areas. One we can teach with the machine learning part of it. But I think there's also this nice benefit of being able to share this idea of how the machine learns and draw parallels and connections with how we learn. Speaker: Sean Tibor And that kind of training your brain. It's kind of amazing if you think about it, we learn faster than the machine does. We learn a lot of this stuff really well, and our brains are really well adapted for this kind of training. And there's things that we can do as humans with our mental capacity that the machine just can't. But it still is a good framework and a good model, a mental model for students to be able to think about how they learn and how they train themselves to get better at things. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes So funny. You said that, and I'm going to let you have your win in the week, and I won't say anything else after this, but I'm reading this book by Jeff Hawkins at Barbara Oakley recommended to us like four episodes ago, and he States, There's no really I there's no intelligence in AI, because although they're very good at that one task, they can play go very well. They can drive a car nicely. We can spray paint a car perfectly, but there really isn't any intelligence. And the best that we can hope for at this moment is actually make a computer that has the mental capacity of a five year old child. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor But just think about everything that your child knows at five, can you imagine? And you having to program in that? So that's been great to see. Well, there's been some interesting stuff about that, too. I'm posting the link to the Amazon book in our live chat here. Speaker: Sean Tibor If anybody wants to go check it out. It's called A Thousand Brains, A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. It is the number one best seller in neuroscience, and I love how Amazon has really specific categories. But one of the things that came out this week was between GitHub and Vs code. They've announced this copilot that's supposed to be an AI driven pair programmer with you. Speaker: Sean Tibor So as you're coding, it's suggesting code. And I've seen a lot of different reactions to it online. Everything. I've tried this, and it's actually pretty amazing to the machines will never replace this. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor That's funny. It's interesting because it depends on what you need based on what it can do right now. Pretty good suggestion for boilerplate code or things that are pretty standard, but it can't really be as creative as a human because it's not as flexible. It's not as elastic as a human is in terms of its mental capacity. But this is starting to really touch a lot of different places, including coding. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes Yeah. Well, if you get into this book, and honestly, we could have a whole podcast about this book, and I'm only halfway through because it's one of these books that I have to read and go back and read because it's just so it's so fun. I don't know. I just really get into this. And Barbara was right when it's a great book, but he talks about these mental models. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes And when we want to code a computer to do something with a FL statement or have a stapler, if you press the top part of the staple and push it down. A staple will come out. Well, when we in our brains, we don't go through this list of press from the top. A top equals this. Here's the rotation. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes This is the place that a stapler is in. We actually see these mental models. We see this picture of a stapler in our mind. And the idea of one day of getting a computer up to that point where it sees that mental model, and then you don't have to define up rotation. What's a staple? Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes What's a stapler. How do you Press? How hard do you Press? And so it's fun and all these things are coming together. Okay, that was a really long win of the week. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes I haven't talked to an adult. Now. Speaker: Sean Tibor I know what you're talking about. I totally get that. Well, so it's here. So wins of the week. I mean, honestly, the win is a lot of things coming together. Speaker: Sean Tibor That's really nice. To be honest. It's great that I have this time to be able to work on different projects, and I'm doing a lot of different things right now, focusing on a lot of technical and nontechnical projects, although they're all kind of technical in some way. So, for example, I finished my my ipad project last week or the week before, and so I was able to spend last week focusing on things like my fast API project that I've been doing. So it's an API with data behind it, and I'm working on how to web scrape data and put it into my database and be able to make that available and automate it and update it and all these cool things that are, I guess, not necessarily. Speaker: Sean Tibor It conceptually hard, but when you get into all the details and the complexity of it, it becomes really interesting and really fascinating. And having the space and the time to be able to really focus on this and learn it is very valuable. I feel like my programming skills are getting stronger, and I'm thinking about how I structure my code. I'm refactoring my code a lot of the time to make it more readable. Sorry, Al Swigert, but I did use classes and object inheritance to be able to simplify some of my code and refactor it. Speaker: Sean Tibor It made me feel really good that I I get this and it works. And a lot of this stuff has been just great to be able to focus on it. And that's been my win this week is just that focused time and being able to figure things out and accomplish stuff as I'm planning ahead. It's kind of hard to believe that we're already halfway through the summer here. Kelly out to cry. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor I'm four weeks. I know. I'm just trying to be really diligent and really focused about what am I going to use my four weeks for? And that kind of, I guess clarity and prioritization is really helping me because it's making me think about what do I really want to do this summer? What's really important to me. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor And it's helping me deprioritize a lot of things that are just not important anymore. It's very exciting that you're done with your work from school. I'm still chugging along on mine, and it's kind of nice, though, because I've reinforced what I already knew, that I really like working with data, and I really like sitting in front of a computer, and I don't know what it is about generating emails and having these tasks that are that are sequential that I need to do. And I guess that's why coding became so natural for me, because that ability to just go down through a list, and after you've thought through the problem and check it off as you go, you find another problem, you go back up to the list. And I'm working on my project for the school, and it's been challenging, but it's been so much, but we're weird. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor I think we like these challenges anyway. Same appeal, but different brains. Right? So I've been focusing a lot on tasks lately also, and my tasks have been coding tasks. So I'm using this really cool server called Celery, which you can schedule bits of code to run and run asynchronously. Speaker: Sean Tibor So what I'm doing is, Let's say I web scrape a bunch of data, and I need to add all these individual objects to our database. I can create a task for each one and put it in a worker queue. And then this worker goes, it just does one task at a time, and it processes through it in such a way that I'm not sitting there waiting for a Python script to take five minutes or 10 minutes to run and execute. And if it breaks in the middle, then where do I Sean everything? It breaks it down into these really small tasks, and then when they're all completed, I can then summarize it and send out an email to say, Here's the results of all the work that you did. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor So this sort of like, idea is I don't know what it is. It's just I think it appeals to me in the same way it appeals to you. I like that idea of thinking about how to sequence it, how to process through it, how to figure it out, how to solve the problem and solve it in a really robust and scalable way, right? It's not just to be able to solve it once, but how do I make it so that while I'm asleep, it can run and work pretty well, and if it doesn't work pretty well, then it'll fail gracefully instead of, like, just crashing out. Very cool. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes Very cool. We have to have that for me just to chug through my to do list. Maybe you can write some scripts, all workers trip. Maybe I can get rid of all my posters this year. I don't know what we're going to do. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor I don't know if we're getting rid of the plexi glass or whatever, but maybe we can just keep the plexi hanging. If you want it, we can keep it. I'm in. Well, it kind of leads into into our first question, which is actually from Eric Mathis. So he wrote to us and said, Sean, do you miss working outside the school system? Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor And, Kelly, do you want to work as a programmer outside the school system? That was a tension I felt every time I taught a programming class with no clear answer. So, Kelly, Here's the question to you, Do you want to work as a programmer outside the school system? So I kept thinking about this and joked around on the tweet that I hope my boss isn't listening. I really liked I'll back up. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes I think a year and a half ago I would never have thought that I would ever want to be a developer or sit at home and work and not have this constant get up at seven, run to the work or get up at 4 30, go to the gym, then run to the work, come back, do this, do that. But after COVID sitting at home and realizing that I could do a lot and make a difference in people's lives from my home, I thought, Wow, that's pretty cool. I probably could do this. I still would like to have some connection with students. I would love to be like the Eric Mathis and the Nick tolove of the world here. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes I'm a developer, but I'm still making a difference in a student's life or a kid's life. It would be really cool. I would not mind if I could actually hack away at machine learning and make some cool products. I've got some ideas of some wishful things that would help you might make a difference. Would I be ever to do a developer? Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor I don't know. I'm not on that one year plan. I hear about the people who started to learn Python in our developer in a year, not me. So maybe when I retire, it can be a developer. Well, you know, it's interesting because for me, I never stopped working outside of the school system. Speaker: Sean Tibor In addition to teaching, I've also continued to do digital marketing work, consulting work. I have clients on the side, and what I've found is that they complement each other very nicely. This programming work and the teaching work that I'm doing, the learning that I do in order to teach and very valuable to me. And my third presets been really great to be able to spend time learning things that I would have never otherwise learned and stimulate my my knowledge growth through teaching and then use that in other areas. So I've written a lot of web services for clients. Speaker: Sean Tibor I've written automated processes, web hook catchers, like all these things that are relatively simple. But most people in the digital marketing space and that are working on this automation area in marketing. They're either developers and they're creating products and services to be able to sell to people like me or their clients that are trying to do, like, a very code free sort of approach. There's not many people who are in the space that are really creating solutions, using code for specific clients, and being able to do that and do it well and be able to make sure that it's really robust with all the tools and the approaches that Python, modern Python programming can give you is really differentiating. And I've gotten a lot of business that way and vice versa. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor The ability to take what I'm learning from my clients and that real world, hands on, practical experience of what they really need and how they're approaching problems is something that I try to bring into the classroom a lot and share those experiences with my students, so it becomes more practical or more hands on for them. You just made you do this all the time, but I just had this huge AHA moment. It makes no sense. So you coming from an outside world. You get your solutions and your drive from doing things from the outside world, fixing problems, solving problems with code, where I get my desire to solve the problems, from the students, where I don't know, it was a mind blowing thing, but that's who drove me into learning so much, Unfortunately, wasn't an intrinsic. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes It was definitely an extrinsic push. Sean, I had that first intrinsic motivation of I'm going to learn to code. But what kept me going is this drive of the kids have answers, and I want to be able to guide them into ways of finding the answers, you know, to their questions. I want to help them be those solution finders in the world to come. And that's what keeps me. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor That's why we teach. And I find it the same way. I mean, just because I'm doing this outside work doesn't mean I'm immune to seeing a student come up with a really cool, creative solution that I never would have considered. Right. That sort of fresh, unfiltered, untrained sort of search and application for solutions is fascinating. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor It's like one of the most fulfilling things about teaching is that you get exposed as an adult to raw, untrained ideas from students. They don't know that things aren't possible, that you can't do this, and they come up with these really creative solutions, especially when they're constrained by their own lack of knowledge. Right. So I think those good ideas, those inspiration, can come from anywhere, and the more sources that you can cultivate for yourself, the better off you're going to be. So, Eric, Yes. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor I think one day maybe I would like to develop my database that would actually help see a student for who they are based not just on their grades, but more on demographics and skill levels and understanding. Yes. That would be an awesome job. But behaviors too, right? What do they actually do and behave? Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor And so what they say or how they respond, I think you'd have a really fascinating, fun time creating that database. It's a working product. A couple just to know if anybody's been listening over the three years, I do have something actually started. It's very poorly written. But it's something we very poorly written and in existence is better than an idea that hasn't even made it to the screen yet. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor So now that I know scripts and all that other stuff and practicing my theory, we'll see how it goes. There's an interesting tie in here. So this is something that was kind of cool. We're very flattered to find out. That essay Olivia, who's a writer in Virginia, has been going. Speaker: Sean Tibor So Olivia has been going through the old TV show Computer Chronicles, and I don't know if anybody else remembers this, but there was a show that ran from, I think, like, about 19 82 or 83 until 2,002. So it had nearly a 20 year run. And it looks like a lot of the episodes are available on the Internet Archive. And so our friend Mr Olivia has been going through and reviewing these old episodes. And so he cited us as the inspiration for going back to an episode from 19 84 all about the role of computers in education. Speaker: Sean Tibor And it was really fascinating because guess what they were using in 984 Logo logo logo, which is a direct ancestor of the Turtle module in Python. And it's really fascinating to see how they were talking about the way computers can be used in education and the role that they saw playing inside the classroom. And it's kind of interesting to see see, at least to me, the way that that changed. So in 19 84, I was four, so I was probably a little line that were going in there. I'm sorry. Speaker: Sean Tibor You were like a third grader. Sorry. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor So much older. And back then, that's a huge difference. I know. But the point is, like 84, the kids that they were talking about, we were the ones that were the direct recipients of computers in the classroom. Computers and education. Speaker: Sean Tibor It's really fasting to see what the adults at the time were saying about how computers could be used. And there's a quote from one of the guests on the show that I thought was really interesting. And I wanted to see if 30 years later this has come true. 30 years later, 35 years later come true. The quote was, teachers and secondary schools will be counselors and troubleshooters, not just counselors about future careers or emotional problems, but cognitive counselors able to help. Speaker: Sean Tibor When a student has not found the right mix for the right approach to instruction. In the wealth of technological offerings, the demands on the teachers will be greater than they are now. They will need to be much more professional and more deeply trained, and they should be paid much better than they are now. I said I think for the most part, that's come true, except for maybe the pay part. And you brought up an interesting addition to this also, which is that the role of teachers is also to facilitate the opportunities for learning to create the environment. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes Yeah, that kind of. And it goes back to this book, about a thousand brains in the way that our brain really works. So we have in our classrooms we use because we both fully believe that these tutorials, these drilling practices, they are phenomenal and they are effective in using in the classroom. So agree with So idea of here. We're going to use this computer model and the kids can go self paced. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes We use Pi bytes. We use tutorials, we use our choice boards. They go at their own pace, they can extend, they can go at a lower level. Agree. But the thing that they don't get and again, going back to Hawkins is that computer program can only do that activity. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes It doesn't know if it's a boy, doesn't know if it's a girl, doesn't know if it's struggling and reading, doesn't know if it's a second language learner. It only can provide that tutorial, and it can identify why that child is not understanding or why they don't understand functions, and it can give them a hyperlink to learn more. But maybe that other tutorial, that other link is not really going to help them to solve the problem. Maybe they need to write it out, maybe they need to draw it out, maybe they need to seek guidance from somebody or ask a friend, and that's what's missing. And I feel in 2,084, unless we produce these real age, these real general, intelligent computers that they're not going to replace a teacher, but we might be able to handle more kids. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor We might be able to facilitate more when we put them on these machine learning or automated or artificial intelligence tutorials. We might be able to take in more students, or we might be able to do it all fully from MOOCs or online. But I don't think it will ever replace that mentor that can can help with these other skills. Well, it might be hard to see from where we're sitting right now, just the same way as it was hard to see in 19 84, where the world would be 35 years later. I mean, they talk about the terminal being this tutor, this personal tutor, and the ability for students to access information and consume it at their own pace, the ability to drill in skill. Speaker: Sean Tibor But they didn't see the internet coming, right? They didn't see the massive wealth of knowledge. Sean, I think it would have blown them away. To think about is not just the terminal, and it's not just the discount that the teacher can load up. Or I remember having the cabinet with all these five and a quarter inch floppies that you could go and pull out and think about all the different games that were in that one cabinet. Speaker: Sean Tibor And then we've multiplied it times a trillion with the Internet and everything is at their fingertips. The need for curation by the educator, by the teacher in charge is probably even more valuable. Right? It's not so much to be able to say Here's all the things we can learn Here's, all the things that we probably should learn, the directions that we should go generally, and then providing those pathways for exploration for them to be able to learn more and to explore and to be creative and define their pathway and to have that guidance. And I think that's where the unforeseeable part of this, Kelly says, is, will we be able to get to a point where the AI driven tutoring, the machine driven learning, is adaptable enough to be able to account for all of those different learning differences that every student has. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Every person has learning differences in the way that they learn, the things that they learn. And if we do it right, we have this ability to, you know, create more equity and equitable access to information. And if we can find ways to do that without biasing the machine learning part of it, that means that any student globally could potentially have equal opportunity to education and resources. But they may not have equal access to the guides, the Cure readers, the people who are there to help them find their path and find their passion for learning, or even just their ability to solve the need that they have. Absolutely. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor And don't forget that the hardest part of learning is not this accepting of knowledge or gathering of knowledge. It's actually that ability to take that fact and apply it. Right. So whatever computer program is out there, Yeah, we can. And I don't want to call out Jet print brains, but in the quizzes that I have for Jet brains and with the AI quizzes, it is repetition of fact. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes But put me in AWS and tell me to go do a Sage maker learning thing. And I'm like, help me. I don't know what to do or go go strip out some Tags from HTML. I don't know what to do yet, but now I have the knowledge. When you get that program that can help the student go from that knowledge, any student, and then extrapolate that information. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes I don't know. It's that environment that we provide that a teacher provides that learning opportunity, whether it's open. Like, sometimes we do open projects, and we just say, here, make this project go learn, make a project, or sometimes it's a guided project. So we create that environment to ensure that the knowledge is taken further, not just the facts. I loved his article, and I was so honored at the very bottom. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes He even referenced our episode about Turtle and we all know how much I love Turtle. And I spend 3-8-4 weeks. I try to cut it four weeks with the sixth graders. Turtle, so thank you. Thank you. Speaker: Sean Tibor Yeah, it was really great. And that is the module that I probably go back to over and over again for learning and for thinking about how to do you wild and crazy ideas and everything. From what we make really cool Kaleidoscope style drawings or sketches to making pictures and artwork to that simulation that was in, I think Leon's book about Python projects where you can plot the Apollo eight moon return mission using Turtle and using physics. It's really cool all the different things that you can do. And the only real limit is your imagination, your creativity and your ability to solve problems. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes That triggered my question to you, if you had a situation where a student was just learning Python and I go through a rock learning or not Python, just Turtle. Sorry. Rock learning. They know the basics. They know how to afford. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes They know how to do for loops. They can write functions. We can make these great pictures. At what point of that tutorial learning could they make that orbit around the moon that we did in Levon project? That's a huge jump. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor And could they have gotten that way with the full understanding by just following tutorials? Kelly, I think the value comes in the challenge. So if you can challenge the student to say, OK, so you've learned these things and you found these areas, how could you do this next step or what's the next step that you could take? How can you get a little bit further? So, for example, how could you plot a parabolic arc to do a parabolic arc of throwing a Frisbee or baseball or something up into the air? Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor You're actually not that much further away from orbital mechanics, right? I know it seems strange. Sixth grader, go do orbital mechanics and make Mr Typer proud. I mean, the thing is, it's really not that far for a student. If they can find the path, they can find the steps from one to the next to the next. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor We're just trying to create these stepping stones for them. Sean, but we create them, right? So we create them. You imagine having to do again, this program, this online program, and this is why in 2,084, I'm not sure it's going to happen or whatever date it was, because the computer program has to know what the likes are, what their interests are, and they could take a little generic. But it's going to be pre packaged unless it's a real, true artificial intelligence that has a general intelligence and not just a specific role. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor It'll be interesting. I'm really eager. I wish I was going to be alive in 2,084. I'm not sure it's a long ways away. I drink your smoothies now. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Keep taking my vitamins and collagen. I mean, I think the role of teachers will change by 2,084, just like they've changed over the past 35 years. We're going to see changes. It's inevitable that the role of teachers will change. The questions, which direction will it take? Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor My hope is that we can create better and better learning environments for students where it's more effective. It's more interesting. They're more capable. Unfortunately, I think the big question is with equity and how evenly distributed those opportunities will be. Absolutely. Speaker: Sean Tibor Sean, that's the quote. I think it's like current. Well, maybe I said this is that the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed, right? Some people are living in the future. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Some people are not. Sean, if we focus on it, we can help bring down that inequity, at least in the education area, through some of these mechanisms. That reminds me need to share out that the video with Let me get that. I think I posted it for you from Mac Rumors with Malala and Apple. They partnered with Malala Fund to help support girls education and helping organizations assist with technology. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes It's a pretty good episode. I went through. It kind of skipped because I've watched Malala a couple of times, and there's a lot of stuff going around with that. And I love what she's been doing for girls. I kind of skipped to her thing about learning how to code. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor She talks about going into this universal language, and it was a beautiful thing. So I haven't watched the whole episode, but it's something to start watching, if you want to see came out. June Yeah, I think it raises a lot of really interesting questions and a lot of ethical questions about what's the right approach for building equity in education. And I don't think I have the full answer. I don't have the full picture to even start with the answer. Speaker: Sean Tibor But it always comes back to me as we know that there are groups of people. We know that there are individual people that are not getting the same education and the same opportunities for education as everyone else through a variety of reasons. Right? Whether it's because they don't go to the right school, they don't live in the right school district, they don't live in the right country. They're not the right age, they're not the right color. Speaker: Sean Tibor They're not the right gender, the they don't have the right learning capabilities as other students. And so people think it's too hard to teach them or whatever those reasons are. We we know that there are people that don't have that same access. They don't have that same opportunity. And what I find interesting is when we talk about giving those people more opportunities to focus on them, to say, Let's emphasize opportunities for people who are disadvantaged or do not have the same opportunities. Speaker: Sean Tibor We get a lot of people who say, but it should be the same for everybody. Right? It should be. Well, if you're going to focus on education for African American girls and encoding, then you should make it education for everybody in coding. But that's kind of like saying, like, this house is on fire in the neighborhood, but we're going to spray water on everything because everybody have equal access to water. Speaker: Sean Tibor Right. Like, we need to go where there are problems we should go to where there are problems that need to be solved. And that doesn't mean that we should ignore other groups of students who have more opportunities and who have more access. We continue to work with every student to the best of our ability, but I think we need to go to where there are problems and create solutions that are effective and smart and make sense. And it's not as simple as just throwing money at it on that. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes I think we're one. I don't know how we got this topic, but I'm trying to come back, but we are just that one person. Right. Sean, two educators see a disproportionate disproportionate between the girls that attend our robotics class. And so we try to aggregate and try to get more girls into code at our school. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor I saw the same issue in Peru when the underprivileged girls weren't getting as good as an education as the underprivileged boys. And it's not necessarily anyone's fault, but it was a problem that I saw, and I, in my own world, has been trying to advocate for and in another person's world, it may be another group of people that they want to advocate for. So I think we're one person and we have to choose our battles at that moment. So, Sean, I think to be very, perfectly clear and honest with ourselves. We teach at a very high end private school with a lot of resources. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor We're on the every opportunity side of the scale for our students. We try to create as many opportunities as we can, and we have a lot of wonderful resources to do that, for which we are very grateful. Right. But one of the reasons why we're doing this podcast is to be able to share that privilege with as many people as we can and to share our learning and what we've come up with to be able to do that. That's our purpose. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor We are I think it would be unfair to say that we are trying to change the world or that we are out there trying to really focus on those students. Like, we have to eat also. Right. And so what? I lose weight that way if we don't eat. Speaker: Sean Tibor Right. But we work where we have the opportunity to make a difference. And Thankfully, our school also recognizes that not every student has the opportunities that our students at our school do. And so they've been incredibly supportive of this podcast of us share as much as we can working with people who are working across the globe to try to solve some of these problems and to be able to share our privilege as much as possible. It's not perfect, but we're working on it one day at a time to try to solve the problem. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor And I think we can always do more and we can always keep working on it. There's still only 24 hours in the day and neither rest are sleeping is probably as much as we should anyways, but we'll keep working at it. And if everyone keeps working at it a little bit, think about the differences that we can make for students. I want to get to Sean Fulton's question. Sorry. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes Not to change so drastically, but we haven't seen each other in a while, so we keep talking. Sorry. So all your posts for asking questions. I'd be interested to know if the students have experienced with Scratch or block based programming languages before starting out with Python. Do you think this matters or makes the transition easier? Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes Just your ideas on block programming languages versus using Python as you do with the level you teach. I love the show. Thanks again. Pse teaches in New Zealand. I had to add that in here, but he teaches in New Zealand. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes He's been a great follower of our show. And Yes, we do coding from PK up. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes He's seven now, but he started with those little so bots. They do codable. I know. Last year because of COVID, our school adopted tinker at the lower levels. We stopped using tinker at the middle school level just because it wasn't fitting our needs. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes I like turn tinker. I think it's really good for the lower levels. I love the block, I love the characters, I love the color and the artistic. So they do a lot of that activity. Scratch was a huge component of our curriculum a couple of years ago. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes This year has been difficult. I know we use Wonder Works. Wonder one workshop. Yeah, one workshop. Sorry. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes In the lower levels and they are also using the micro bits. They just started that with fifth grade and the block programming with micro bits our students get. And I say this, they do a lot in the lower levels, but it's 30 minutes. I don't know, every other or every day depending on the grade level. And it's not a full time curriculum, but they do get a great introduction and they use ipads and they have a lot of technology in their hands at an early age. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Yes. And Yes. Yeah. I completely agree. I. Speaker: Sean Tibor Never really done a lot of block based coding before I started teaching because I think I missed that opportunity when I was growing up and as I was learning. So all of my coding has really been text based, although I have worked with surprisingly powerful enterprise grade integration tools that are drag and drop kind of graph diagrams and you can pull things together that way. But I think the interesting thing for me, what I've Sean with students in block based coding that you just can't really get with text based coding, no matter how good it is is that library of available commands. So for students, one of the hardest things to do is look at a blank screen and figure out what to type first. Right? Speaker: Sean Tibor If you're in Python, like, what do I do? Do I need to import stuff? Do I need to write stuff? Should I write pseudocode? That first step of how do I create a program can be very challenging for them, but with blocks, you have that little drawer of Here's, all the available blocks that I can play with and I can assemble, and you can see the connections between them and provides this creativity. Speaker: Sean Tibor How do I connect these together in interesting ways? And you can see students like naturally kind of get that, especially because Legos have become so pervasive in so many students homes. They're used to this idea of connecting things together and building pieces and then connecting it, like assembled part of their Lego blocks to another assembled part in creating something bigger. And so this idea of the building block mentality, it works very well for students, especially at the lower levels. But even as they get older, sometimes being able to go back to block based coding is really helpful for them to be able to prototype an idea, to see if something works a certain way to just explore and play and have fun, too. Speaker: Sean Tibor So I feel like the block based codes help build that enthusiasm and interest in coding. It helps build a lot of the thought processes around concepts like loops and variables and functions that you can reuse. And it does make it easier for us to go into text based coding that way. The only possible drawback is that sometimes students get so comfortable in a block based coding environment that they feel extra paralyzed and text based because they just want to go back to block base where they know they can do the same thing and do it faster, like they have that frustration. I'm like, Why won't this just work in text? Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Because I know exactly how I would do it in block based until they can't. And that was something that I encountered before we started teaching Python. I was teaching I can't believe the seventh grade Legos. I was teaching what I came from Peru. I did a lot of robotics with Lego Mindstorms. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes And when we went to the Carnegie Mellon Institute, I was surprised of how much, how little I knew of the drag and drop of the Lego interface, because I did what I knew. And I solved the problem with the blocks that were comfortable for me to use. And I never extended my knowledge and that's part fault of mine. But I didn't feel the need because I could solve the same problem with generic blocks. So most kids are not those kids that are creating those amazing games on the scratch platform where our kids are going to play games, they're consuming it. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes They can make the little cat Meow and go through a four loop and go to its coordinates. But they're not really. And I say, no, they aren't. In general, kids are not creating these phenomenal games in comparison. There are kids creating it. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes But in the comparison of the people using the block based environment, not everybody's doing it. So it kind of hinders you, I think, a little bit. Whereas in Python, if you only stick to the basics, you're only printing Hello World. You really need to push those boundaries and seek out other ways of doing things. And then by seeking out other ways, I guess you could do that in block, but I don't know. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor I'm Brown. Yeah, I'm sorry. But again, that comes back to who's cultivating the learning, right? Who's writing that, who's challenging them. Because I think if we challenge students in block based coding, they can continue to grow and expand their knowledge and their capabilities and block based coding the same way they can in text. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Personally, I like the ability in text to concisely express an idea in a way that might be harder in code, but that's sort of the Sean block based code, but that's sort of the same way that sometimes it's better to write something out and so draw a picture. And sometimes it's better to draw a picture than to write things out. So different mediums for different needs. I have to admit, though, I was a cargo bot app user with the codable I love, but I just did the bullet and bought my son the code War Monthly 9 99 Python because he's like, Okay, I'm done. Like, what do you mean you're done? Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor How could you have done all the free stuff? He's doing the Python one and he's going to be entering grade, so I don't know. I tried to. My daughter and I've been doing code combat together. That's what I meant to go back. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Yes. Have you bought it? No, we haven't quite hit that point. She was really into it for about a week and then lost interest in getting her back in. And I don't want to push her too hard. Speaker: Sean Tibor She's going into third grade, but I think it's more about us spending time together than it is about her really learning how to code. Seriously. And I just love spending time with her trying to figure this stuff out. And it's fun. So as long as it stays fun, we'll keep doing it. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Yeah, but I bet you if you gave her codable and let her do right, left, right, left, you would probably spend hours. So that is the one bonus of having those blocks. Nice. Okay, well, I have some stuff. I think I have some new things that I'm experimenting with, new products, new things that have been announced over the summer that I wanted to quickly run through. Speaker: Sean Tibor Kelly, If you have stuff that you've discovered or found that you want to share with the audience, I think it's kind of a good time to catch up. I did see a quote that I think is very apt for teachers. It says anybody who thinks teachers aren't working the summer and the summer are the same people that think that football players only work on Sundays. Right. We're working during the summer in a different way. Speaker: Sean Tibor We're growing, we're learning, we're planning, we're recovering. We're regrouping the same way that athletes take the time during the off season to train, to recover, to refocus, to be ready for the upcoming season. We're looking ahead to the fall and what we're going to bring in. So there's some cool stuff that I've been checking out. The first one is I got invited to the beta of the Adafruit Whipper Snapper. Speaker: Sean Tibor Whipper Snapper is kind of cool. I got this. I'm going to put on the stream here. I have this eight A Fruit fun house. There we go in a fun house. Speaker: Sean Tibor It's a board that's designed for IoT and home automation. This is my jam, right? It's WiFi, it's got connectors for sensors, but it also has temperature, pressure barometer. It has analog inputs, capacitive, touch sensors, buttons, lights, the whole thing. But what's really cool about it is they came up with an image that you can flash on to this that will let you drag and drop or configure sensors and buttons and everything on the Adafruit IO platform. Speaker: Sean Tibor So if I press the button on the front on the website, it detects that I press the button, and I can trigger different things to happen. But it all happens without code. So it's a way to get students to explore and prototype quickly and then maybe turn that into a circuit Python program that is in beta right now. I believe it's still in private beta, but hopefully it'll open up into a public beta soon and you'll be able to check it out. And that comes with Ada Fruit I O. Speaker: Sean Tibor So that one is very cool. I also have been working with I have a new data fruit board here. I think it may not have it right in front of me, but it is an eight A fruit feather board. So the feather form factor like this, and it's called the sense. It's the feather sense. Speaker: Sean Tibor And it comes with Bluetooth built into it. Sean, It has a bunch of really cool sensors, probably more than I even thought were possible to cram onto a board. It's got an accelerometer, it's got pressure sensors, temperature sensors, light sensors, like all of these different sensors fall on one board that you can use with Bluetooth. So it's a very, very interesting and cool way of prototyping stuff. Probably like a step up from the circuit Playground Express in terms of being able to prototype and use it for different project, so I'm going to be playing around with that quite a bit over the coming weeks. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Kelly, do you have anything that you've discovered this summer? Well, no. Yes and no. I did purchase the AWS. I don't know if I copied you on the email. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes That the AWS keyboard. We own the Deep Racer. It's expensive, and I did get another AI image recognition so I can practice Deep lens. That's also expensive, but the keyboard and it has mixed reviews. I can drop the the link in there. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes It's the Deep composer. It got mixed reviews, but I think it's because, you know, maybe these are real time developers who are at a limit. Right. I'm not going to be playing music and it's going to be a full matched up artificial intelligence song composed, but I really think it would be good for our middle school students. I think the ability to play Mary had a little Lamb or whatever little musical thing that they're learning on the keyboard, and then it generates some background sounds. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes The video is really cool, has the drum and other instruments playing along with it. It's kind of neat, so I think it's going to be one of those kitchy kind of things to introduce. Here's your Deep Racer, Here's your lenses. But Here's your keyboard for these musically inclined and artistic students that we have at our school. I think it's a great way to pull them in. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Yeah. We had a student earlier this year that was really into the music part of this and was using it to create their own sheet music via code. And I was thinking, wouldn't it be great to have something like this where not only could you use it to play music on the keyboard and turn that into notes on a page, but also to have an AI composed accompaniment to it orchestral arrangement based on what you're just noodling around with on the keyboard. I think that'd be really fascinating, and I'd love to be able to put that together. It's Sean AWS will probably get tired of me making a whole bunch of Gmail so I can have my 12 months of free is not the first time I run into I'm sure I'm like, what other email can I make and get certain amounts, but that was really cool. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes And then I just have this one cool thing and it's old. It's called a Day in the Life of America and probably should have shared this, but it's so cool. It's me being that data person. It's got music. So just be careful when you click on it. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes It shows how through the time, the people people moving from sleeping to work on the phone. And this was, I think, two years ago. 2,019. I'm not sure, but I saw it on LinkedIn and I've been following a lot of AI people on my LinkedIn and the stuff that they're sharing with the data. It's just cool. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes I could stare at it all day. And I want to create that stuff that would be cool. Part of the dashboard about students. Where do they move? I collect these wish lists of ideas, so I just had that. Speaker: Sean Tibor Well, the other new thing that I wanted to share that is not really that new, but I thought it was really interesting is as part of this fast API project I'm working on. One of the things I'm doing is looking at government data sources for information, and I'm looking at state level government. So within the 50 States of the Us, what data is available? It's a whole range, right? Sometimes there's no data available. Speaker: Sean Tibor Sometimes Here's a CSV file I've seen. Here's a PDF of our data, which is like banks. That's really not helpful. But okay, I'll probably have to OCR to strip the data out, but probably the coolest thing I've seen. And this is a really great source for examples and data sets that you can use with your students. Speaker: Sean Tibor And it's public domain information. The state of Washington has a data portal called Data WA go of, and it is really cool. It's all based on this open library or a lot of their data is based on Open library that has a Python wrapper around it. So you can very quickly query their data sets and get just different slices of data, like different ways to visualize it. So for example, they have everything from find a health provider. Speaker: Sean Tibor So the Department of Health has providers for provider credentials. So does your doctor have a medical license? You can query that. It has information about cleanup sites of different natural resource areas. So they look at Elliott Bay or the Kenmore Water from. Speaker: Sean Tibor They have a whole set in here about lobbyist compensation and expenses by source. So every lobbyist in the state of Washington has to register their information about where they're getting contributions from, what their expenses look like, how they're spending their lobbyist budget. And you could do a lot of things with government with us. They have a data set for vehicle battery registration, and some of these are newer. Some of them are older. Speaker: Sean Tibor The vehicle battery one was updated in 2,016, but these data sets are all publicly available. So if you can go look at this, you can pull data and use it. Maybe for your students. If you live in the state of Washington, maybe there's a really interesting data set that your students can work with. It's personally relevant to them. Speaker: Sean Tibor So I just wanted to highlight that to go look at your government website. State government, federal government. Regardless of country that you live in, your National government, your regional government may have a lot of really cool open data sets that you're not even aware of, that you could use as a resource for teaching. And they're completely public domain information as a matter of public record. So why not use it to teach students about the world that they live in or the region that they live in. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Absolutely. That's pretty cool. Sean, you are trying to get me to go on a lot of data before it overwhelms me. Yeah, it happens. It can be. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor But I think this is also teaching our students about the scale of the world that is absolutely inheriting. Right. We have so much data available to us and being able to handle that, draw insights from it, visualize it, slice it, dice it, whatever that is is a really valuable skill to be able to have. I'm hoping to be more stronger aptitude in parsing information from the web. So that's my goal. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes I have four more weeks and it stresses me out that I'm not going to finish both of these courses in four weeks. Throwing two books, a couple of books out there. I don't know if anyone has heard of The Engineers by Jared Learner. I don't know. He's fairly new author, but I have my youngest son reading those books. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes Were reading them together. Read allows. We often do that. Love the books. My only sad thing. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes And this kind of goes back to our conversation, which we won't start again. It's all boys. And the boys don't like the little girl and they don't think she's smart enough to be an engineer because she's a girl. Sean, I have to read that with my son and say that's just because there are little boys, they don't understand that girls are smart too. And in the third book, they do take Mikayla in with her, but she's really into UFOs and these guys are battling these bots that one of the kids made, and the bot has the ability to learn. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes And it's cute book. We're on volume two, and he's coming out with a whole series called Er. The Robot Goes to School. It's a fun book. It's one of those things that he's pooping out huge cubes of food and it's about to kill people. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor Not really, but it messes up his room and stuff, so they bottle these bots before the UFO aliens come. But Mikayla is going to come in and save the day. I feel I don't want to ruin it. I hope so. If you're looking for a book, though, that really is well done around engineering. Speaker: Sean Tibor And for girls, it's something that's relatable. Sean McClosky is a great author. She wrote a book. She's written several books, but one of her books is called Dale One Point, and it's about a girl who hacks her own doll to make it more lifelike and interesting to her. And she takes this engineering approach to it and it's really cute. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor The illustrations are amazing and it feels really genuine. It doesn't feel like, Oh, Here's a girl doing engineering because in authentic reason, she sees something that she can make better and she can take apart and fix and she's really into it. And I love reading that book, and I've read it with my daughter a number of times. So if you need something like that. I don't have a daughter. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor So I have to read these boys books, and I try to read a lot of grill books. Well, there's a companion book to Dolly 1 0, which is called Sean The Drone, and it's perfect. A boy with his drone spoiler alert. Charlotte, the girl from Dolly one point makes a special surprise appearance in Tiba on the Drone. So there's a little bit of a catogod. Speaker: Kelly Schuster-Paredes And I won't bore anybody. But if anybody wants to learn how to build an outdoor kitchen, that was another project I did during my time of diffuse learning. So you'll be happy to know, Mr Typer, that the concrete has been completely poured. We did, I don't know, like nine bags of concrete. The stucco is on my son's know how what it takes to do construction and the ability that if you mess up with with anything that you can always fix it skim coat the concrete and picking up paint. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor I am outsourcing the painting because I am not a painter. And if anyone's curious, always wear gloves when you're pouring concrete because your hand absorbs the chemicals and the concrete just a fun fact. I had funky hands for a week. Well, my painting project is the my kids and I got new controllers for Nintendo so we can play Mario Kart better together. And I got the perfect controller for my daughter from a functional perspective. Speaker: Sean Tibor It's called a Nano controller. Nano Pro, and it's basically all the same buttons that you get on a Nintendo Switch Pro controller, but smaller. So it fits really well in our hands. However, it only comes in black and Gray, so it's really boring. And so she got it. Speaker: Sean Tibor And she's like, I was unhappy because it was Gray, and it has, like, a little splashes of color here and there, but nothing really interesting or exciting. And so what we're doing right now is we took the shell apart, we took out all the plastic pieces, all the electronics, and we are repainting it. So we've primed it, we're standing it. We have design ideas. We have a little stencil. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor We're going to stencil it. So she's getting to personalize her controller, and I'm helping her do it because I want to make sure it comes out really nice for her. You need a patent that, you know. No, it's been done a million times before. Okay. Speaker: Sean Tibor But it's only been done once for her. And I think that's the really cool thing is that she woke me up this morning before I took her to camp. And Sean, can we send it now so that later we can paint it? She's really excited about the project and wants to see it through. So we are going slow and methodically through the process and making sure that everything dries and cures and all that stuff that it needs to. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor I love that hands on stuff. Awesome. Yeah, man, we can talk forever hands on stuff so we can play video games and veg out later. It just shows you that we can't go a couple of weeks without talking. Yeah, we'll do this again. Speaker: Sean Tibor We have a few more guests that we're working on for the remainder of the summer. We'd like to keep the livestream process going. It looks like we've had at least one viewer the whole time, so thank you to whoever that is who stayed with us the whole time. But to be honest, we're going to keep doing the livestream because it's a really easy way for us to see each other and be able to share with all of you. I think that's pretty much it for now. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor We better stop ourselves anyways. We're on with John Micon on July 23 Rd. We'll send out the information for that. I'm really excited to be on his podcast. He came on our podcast last episode, and I had to look up the date. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor It was 2,012 when I took the course with him, so he was right. He's a great guy, so I'm looking forward to that. So we'll have that posted on our website and on our social media. So if you'd like to check that out, we'll post that as soon as it's available. I think they live stream also, but I could be wrong on that. Speakers: Kelly Schuster-Paredes & Sean Tibor I will keep that going, but I think that should do it for this week or for teaching Python. This is Sean. This is Kelly signing off.