Sean Tibor: Hello and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 83. We're going to review 2021 and talk about our goals for 2022. So I don't know how to turn that into a title, but what I do know is my name is Sean Tyiver, and I'm a coder who teaches. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: My name Kelly Schuster Perez. I'm a teacher. That code. That was Kelly pathetic title. Sean Tibor: I don't know. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: A year in review. Sean Tibor: A year in review. I really want to look ahead to the future. That's what I'm thinking. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, looking ahead. Sean Tibor: Looking ahead. Right. And I think just like you and I practice in the classroom, we have to reflect in order to look ahead. So we're going to do a little bit of reflection today, talk about some things that we really liked in 2021. Some of our favorite episodes wins of the year. Not just win, but we'll also do our wins of the week, and we'll talk a little bit about what we have in mind for 2022. And the goal is to commit some of these goals to our audience so that you can see them. If we say them and we write them down, it makes them real. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: We'll try. Right. Sean Tibor: If we even accomplished half of the things we have in mind for the year, it'll be a pretty good year. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's great. That's absolutely great. I'm still working on that goal of making a database, but I am getting closer. Let's just say that I chopped it up into a smaller goal instead of at the large goal. Sean Tibor: Nice. Well, I think before we get into the winds of the week, I want to just catch up with what you've been doing. We've actually not seen each other because of COVID and being out of the office and out of school and everything. So how was your winter break? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Winter break was good. I let go and I detect myself. I did send one or two tweets in a LinkedIn, got up and saw some sunrises, went to North Carolina, spent a lot of time with the kids at the park and just playing and playing games. I think just 21, 2021 was definitely a busy, busy year, and I was preparing myself for what I knew was going to be a very busy 2022. So, yeah, I just totally shut down everything. So that's pretty much why I've been absent from a lot of Twitter and LinkedIn and from you. Sean Tibor: I don't take it personally. I knew that you were doing it to everyone. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. Nothing personal. It's good. I think it's very helpful to just disconnect. I even watched a lot of TV, too. I finished the Ms Mazel series. Sean Tibor: Nice. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I binge watched that on not your request, but your recommendation. I did that, and that was pretty fun. And I'm going to my first barbecue, so I feel like I understand a little bit more about the Jewish society afterwards. Sean Tibor: I don't think it's like, official, though. I don't know that that's the. But at least it gives you some context. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Some context. But it was cute. So, yeah, that's all I did. And I just started picking up back into coding on Monday, and I felt a little rusty after two weeks off. Sean Tibor: Yeah, it's understandable for me. I spent the first week of the break doing something different. Right. So I think the whole idea of a disconnect is a little bit different. It's not so much the disconnect, it's the doing something different. It's taking some time to do something. You can be very busy, you can be active, but just doing something that's not your normal routine can be really relaxing. So I spent a lot of time with my kids. I built a Lego Ecto One Ghostbuster set, and it's the most amazing thing ever. So, yes, I'm a 40 year old who loves to play with Lego still. But as I told my students so many times, I don't know if you're going to find this surprising, but the computer science teacher is kind of a huge nerd. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: No surprise, no surprise. I think there are a lot of Python Easter out there listening. That's cool. Sean Tibor: Yeah, it is amazing. And really just looking at how it all fits together, and it does make me reflect on how much that mindset of building and creating and assembling small pieces into bigger and bigger things is very satisfying for coders and for people who teach to see how things progress and build up. So I really enjoyed that. And then we went to California as a family to meet up with my family. First time I had met my nephew. He's almost 18 months old. So I got to meet him for the first time, and we spent the whole week kind of rained out. It was Los Angeles, but it was 50 deg in raining the whole week. So we spent a lot of time with family. We played games together. We went to parks a lot. But it was really nice to see my family and disconnect my technology fixed, though, while I was there because I was jet lagged by about 3 hours was when I woke up at 05:00 in the morning and I couldn't sleep anymore. I worked through a new coding language, and I don't know how to describe it exactly. It's not a general coding language like Python. It's a very specific language called TerraForm, and you can use it to create things in the cloud. So instead of going into, like, an Amazon Web Services console and clicking through the buttons to create virtual servers or databases or networks, you can define all of that as code. And it's really kind of fascinating. I just wanted to do something a little bit different, learn something new. And it's really fascinating because it helps simplify a lot of the cloud concepts that I think I was overcomplicating in my head to see it in code somehow made more sense for me. And it was really kind of amazing to work through this set of tutorials in a book that I downloaded called TerraForm up and Running. I'll put a link to that in the show Notes. But if you're doing anything with wanting to set up and create and manage cloud resources, not just on Amazon, but on pretty much most of the cloud providers, it works pretty amazingly well and it works across providers. So if I want to create a digital ocean droplet and have that talk to an S three bucket on Amazon, I can create both of those in the same TerraForm file, and it will define all of that and create it for me. So it's kind of cool to see how that works. It definitely stretched my brain in new and interesting directions. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's pretty cool. I think there's a lot of learning going on for a lot of people out there. I was speaking to someone who had sent us a cool library, and it's all in Python. And then the email comes back, well, I think I'm going to do it. And see, now I've had fun. Now I'm going to change it. Okay. I think we do that to ourselves. We have to do that challenge and change things up and learn something new. Because for people like us who are active learners, doing the same thing is never a good choice for our brains. Our brains get really bored really quick. That's cool. Sean Tibor: Yeah. Well, that's kind of what's been happening with us. Why don't we talk about the wins of the week so we'll get a little bit more specific now. And Kelly, I'm going to guess I think I know what your win of the week was this week. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, my goodness. Sean Tibor: Starts with an H. Rhymes with whacker or weed whacker. Right. What Hacker News. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, that's your win. I was going to let you have that one. Sean Tibor: No, I thought that was yours. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Okay, so the Hacker News is one of the wins. I was actually going to comment on the Twitter verse and how cool the metaphors were that were coming in. But yes. Okay. We did get a really cool email from a gentleman that we're hoping to get onto the show. Very cool person that audited our podcast off of Hacker News. And I texted Sean and I was like, have you seen this? And he's like, no. And of course, you had a lot of more fun than I did on writing and commenting on there. It was just really cool. I think a lot of people were surprised that when we're teaching, it's always the same thing. Teaching Python to middle schoolers is a little bit of shock to everyone. But the idea that learning how do we teach in a way that's new and shows them that we're learning. And funny enough, of course, that's my whole story. And it was your story, too. We both were learning Python you had tech in your back pocket where I'm not so savvy when it comes to actual computer stuff. And it was a cool little thread. Sean Tibor: I really liked how and it ties kind of into that experience I was having. Learning TerraForm, learning something new over the break was one of the comments that was on Hacker News was about how effective it can be to be learning with your students that you don't know everything that you're teaching them, that they see that behavior role model that you really like. I was saying that is something that we're always striving for. We're always striving to keep that feeling of learning something new and struggling through it and not knowing everything about what's going on. And so I thought that that was a really nice tie in because you should always be learning something new with your students. And now here I'm learning something new. I'm keeping that feeling because it helps you develop that empathy for those beginner learners to understand their frustration, understand why they're feeling that struggle and going through it, but also help them understand that there is a point where they have that breakthrough, they have that moment where it clicks and it's rewarding and it's the part that keeps us learning 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: But I have to also add this sweet, sorry, that was really going to be my real win. And you were getting me to do the hacker newsletter, but I was having such a great 6th grader question. It's that first day of the quarter and I always ask them, what is it that confuses them? And we're talking about comments and how to write comments. And a lot of people in the thread, I don't think really understood my question at first. The kids get it, put a hashtag in front of it, you write it, it's a comment, they can remember that. But a lot of our students want to know why. And I always think of it as that question, Mommy, why is the sky blue? Because it is. But why? Because the light when you go through this whole thing and they're like, but why? I'm like, I don't know. And so a kid had asked me, but why is it a hashtag? Why is it a triple comment? And how is it that these get neglected? And it was like they wanted to know what was the hard coding. And we had a lot of great responses. Eric Matthews, of course gave me a whole project to try with parsers of putting things in. I love the idea of there are a couple of parts that said stuff like, well, what was it? Putting glasses on with red lenses? And if it's written in red ink, you're not going to see them. So that red is like a filter. But the whole idea was pretty cool. And I like that help from our friends on Twitter and just helping me get to a lot of different ways to make it relatable to the 6th grader. So that was my real win this week. The Hacker News was two days ago. Sean Tibor: Well, I have to say I think my favorite response was comments or like comments from your Paredes. You ignore them. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. Sean Tibor: So some really good tongue in cheek sort of explanations that I think we'll definitely be able to use with our students. And it's something that I wouldn't know how to answer that either, because in my mind, I know the fact that the parser has this tokenizer, right. It goes through and it creates this syntax tree of all of the stuff that's in there. I don't know all the details of how it does that. I'm not that deep into it, but I have this conceptual idea in mind. And knowing that the comments are not included in there is something that I know, but I don't know how to explain with the context that the student needs to be able to get it there. And with practice, I'm sure we could find a way to tell that story to be able to help them build that mental model. But with the first time you're asked, it's kind of like that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm not sure, especially coming from my background. It is a huge learning curve and everything I research, it's a little bit more involved because in order for me to teach something or explain something, I really need to understand it. And it's kind of still like that Santa Claus or the believe in something kind of mentality. Yeah. Okay, there's this parser, whatever. And then there's an interpreter and the compiler. All these words really aren't Crystal clear in my brain because that's not who I was as a coder. And it's funny to remind people that I was just a biologist. I didn't have to study this stuff. It's been a learning goal for me. Sean Tibor: Well, and the funny thing is, as a coder, you may not need to know that it may never come up, but as a teacher, it's going to come up right. Someone's going to ask you that question. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yes. So that is funny. But the Hacker News is they're always learning. And I'm like, I'm always learning. There are so many kids out there asking me so many questions that I don't know. So I'm like, oh, great question. Let's Google that. Or ask Twitter. Sean Tibor: Exactly. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: What was your win? Sorry. I had a lot of things on my mind. Sean Tibor: I guess that leaves Hacker News open for grabs. So I'm going to take that. That was a lot of fun, and it was really great to go through all the different comments and ideas and thoughts. And one of the things that I've always appreciated about the opportunity to teach is that so many of us that grew up in the 80s and 90s and even the 2000s and kids today, we didn't have access to computer science teachers and computer science curriculum at early ages. Right. It's not something that's evenly distributed, and it's not necessarily equitable. Right. And that's one of the reasons why we do this podcast is to be able to share what we can. We recognize that we have the privilege of being able to work with one another. We have the privilege of a school that's very supportive and students that are very if they're not into it, at least they're going to go do it anyways. But we have those wonderful things, and we can share that with others through our podcast. So that was a really nice thing to see in those comments, was just being able to talk with and respond to some of the people who hadn't heard us before and give them share a little bit about why we're doing this and what we love about the podcast and about the community of Python. Unknown: Absolutely. Sean Tibor: No worries. So I think where we could start for our main topic today is really just a look back at 2021 and just thinking about the things that we really liked about our year in Python and our year in teaching Python. It doesn't necessarily have to be things that were in the classroom or things that we taught. But when I think back about the moments that we had on the podcast, there are a few that stick out to me that I really liked, for example, and I'll go first. So it gives you a chance to think about this, because I'm kind of just throwing it out there. But I really enjoyed the Barbara Oakley episode, and I know that for sure, but I know for months you were telling me, we have to get Barbara Oakley, we have to get Barbara Oakley. And then when we got Barbara Oakley, you're like, we got Barbara Oakley. But what I really admired about her and what I really appreciate about that episode is that she really changed the way I thought about learning and about how we acquire new knowledge and information, whether it's the role of practice in our learning and the way that we acquire new skills and how you get what you practice, that was a big part of it. But then also this idea that you have to be engaged in your learning, you have to find a way to make sure that your learning really helps you grow and develop and that you have this goal in mind that you want to go achieve. And I think she really clarified a lot of those kind of not just the theoretical parts of learning, but also how that connects to the physiology of the brain, the neurology of the brain, and how we learn. And I thought when I went back and thought about it and I looked through the episode notes and everything that was really one of the highlights of the year for me was that particular episode. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, she's great. I have one of her first series of books about evil genes. And it's such a different thing than her learning. But what a brilliant mind she has and just going through the way and really parsing out very specific, like, very specific things about learning, which is something I've been following forever. And I think teachers, when I coach them or work with them, they get weirded out because I'm just like, okay, you're teaching about weather. But why? But why? But why? And always just breaking it down because there's so much happening in our brain and being able to tell people, like tell you, Sean, my frontal lobe only holds three things. You cannot give me all that information at once. Where yours? Hold ten. It's okay. But mine. We have to understand that not all of our kids can remember so many things at once. We can't view off a whole bunch of instructions, or we can't keep rolling out all these words that they don't know because as soon as they have a vocabulary word that they don't understand, their brain shut off. So there's all these things that happen. And I just loved her episode, too. That was a Kelly good one. But I'm going to up it up just because I love this guy and he's always there and sending us great moral support and he's like a cheerleader in the background. I'm sure you know who I was talking about. But it was a new editor talking with Nick Solovay. He's one of my heroes and he doesn't really listen on Twitter anymore. He did stop social media, but he is a great author when you want to write an email, which I'm very poor at responding with his eloquent letters, but he's just got that great understanding of really what the power is with learning and why it was so important to have the new editor. And I'm just so happy that it's still going and still working well for us and for a lot of other people. It is one of those Ides that even when I have struggle and I have a problem that I feel is really challenging, I will skip out of pie charm and go straight to move editor just because it's just a fun feeling. It's just a safe environment. And that episode really focused on all the great things that code with Moo, and he had his code grades that are the eight key listed steps that were coming up. And it's a good episode. It was a highlight. Sean Tibor: Yeah. That whole series about different Ides and how to use them in teaching, I was really happy with that. And I'm glad that we had the chance to go through that process because there are so many ideas that people use for doing development work or to create projects or to make things happen or just to edit a bit of code for 1 minute. But teaching with them is really different. The need is different, the experience is different. And one of the things that Nick and all the people who work on the Moo editor have done really well is talk to people, talk to actual students, talk to learners, talk to teachers, find out what works well and to make it a project that people can contribute to because it is really focused on learning. It is not focused on, quote, real work. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Exactly. And just to hear a little freebie, we never really give out curriculum secrets. But one of the assignments that I had this quarter and it was after reflecting and looking back at the episode at the beginning of the year was to tell the students here, you need to pick two or three Editors. We're going to spend a lot of time. You're going to investigate them. I want you to have a backup because sometimes move will crash on the new Max or they'll have an issue or they'll have to get a rental laptop and they need to have a backup that's going to be an online editor. And it was one of those things that your kids I use the mood editor, I use replica, I use Colab, I use PyCharm. Depending on my mood that day, I'm not picky, but depending on my mood, I'm going to have use a different editor. So why not you, why not investigate the one that you feel comfortable with and that you want to code it? So if that was a real fun little sign that you do at the beginning of the quarter with your older quoters and it was good. Sean Tibor: Yeah. As I was thinking about this year also and thinking back on this year, I think one of the things just stepping back from the individual episodes, one of the things that I think we finally found this year was we found that voice of the episode, which is really about the learning process of teaching and being able to connect all these different areas together. And when I look back on it, episode 83, we've done 82 episodes. And the diversity of topics, when you look at it is really pretty amazing. But even more amazing than that, to me is just the fantastic people we've gotten to meet. I'm still amazed that when I say, do you want to be on our podcast, people say, yes, right. And we get all these amazing people that are doing so many different things, astrophysicists, teachers, developers, we have curriculum designers, we have data managers, all of these people that touch different aspects of learning and teaching and computer science and programming and Python have all kind of come together in this really cool thing that we started three years ago. Right. As, just as a little side project that was like, hey, we're having great conversations. Let's start recording it. And now we're 82 episodes and 83 after today. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. And I think for me, trying to process this about what I want to say without sounding too proof through andoshy but for me, as much as I have fallen in love with Python, and that is the only language I know, it's like the only boy I've ever met. I fall in love with it. But the true heart of my passion is teaching. And I think with these episodes, people can Peel away, exchange Python for math, exchange the word Python for Spanish or Latin, and science and physics. You can take away that specific vocabulary and really apply these concepts to pretty much other curriculum. Any other curriculum. You even go into the block base. How are we going to do computational thinking? So I think that is what's really special about having someone to talk to and really dive into that aspect. Sean Tibor: I agree. And I think that kind of gets can't remember what episode number it was, but it was that what are we really teaching episode? What are those real skills? What's the real learning here? Python that we're teaching right now will be different next year. It'll be Python 311 next year. And then there will be new things and it will change over time. But the durable skills, those things that we are teaching about persistence, about resilience, about learning, how to learn, about how to research effectively, about how to have confidence in yourself, that you will find the right answer. All of those things that we're really teaching don't have to be taught with Python. They could be taught with math, with English, with music, with drama. Those are all things that you can swap out the subject content for. And if you're thinking about it, and if you're a really good teacher, you can teach those things that are the really valuable skills. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Okay, I'm thinking, what is one thing that I really liked from last year? I'm trying to remember if it's last year, because I'm going to do it again this year. I can't remember, but we're going to do it again with the Boss and the making of the Boss. Something that came out of covet was the fact that we could not use our free package robots, our Lego, our Spike Primes, and all of our other bots because we had to have social distancing and we took those microbits and we piecemealed a bunch of things and we made these bots. I put together a whole unit for the exploratory robotics. I know this is kind of going into what I'm going to do in the future, but this is based on something that I love from 2021. But I put together this whole unit just with so many cool things and videos and resources, looking at what really is a bot. And that stemmed from our need to figure out what to do last year. And I'm really hoping that I can get some kids to just get creative, even with the servos something simple or even go into the fact that a chatbot can be a bot and how that can be an input and an output and as long as we're having this interactivity, whether it has a body or not, not necessarily a robot, but it's a bot. So kind of cool. Sean Tibor: Yeah. I think that was one of the risks that we took. Right. Like, let's just totally pull apart this curriculum around robotics and rebuild it in a new way. And I think it was a calculated risk. It was really effective to do it that way. But when we started it, we didn't know how it was going to end. And I'm really pleased with how it worked out. And I've actually kind of handed the torch to you on this one. You've been running that entire class by yourself. And I think if we had asked you three years ago if you would be running a hardware based robotics class by yourself, you'd be like, no way. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: No way. Not at all, not at all. And we get to go and soldering. Sorry. I know you tried to reflect, but with reflection comes progression. We're going soldering with these really cute light facing robots, and they have a little, I don't know if I haven't looked at the piece. It'd be a Thermo sensor, I don't know, light sensor, something. And when you cover it up, it stops moving. And then when you let the light on, it starts shaking. Yes, it has no coating whatsoever, but it's going to be our gateway into our microbit build. And really, I don't know. I did spend a lot of time last week working on this new unit for Exploratory Robotics. I'm not going to lie. Sean Tibor: Nice. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: All right, are you progressing? Sean Tibor: Let's progress. Let's talk about 2022. So thinking about what we've done in the past, what do we want to do this year? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, man. You know, I think one of the major focuses that I'm going to start introducing with students because this quarter I have a lot of pipe Flyers and a little bit nervous about having them because these are kids that are definitely going to outcode me. I have one student that's telling me I don't want to code in Python. I want to do this. I want to do that. And I'm like, well, this is our course, so this is our curriculum. And to be honest, your Pythonistic skills are crap. So we're going to work on things like that. But I'm going to work on libraries. I've focused on a couple of students that I know do the work really easy. They get all the challenges. They're in Pi Bytes, doing regular bytes now or starting, too. And I just want to push them. So I have I think it was Joebase, what was that? The drawing library that we were sent. I have a couple of kids want to go into Deep Lens, and I really want to start digging more into requests. So I've been trying to get the APIs, just like with your guidance of going into APIs, because it is really cool. Why not? You can easily put together a quick API weather app. Michael Kennedy has one that he has on the side and his ten apps or something to make. And it was a really good segue, very basic coding skills for your 7th and 8th graders. But I think definitely libraries that request. Again. Sean Tibor: I couldn't agree more. I think they're great for learning because it helps that with that surprise and delight, it's sometimes unpredictable what it's going to do. Or you can see that it connects to something and has live data, so it's not something that you can say. I wrote all of this myself, and it's doing exactly what I told it to do. You're telling it, I want to go you to go out and get the weather data for this city, and then I'm going to make it so that you can ask for any city. And when that works, then they see. I made something that is pretty simple on the code side, but really powerful in what it can do. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. Just got to be careful. You might want to find a little sandbox kind of website. Not go out. And I think you did dad jokes, which were okay, but sometimes you can get into some websites that you're not really sure what's going to pop up on the screen. Sean Tibor: No, I've definitely failed on that one pretty hard before. So my recommendation do not do the Chuck Norris joke. Api is not always appropriate for school learning moment. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You must test and proofread the entire website or stuff before you use it on the API and refine. Sean Tibor: Yeah. When you're doing APIs, do not just wing it or make it up as you go. Make sure you know that what you're getting into. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Little caveat fun. Never supposed to wing it and make it up as you go. Sean Tibor: As a teacher, I like to think of as jazz improv. It makes it more exciting that way. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: What about you? What are you looking to learn? Because I know you have a lot of fun little projects up your sleeve. Sean Tibor: There's a lot of things that I'm learning right now, but I'm thinking a little bit more about the podcast and teaching Python and where we want to take it. And I know you and I have talked about this a little bit, but one of the things I want to do is figure out how to go beyond just the weekly episode format and contribute more to the community, but also figure out some ways to monetize and support our own production a little bit better. We've spent the last three years paying for this out of pocket for the most part. We do have an amazing group of patrons that have been supporting us throughout the last few years. I want to do more for them, so I want to have more activities and more events that are for patrons both to thank them and give them something valuable for their contributions, but also to encourage more people to become patrons. So some of the ideas that I've had is a monthly kind of chat where we can all get together. It's kind of a closed group, so you have to be a patron to join it. But everyone can come in and we can have a conversation about what everyone's working on for patrons who are contributing more. I was thinking that having some sort of review of teaching or ask questions like a Q and A session could be really good. But just focusing on that patronage area a little bit more through Patreon to make that more valuable and enriched is something that I really want to get into in 2022 because I think it will be rewarding not just to help support the show, but also it will help us build better, closer relations with those people who really want to be a part of our community. So a little bit more community focus in 2022 is something that I have as a goal to make our community a little bit better. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100% actually the only social media I have and the only thing I've been working on this week with social media from one of the people that I follow, Howie, if you like math, this is the guy who follow. He always has these Tik Tok, but he's been offering a couple of DMs and the meat and just to talk because he likes to meet people. Luckily, we have the podcast cast and we get to meet people. But I follow your lead. And the fact that I would love the opportunity for us to build this coaching ability with some of our followers, especially other educators out there who don't have this partnership like we do, because I think that is one of the reasons why I took such a risk in learning how to code and teaching coding without knowing anything. So having that ability to just share and discuss and be that coach like we coach here would be awesome and to meet more people because 1 hour. I always want to talk more with the people that leave me. And luckily we have a lot of people that still tweet us or direct message or email us. And that is where the fun comes in of just being able to talk and grow with these experts. Sean Tibor: Yeah. And I think there's something that's also good about those Serendipitous moments. Right. It's not necessarily the water cooler chats or the coffee, but think about how many great conversations we had at Python when we were able to attend in person in 2019 or last year when we jumped into Python virtually and we're chatting at the round table conversations with just people from all over. If we could start to create some of that among teachers where you can hop in and you may not have a specific question that you want to ask or get answered, it may just be like, I want to come and hang out and listen and chat and find something new that I can play with or work with. That's something that I would like to create also. Because to your point, not everyone has that other person there who understands what they're talking about or what they're trying to teach or what they're trying to do. So we want to create. That almost like a teacher break room, but for Python teachers. So that's something that I really want to figure out how to get off the ground this year. I'd like to do it in the beginning of the year, not at the end, so that we can create more of that community feel and also bring in more people to do that. It doesn't have to be a one way coaching. It can be people making connections and speaking to one another and advising each other. And that it could be that one day I'm getting coached, the next day I'm coaching someone else. So I think that would be great. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, maybe. I think. Was it Curtis Olsen tweeted that he took this course on compilers? He could totally teach me what he learned in a class. I'm looking at that book. I didn't get his joke at first, but then I see the book that he posted was about this Dragon coming through with the night. Yeah, that does not look like a fun course that I would take in College, but maybe if I had a round table kind of Zoom meeting, somebody could teach me compilers, principal techniques and tools, and I would actually enjoy it could be fun. Sean Tibor: You never know. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It could be fun. That's funny. What's another thing that you want to do? Sean Tibor: Well, the other one that I was thinking about and I don't have this. This is a half baked idea, so I don't have it fully baked. It's not ready to go yet, but I've been tutoring some students on the side over the last six months or so, and I really enjoyed that one on one opportunity for tutoring. And there's also a financial part of that as well. That's rewarding. But not everyone has that opportunity. So I'm grateful for the students that I have, the ones that I'm able to tutor. I'd like to figure out how to offer tutoring through teaching Python in such a way that it's not just for the students who can afford to pay for tutoring. It could also be for teachers who need a little bit of extra help and they want to pay for that access. But then I'm thinking about one of those Tom shoes type models. So if you pay for an hour of tutoring, it creates a free hour of tutoring for someone else in the community who can't afford it. So we create this bank of tutoring hours that we can use with students who are unable to afford it or teachers who are unable to afford it and have a process for them to get that assistance as well. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Supported by the community 100% and on that future looking helping a little bit more with Peru. They're trying to monetize their summer camp, winter camp, spring break camp in order to reach more students in underdeveloped areas. And so kind of helping them that's one of my goals is hopefully Sean and I can go to Peru and help. Kreya quote I met some of the instructors over while you were in California. Enjoying your time. I did a little Pep talk and gave them my three must do because these are young kids. These are like 17 1819 I think the oldest one maybe was 24, 23. They're in College and they're learning to code and they're learning to be developers and then they're in this Crane code, but just being able to speak to them and hoping we can go down there and make a difference in Peru, I still want to go to Bahamas, Bryan. Yeah. Sean Tibor: That'S my bonus. My extra, as Michael Kennedy and Brian Akin call it on pipe on Bites. My extra extra is I have it in mind. I have a friend who has a small airplane, and I'm going to try to sweet talk him into flying us over to the Bahamas to meet with Ryan and his program that he's working on over there. I haven't figured out how to do that yet, but that, I think would be a lot of fun to figure out. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Big goals. Tons of big goals. Sean Tibor: Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Anything else? I mean, those are huge goals. That's a lot to work on. Sean Tibor: I'm going to stop there. Obviously. I have a lot of my own personal learning goals, and I've really been enjoying getting back into learning this year. So I'm going to keep that going as much as I can. I'm going to be shifting a lot of my focus towards the cloud. There's a lot of things that I am trying to figure out how to integrate that with teaching and development and everything in a way that could be really useful for teachers. So if I can figure that out, I'm going to share more of that. But even just something as simple as leveraging something like a free tier on Amazon Web Services to set up a Jupyter server so you could do Jupiter notebooks in the cloud. You don't have to wait for it approval and make it something that is secure and could be quickly set up and torn down without having to risk your students data, your data, or your school's data. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Cool. Well, I want to add the other goal, and it's kind of coming into fruition in January. And hopefully February is a couple of our new speakers. Sean and I, we really want to keep that focus of being transferable sales and not just with Python. So we have really cool guests coming up this week. So excited. I'm not even going to release it. And hopefully I have a couple more guests, AI and cryptocurrency. And I am doing another course, which is brutally hard because it's all about finance and it's supposed to be Python and finance, but I haven't got anywhere near Python. And I never took steps. I took calf one, two, and three again, bio major. Never did that stuff that you did analytical things. But I'm hoping to get a couple of speakers out there. So that was another goal I forgot about. Sean Tibor: Well, I really appreciate that because you've been getting some fantastic connections for us. So whatever I can do to support that and keep it going and teach me what, you know, Obi Wan, because I want to keep getting great speakers. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Just don't let me sound so dumb when I'm like, what is that? So some of the topics that were coming up, and I'm just like, I don't know anything about that, but I want to learn. Yes, please. Maybe we can get someone in who wants to come talk about compilers. That's not boring. Well, something about the computer interpreter, how that works. Just Kelly Me, the magic and podcast for me. Sean Tibor: Maybe Anthony Shaw, because he wrote that whole book on C Python internals. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Okay, that sounds very advanced. He's been rescuing a lot of people at the beach, so I'm not sure how free of his time is. Sean Tibor: Maybe if he needs to take a break and go into something less challenging, like how all of Python works on the inside. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Sounds good. Hey, I have a book. Oh, nice. Sean Tibor: Go for it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So it's called Think Again and Adam Grant. I read a couple of other books from him. Really like him. He's a very easy reader. Think Again goes back into this idea of rethinking or thinking. It starts off with a couple of firefighters who unfortunately had lost their lives because they were trying to run up a Hill away from a really bad fire. And they didn't drop any of their weight. They didn't drop any of their tools. And one of the guys was like, hey, let's start a fire. And I'm not really sure how it works, but they started a little fire that ate up the fuel for the bigger fire. And the one firefighter survived by making a small fire and sitting within and staying close to the ground. And it was just this idea. He hadn't been trained to do that. His training was we fight fires, we go do this job, we do this act. And unfortunately, his colleagues had perished in the flames, but he survived. And it was just this idea of sometimes our answers weren't always provided for us and sometimes we need to rethink again. And this just goes through the idea of keeping it open in mind. Open mind is a teachable skill, and that's something that we do a lot in class, that I can't teach everything about Python to these students. I can't teach them everything they need to know about computers, but being able to be open minded about learning or looking at new ways to solve a problem is one of the things that we really focus on. I just started the book so it sounds really interesting and sweet to me. If you like it, I'll be tweeting some quotes from it like I normally do. Sean Tibor: Nice. I will post the TerraForm book. I think it complements Python very well, so if you want to set things up and tear them down in the cloud, it works really well and you can have all of your same stuff in source code right alongside your application code. And so I was just really impressed with how well it worked and it just fit my brain a little bit better to put it in code than it did to go on the website, although it makes a lot of sense to me sometimes to have the code and the website side by side so I can see which options I need to focus on and which ones I can safely ignore. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Something else. I found something and it's not Python and I think I'm actually going to try it out. And I thought of you when I saw this. I forgot to send it to you but there's these little cute gaming devices and I'll send the link and we'll post in the show notes by Alex Freaks and I love that store. So I'm always looking at that store now, but they look like tiny little Game Boy and you use the MakeCode arcade nice and you have a retro arcade for education. I don't know how they work. I guess you have to pass it in with maybe a USB because it didn't really say much on the site or I was also multitasking and watching Lucifer The New Seasons out or was out on that. But anyways it looked really cool so I'm going to maybe get one of those to try it out to see if some of our robotic kids want to play. Sean Tibor: Sounds like fun. I don't think I have any new toys or new items to play with. I'm keeping an eye out for the next aid of box. I think it comes out in a couple of months. I think that'll be probably my next look at hardware. I do have one of their macro pads here which is kind of cool and once I figure out how to code that I will send some code your way because I think it can be really fun for us to use in the classroom for making different things happen or making automations. So it has almost like a ten key keypad like you'd have on your keyboard, but it also has a little OLED screen on it and a little knob. And so for things like muting and unmuting a Zoom or pausing the screen or minimizing the windows, you can have all of that set up with this macro pad. So I'm kind of excited to see if I can get that working soon. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very well. We have a lot of things coming up in March, right? Hopefully Python. Sean Tibor: In May this year. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Is that right? Sean Tibor: We did get our talk papers submitted, our requests for our RFPs for the talks at Python. With any luck, we'll get to go and speak at PyCon about teaching and learning and that we have the Innovation Institute. I believe we have something in Europe with a Lux tech. Is that right? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Virtual learning loss with John in the first two weeks of March. So that's a very busy Mark. Sean Tibor: Well, and if you have anything else you'd like us to join in on, if you're doing a Python conference and you're involved in that and you would like to get us involved somehow, we are always free for a Zoom. Maybe not always free for travel, but we're free for a Zoom. If it's someplace really cool, we're definitely free for travel. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: If we ever get to travel, let's get through this new phase of January. Exactly. Sean Tibor: Well, I think that's kind of everything that we had in mind to share this episode. We have some great guests coming up over the course of the next few weeks, so stay tuned for that. I don't think we have any other announcements, but if you have goals or ideas or thoughts that you want to share with us based on what we have discussed today, especially since a lot of these ideas are still in progress, they're half baked. So if you have ways that we can make them better, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. You could do that through the website at teachingpython. Fm or on Twitter at Teaching Python. Kelly is at Kelly Perez on Twitter. I'm at Smtiber on Twitter, and we're always available through that social media network. Someone asked me the other day if I was ever going to get a TikTok, and my answer was very short and ended in no. But Twitter is my jam, so feel free to reach out to us there. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Anything else, Kelly? No, that's it. And if you email me and I never responded, I have been going through a lot of emails and trying to catch up because 2021 was really busy. I don't know what happened to it, but it's a blur. Sean Tibor: Yeah. I think your record was like a year later responding to an email. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I know, but he was really nice and he totally got it and he replied back. So I'm hoping to provide some examples for I have to pull that back up. Do you have the library that he made? I'm going to actually do a proper shout out because I did get a reply. I emailed back. It was a library. Give me a few minutes. Sorry. Sean Tibor: That's all right. So one of our 2022 goals is not to take a year to respond to emails we'll try to get it to be a lot shorter so please do email us or reach out to us on Twitter. We'd love to hear from you, Kelly any yes, Joe base. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Reuben Ford he did make this really cool library. He says that he hasn't really paid a lot of attention since he sent it in 2020 but he is going to rebuild it again but he's writing it in here C which is actually faster so I can't help him with pure C but listen, the Joe Bay library was really cute in Python. He has no examples, no tutorials but the script that he wrote I got a window I got flashing different colors and I have a circle that moves around with an arrow. So if you're thinking turtle it's a quick little step. I gave it to a couple of our high Flyers in 7th and 8th graders and I said listen it might be an opportunity to get an example on a website so go for it. Perfect. Yes. So I give a shout out because I was a horrible person. Sean Tibor: All right. So there you go, Joe just one last final library and idea to try out so for teaching Python this is Sean and this is Kelly signing off.