KellySchusterParedes: Music. Sean Tibor: All right. Hello, and welcome to teaching Python. This is episode 99, and we're live today talking about the fine art of searching it up or learning by doing so. My name is Sean Tibor. I'm a coder who teaches, and my. KellySchusterParedes: Name'S Kelly Schuster and I'm a teacher who codes. Sean Tibor: I know, right? Like live stream. So much pressure. But it's funny, it's been a while since we've done a live stream. We've been so busy and crazy trying to get things organized that we've really been focused on the prerecorded session. So it's kind of nice to do this live again and hopefully we'll get some people joining us. KellySchusterParedes: Yeah, I think it gets rid of that stress. I think following a lot of podcasters on Twitter and it's that stress of and I never felt it, but that stress of getting things produced and getting it out there. I think after 98 times, we decided, you know what, let's just give it a go. And they all know that I make mistakes and you make mistakes. Sean Tibor: I never make mistakes. KellySchusterParedes: You never make mistakes, ever. I just got to be really careful what I say now. Sean Tibor: Yeah, it's hard to edit it out later, so well, anyways, let's jump right in. It's been a busy, crazy couple of weeks since we last chatted. Why don't we start with the wins of the week? And I'd love to hear what's going on with you and what's been your latest win? KellySchusterParedes: I was going to say, like, the live stream and the fact that our number 100 episode is coming up, that honestly is a really big win. I think talking to people and thinking back over the years of being in this podcast with you. Just those hundred episodes. I was going back and I've been posting a lot of stuff about previous episodes and looking at all the people that we've met. That's got to be like my biggest win is the fact that just knowing that hundreds right there around the corner. I think we should just call it quits at 100. Sean Tibor: A little bit of the meta reflection right on the last 99 episodes. It's been quite a ride and it's been fun to think about where we go from here and what's next. KellySchusterParedes: Yeah. And so I'm going to leave like that because I have a project in the works, but it might turn into epic fails. So working on with the projects, with kids, and we just launched it today, so I'll share that maybe on 100. Sean Tibor: Well, you can save that for a fail of the week upcoming, right? Always good to have one of those. Locked and loaded. Let's see here. So for me, the win this week I mean, the win this week is taking a minute just to slow down and talk and think about things. It's been really busy and there's been a lot of good technical work that's happening. But I think the biggest thing for me that's a win is really just looking at, like, how to document things better on my team and how to write up a lot of the stuff that we're doing. I have a new engineer coming and joining our team that's overseas. And so one of the things that I was thinking about was. How do we make sure that she is equipped with the right information about how to join our team. How to get on Boarded. What technologies you need to install. How to become productive as quickly as possible. And to do that when someone might be working while you're asleep. So making sure that our documentation is up to speed. So I wrote three or four pages worth of onboarding documentation for here's how you set up your computer, and here's how you install everything. And it's not trivial by the time you put it all together, it's everything from how do I set up omicsh and get that connected to how do I make sure that my get commits are signed appropriately and that's shared with GitHub. So we're putting all that together. And then on top of that, the next layer is trying to standardize this with some development containers or dev environments so that a lot more of this is scripted and predictable for someone onboarding onto our team. It's a work in progress, and it's more complicated than I thought it would be, but it's a lot of fun to try to figure out. KellySchusterParedes: It's kind of like a lesson plan. It's never good to go around. Sean Tibor: And the funny thing is, it really is like a lesson plan. It's really like, what are the outcomes we want the learner to achieve? All of those things that I'm taking from teaching and using that in a more corporate setting. KellySchusterParedes: Awesome. That's pretty cool. Sean Tibor: Yeah. KellySchusterParedes: Don't my sub plans for tomorrow. Sean Tibor: Exactly. So what we thought we would do today. Though. And this kind of ties in. I think. With both of our wins this week. For me. It's very recent because I'm thinking about what do I need to look up or what does my learner need to look up in order to get on Boarded. What do they need to research. How do they need to come up to speed quickly? And I think for you not to put words in your mouth, but it definitely feels like a lot of the conversations we've had over the last 98 episodes have been about more effective learning and how do you research better, how do you acquire knowledge better, how do you become a better learner? And searching and understanding is a big part of that. KellySchusterParedes: Yeah. And writing off the waves of Digital Citizenship Week or Digital Citizen Week and stuff is the fact that there's a lot of stuff that was going around saying, how do we use Google, how do we use it safely, how do we teach kids to identify the right and the wrong answers? So this kind of kept coming up in my tweets, in my feeds and everything. So it's been sitting there again and again. Sean Tibor: Yeah. And what I always find interesting about it is that there's so much misinformation out there, too, right, about what we search for and how searches are made. And I won't pretend to have any knowledge of Google's search algorithms or the internals of how it works, but I know it works for me. And I know that I've been using search quite a bit over the last, you know, actually forever, but really over the last nine or ten months to learn more and to add to my knowledge. So I'm happy to jump in on this topic because I think it's really important for anybody who's learning. KellySchusterParedes: Cool. Well, no, I want to just say this right now because I'm starting in on a couple of courses, and one of the first prework courses was learning how to research. And I'm thinking, this is from a college. I'm not going to say the name. This is from a college, and this is a standard module teaching adults or young adults and old adults how to research in order to prepare for a computer science course coming up, and knowing how to identify and stack overflow and knowing how to use keywords and everything. So it's not something that is unheard of in this realm that we do in your work and in the school. Sean Tibor: Yeah, and I think that might be a good place to start when it comes to research and searching is really defining what you know or where you're starting from. One of the mistakes that I see a lot of people doing is the first thing they do is just start searching without really formulating what they're looking for, understanding what they're looking for. And I could see where that's why it's helpful in a lot of university settings, classroom settings, to take that first step of establishing, what am I really trying to find? What do I really want to understand? So even just taking a minute to think about that makes a lot of sense, and also not assuming that everyone knows how to do that very well. KellySchusterParedes: Well, that's a huge skill. And just even dissecting, like you said, into the two parts, like learning how to research and adding it into computer science. So we're not even talking about yet what we do in computer science class, what we do with coding, but just that fact that as an Edtech specialist forever, we've always gone in and said, okay, here's my English teacher. How do we teach the kids how to research? And I think it's an overlooked skill. We assume that these digital natives actually can go in and find things, but they can research on at Google at some level. Yeah, they'll go in, they'll write, how do I upload or import a library in Python or whatever? How do I find Shakespeare's? Whatever. And they type the entire sentence. It's a verbatim kind of situation. There's no problem solving involved. And kids go to that first page that comes up, and then they always read the top adverts and they never really click on the links and they're reading the paragraphs, getting the information from that short little snippet. And right there, putting computer science on the side right there. We're taking these kids into this mountain of research that they might be getting qualified results from. So that's like me, my Edtech cart going, this is a skill, this is a skill, this is a skill. Why are we not teaching this across the board? Sean Tibor: Well, and it's also something that we do all the time, right? So it's something that we feel like we're pretty good at until we realize how bad we are at it. Right? And when I say we use it all the time, I mean, I'm looking at my Google Search activity, and you can get to this by going to myactivity Google.com and my first search this morning. Sorry. It includes a lot of other things, but my first actual search today that I put out was at 918 this morning, which I think is actually rather late the day for me, but that was my first search, and I was searching about Kubernetes command line interfaces because of a podcast that I heard. My most recent search was about three minutes ago when I searched for my Google Search history. Right, but when you look at this, you can see just go back and look at the things that you're searching for. So this is a little bit like going back to your own video recording of understanding. Kelly. How do I search? What's my evolution or what's the path that I take? That might be the first step to really understand and define where you're starting from when it comes to research and specifically using Google. But this could be applied anywhere. When you look at searching through Amazon for particular products that you need to find or searching through a library catalog to find, that the book that you need or the articles that you need to research, looking at what you've already searched can be a great way to gain some understanding of the way that you research things. KellySchusterParedes: Should I embarrass myself and tell you the first thing I searched for this morning? What? Sean Tibor: What was the first thing you searched for this morning? Kelly, now that you've said it? KellySchusterParedes: I wanted to show the kids the picture of Gullum because it came up on membeame. And Maxi and Materia are like, who's that? I'm like, you don't know who got my precious? And that was at 07:00 A.m.. Yeah. Sean Tibor: And sometimes it's a little early for The Lord of the Rings, but sometimes not. KellySchusterParedes: They're going to have nightmares, my precious. Anyways, sorry. Yeah. So I agree, though. It's like going in into search history, that's a great tool. And actually showing the students that and the information that's we'll get off on the side, whole side tangent, but the information that's kept on them about their search and how effective and what things maybe they search for all the time. Is there a pattern? Is there something that you're not getting stuck in the memory? And it's kind of crazy. I'm looking at stuff from Daniel, who we absolutely love. Yeah, we got knowing what words to Google and figure out what you're looking at is pretty much the entire battle. Of course. Absolutely. Sean Tibor: And then I like this other one also, which is what seems related to research is even giving students a new data set and having them explore it as an open ended question. And I was thinking about that. What that made me think of is the prompt, right? Like, that even before you search that step, right before that is having a prompt, something that gets you in that moment where you're like, I need to go look this up. I need to go research this. I need to learn more. And what's important to me about that is being prompted by something novel or something that you don't understand. And I don't know if there's actual brain psychology behind this, but to me, it feels like this is where I search through my own memory quickly and say, do I know anything about that? Is there anything that I'm aware of? Am I familiar with that? And then when I come up empty, that's when I go research. Right? So that prompts, so the getting a new data set is a great prompt for that because this is something new that I haven't seen before. How am I going to go look at that, understand it, get more knowledge and understanding what's happening with it? That prompt is really important to get you started. KellySchusterParedes: Yeah, I'm not going to add to that. This is what happens in Recorded. I have to pause and say, wait, so let's put this aside because this actually came out in a tweet. I found it in LinkedIn. I was trying to find it in Twitter, but I'll pull it up in a second. But pretty much it was a LinkedIn post saying that 70% and I'm guessing the number 70% of all developers use Google and that we the other 30% lie about it, probably, right? And I made the comment on Twitter saying, yes, yes, we need to stop making students memorize coding and teach them how to find the right answers through code. And that was like a very bold statement. And I think for me, it was an understanding that I'm not saying go research, print statement and go research everything that they write, but at the same time, if they're stuck, I don't want them feeling that they are not capable or do not have the resources immediately to find the answer. And I don't want to be the person giving them the answer. Because I want to have them struggle and to really remember that thing that they had to look for. And I started diving like I normally do, down this rabbit hole of research of is there anyone out there that has the hard facts of what can happen from googling too much and not Googling? And I couldn't really find too many too many good resources, but I wanted to kind of put that back. I know you do a lot of Google. We've always been teaching the kids just in time, learning and figuring things out. And we both full heartedly believe that this is a process that really works or works in the classroom, works for learners, and it's something that helps their brains to process and stick things. And I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that because we were silent on this. Sean Tibor: Yes. My thinking on this has evolved over time because I think we can all agree that we don't want students or learners to immediately raise their hand and say, oh, I need help right now. Kelly, what's the answer to two plus two? I need help. Right. Give it a chance to think about it, to figure it out, to work through the problem, struggle with it, grapple with it until you get something right. So there's like this initial phase that we don't want them to seek help too quickly, right? Then we want them to really get into it and dig into it. And that's kind of like the middle phase of it where they've maybe exhausted some of the easy answers and need to go a little bit deeper. But then there's also a point where they have lost all their traction towards solving that problem. And we don't want them to sit there and spin their wheels either. So it's a little bit more along the lines of as long as they're making forward progress, as long as they are making progress towards an answer or adding to their knowledge or adding to their research, it's good. But as soon as they get more confused instead of less confused, as soon as they start running out of things to research or running out of places to look or running out of answers, that's a good time to say, okay, come get some help. The hard part is that we don't like to give up. Once we get to that point where we're researching it, we're trying to figure it out. We don't want to give up or we don't want to bother anyone else. So what I've started to do for myself is to time box my struggles. So I'll give myself an hour or 2 hours that I'm going to research and try to figure something out. Even if I know that someone else on my team could help me with it, I'll work through it because I want to do the learning, but beyond that point, I have to move on. I have other things I got to do. And so I go back to someone else who can help me for that. I go ask them for the assistance to get past that roadblock so that I can keep moving forward and keep my momentum up. KellySchusterParedes: I'm looking daniel actually just I wish we could click on a button and have you come in and pop in live. We'll have to figure that out. Sean Tibor: Probably can. I can put them in timeout. KellySchusterParedes: Don't put them in timeout. There you go. But yeah, it's a flipped classroom and we mainly have to do worksheets. This is about solving problems. And I went through this whole outline in my head because not to give away our curriculum or anything, so I'm not allowed to do that. We said that enough times. But I started thinking through this whole process of how we implement Google, how we implement this structure. And I teach computer science like I would if I was going into a science classroom, like a math classroom, an English classroom, or as in 2020 research paper that just came out like a foreign language classroom, because computer science and foreign languages are getting closer and closer in this study. Anyway, I was thinking about how things were done and I was thinking about this top down approach of how some computer science science teachers teach from top down. Here I'm going to show you exactly how to do things. It's great. The kids can walk away making an arcade game, and they have really hardly any knowledge of coding except for they made this really cool game. So they have this top down approach, and then they have kind of like the bottom up approach. I'm sorry, the bottom up approach is where they teach everything. And the top down approach is where they kind of give a problem and they figure out learning solutions. In 6th grade, I do this bottom up. I'm like, here's an object, here's this, here's this. And we do a lot of metaphors and a lot of repetition, so there's really no need at the beginning to do any googling. It's when they first start when I first start switching from that sort of not bottom up, not top down, I go kind of like in the middle kind of teaching, where I go, oh, well, that's really interesting. You know, they ask, how would I do? And this was actually a real life situation. 6th graders were in my class for three days. Wanted to have his code, his print statement, print out one letter at a time because he was writing a 40 line story with print. And he's like, I want it to come out one letter at a time. I was like, wow, okay, well, you can put the time in there. I didn't want to go too crazy. He's like, okay, well, I guess that's okay. And I have one line coming in that's cool. Comes back the next day and he goes, look, what I found. I found that if I import system OS, I can have it do something. I forget what the code was, but it was four lines, five lines, where it literally printed across the screen with the library. And he's like, I found that on Google and I put it into my code. This is a kid that's been learning code for three days, only knows how to do the print function. And I was like, right on. This is a star person. This is a kid that wasn't afraid to go look, and it was as cool as ever. Sean Tibor: Well, it goes to show you that really, that determination to figure something out, having the desire to go learn it and to go figure it out matters a lot because it keeps you moving forward towards that goal. It keeps you persistent. The other thing is having the research skills to be able to get to that point. And I want to get into some of the hard research skills because I want to give people things that are actionable that should be taught. And I'm very much in a Google mindset right now, but I think it's also applicable whether you're looking within a library or another place as well, where you can find lots of different materials. Like sometimes going and looking on Wikipedia can be a rabbit hole of research, right? So what I thought we could do is maybe start with how we search for things and give some very concrete tips on how we start, right? So the first thing that I think about is that Google has billions, if not trillions of pages indexed in their database, right? So I think about this as a database person, because right about the time I started learning about databases was about the same time that Google came out. So they're linked in my mind. But I think it is this huge index of web pages and content that I could be searching for. And the brilliance of Google is that when I put in something very simple in terms of my search term, it starts to narrow that down into results that it thinks are relevant to me. So when I search, I'm thinking for, how do I narrow down to just this one little section of that massive index to be relevant to me, right? What can I do to help Google with it? So, for example, Google knows enough about me that if I type python into a web browser, it's not going to typically show me stuff about snakes, right? It's going to show me stuff about the python programming language because it has all of my search history that it's using to filter this. But when I search for python, that's still a huge amount of content and it's still not necessarily what I'm looking for, right? So now what if I search for python decorators? Well, I'm going to get narrowed down even further, right? If I just put decorators or if I just put python, I'm not going to get either of those. It's the intersection of those two terms together that starts to bring the magic. So my process for searching is continuing to add fields or terms or keywords or additional ways clues for Google to filter down this massive index that it has, down to something smaller, right? And there's some really cool kind of power search terms that you can put in there, like site colon, and then the domain of the site that you want to search, it will restrict your searches to that. So if I wanted to search on real python for site or for python decorators, I could search for python decorator, site Python.com, and it would show me only stuff from that site, right. So it's this process of narrowing that matters in terms of my ability to search. And I can see that when I go through my search history. My process is very iterative, it's a lot of search refine, search, refine, search, refine, and I might read a few things here and there on each page and then come back and refine it further with what I just learned from what I read there. So it's highly iterative. I was wondering if you approach it the same way. Kelly, we've talked about this many times. My brain is very much designed to be a software engineer brain or a database brain. When you think about this, how do you think about searching the whole time you're thinking this? KellySchusterParedes: I was like, okay, that's the college level, adult level teacher. And she's like, yeah, we're going to teach him all these keywords. And I read this, I was reading this the whole time. Teach him how to use and our operators. And I think that's a great lesson. And if I had more than a quarter of a year, I probably would do that and teach whatever, all that stuff. But as a, you know, I'm thinking with this eleven year old brain who still types in the whole entire question, even puts a question mark at the end, or ask Siri to type it out for them, getting vocabulary and the keywords is part of the very first things that I am teaching the 6th graders, the eleven year olds how to do. And this is regardless of which class I'm in, but they're writing out the question and then they circle the word that's important. And then in that question I'm asking, is there another word or is there a proper word or is there a vocabulary word that's missing from this question? Or can this question be broken down? Because many times it's like, why is the sky blue? Well, that's a great question, but you're not going to get a solid answer. Well, you probably will now, but Google is so good, but you won't get a really solid answer if you don't focus in on maybe smaller aspects of that. So how do I code in? Python. The kids are going to get all these books on how to code. So we tried to figure out what that vocabulary is first and then put the keywords and right now, we're teaching them instead of just saying, how do I make my line of code come out slower? Which is the question that he asked me. And I was like, what do you mean? Start searching for clarity in their questions. Clarity and their communication. And once they have that clarity with what they're really trying to ask you, finding those keywords within that so literally dissecting every question that comes out of their mouth. It takes a really long time. And I'm sure Sean remembers those days of we sit there, we want to give the answer. It's like a five second question and move on. But it takes us, like, five minutes to help the students come up with that question that they want to ask us. So again, going back to keywords vocabulary words, and I always tell them, put in Python three in there. Because you have to remember that their search engines are not like our search engines. They're looking at the latest TikTok doggie craze or dance or whatever. They're looking up, and it's not going to be their top hit. Sean Tibor: Yeah. And I think the other thing that I would add to this is the content that we're indexing and the content that we're searching through was all written by other people. Right? And so it's not actually generated by Google most of the time. So when we search for it, it is trying to match up what we are in search intent, what we intend to search for with what someone actually wrote and put on a page. So one of the things that I always think about is, how would I have written this? Or how would someone have written this if they were writing the thing that I need? Right. So why is the sky blue? Is a great general purpose science question. Right? So if I'm a science educator and I want to appeal to the broadest number of people about why the sky is blue, I'm going to have literally why is the sky blue? Might be a question that you would ask about. Right. I would have that in there. Right. But if I was a scientist talking about complex atmospheric light conditions, I might talk about the specific wavelength of blue that is there and what wavelengths are scattered and how this works in the interactions of the molecules. So my language that I would be searching for if I wanted to find those types of paper might be more scientific in its intent or in its vocabulary that I choose to use. So choosing the words is a little bit of like a guessing game of guessing. Like, how would they have written about this? Right. So to your point about the how do I make the. Words come out slower in python. I don't think they probably would have written it that way, but they might have written it like print one character at a time on the terminal or in the reple. And that to me feels more like, well, we're using the print state, print keyword, we're using character, we're saying REPL. And it's probably going to get us to a article or blog post or an example. That's more like what I would be looking for. So one of the reasons why stack overflow does so well is because usually the questions that I want to ask when I Google are the same that someone has asked and had answered on stack overflow. So from an SEO perspective, it works really well. KellySchusterParedes: Yeah, 100%. And I'm not sending many kids to stack overflow. I'm going to tell you, remind me to tell you the true story of what happened to me yesterday on a class challenge. And again, another. This is an 8th grader who has spent with me for this is their third year with me. And so they are very good at Googling, which is impressive. But anyway, second thing going on your side of thinking of who wrote it, as a younger eleven year old, knowing what to search on and giving them the tips on what websites you know are good websites, seems to really be my second go to when we're teaching. And yes, we love real python. They only get a little bit of it free when it comes to certain things. We send them to real python, but we always send them to the same type of solid, small amount of word websites. Yeah, words are hard. They're hard for me to speak sometimes, too. You did that on purpose. Sean Tibor: Just a little bit. KellySchusterParedes: But we send it to the website like geeks for Geeks and things like that, where I know that they'll be able to find their answer faster because there's less documentation. I was also thinking about this of when I actually introduced documentation from python, and a lot of developers and programs will say, well, send them to documentation. This is where they would read it. You send a 1011 year old, so some documentation is not going to happen. The only documentation I send an eleven year old normally is to turtle documentation, which is the best documentation, I think, written out there. And it's easy. But yeah, send them to quality websites where they know they can find it. Sean Tibor: So I wanted to give an example of this because people may not believe us, especially if you've been printing for a while. Here is, I'm going to share my screen. Maybe I can do that. Let's see if I can do some screenshots on Zoom. Yeah, let's see. Maybe it'll work. No. Okay. I'm not going to do it because I need to have two monitors. Let me read for you the first couple of sentences of the documentation for the print function in the Python 310 documentation. Print. This is the description of what it does. Print objects to the text stream file, separated by sep and followed by end sep and file and flush, if present, must be given as keyword arguments. So if you've been coding for ten minutes, one of the first things that we're going to show you how to do is how to print stuff out to the reple. I'm not going to show you what a keyword argument is, or a separator or a text stream or any of that. That's way beyond. So when we think about the documentation, it's there for a very specific reason and it's there to be helpful for people who are really looking for a precise, specific definition with the language that helps us understand what's really going on. But it's written more for your intermediate or advanced developers in most cases, because those are the people who really want to look at the documentation and know what's happening. But if you just look for what does the print function do in Python? I Sean. I have that coding projects in Python book sitting on the shelf in the garage. It has a really great definition of print, which is when I want to put stuff, print stuff out of my program, I want to display text to the user. I use the print function to show it to them. That's understandable to a ten year old. But the separator part I don't think they're going to get right away. KellySchusterParedes: I tried to teach it this year and I was showing them the yellow box that pops up in Moon. I was like, look at this really good information. And they're like, object. I'm like, oh, we're going to learn about objects tomorrow, don't worry about that. Sean Tibor: Part of the research process is finding the right level of information for your understanding, because it's a lot easier to go from 10ft above the ground level of understanding to 15 foot than it is to go from ten to 100 or ten to a thousand. Right. So we want to make sure that the learning and the acquisition is gradual. Right. Oh, Michael Kennedy just joined in and said, I think this is a really much cleaner way of saying it is. Often people forget what it's like to be a beginner, and keeping that top of mind would help improve a lot of documents, articles and videos. I think that's absolutely spot on. Once you get past a certain point, it's really hard to remember what it was like to learn something for the first time. KellySchusterParedes: Absolutely. So I kind of wanted to throw this part and this goes and ties in with the story I want to tell you. But it's the whole point of while Google has all this information that we have online, we try to tell them this is not like a replacement for them thinking this is not where they go to and this often happens during class challenges. And teaching them how to solve class challenges. And reading the problem statement for literally what it's saying and not trying to overthink any complications, just trying to figure out literally how you're going to write it is one of the things that we teach more in the 8th grade is we have this huge problem. Like, we're going to give you this data from a source. How are we going to output this data into something that somebody wants to read? That's your problem. And so we were doing a class challenge, and I was like, typical. Here's a string of information. Let's go pull this text from it was Frederick Douglas because they're reading this book. Go pull this text from Frederick Douglas. And I want you to separate this long string. Let's just pretend that every comma is a sentence. Because back when he wrote his speech, it was like, no punctuation. So it was not a very good example to pick out. But I was like, there's one exclamation mark, one question mark, and everything else was commas. Let's just assume that all of these are commas. What do we need to do? And I let them sit there for a minute, and they're freaking out because there's a class challenge and they're getting a grade. And I was like, okay, let's dissect this. What do we need to do? And we talk through the vocabulary. And then about 510 minutes into it, when they were dissecting all the steps in English, a kid goes to me, I got it. I didn't use what you said. And I'm like, really? What did you think? He just printed the fifth and the 7th line. He comes up to me and shows me import re and did it in one line of code. I'm like, gosh darn it. Looking up regular expressions. But this was after two years of having he knew that he had to separate the punctuation. It's not an uncommon problem in all the books that you read. And he did it with regular expressions. And I was like, put it in the punctuation marks in a string and separated it out. And I was just like, that's brilliant. You get a bonus point. You'll get a bonus point. Sean Tibor: Great example of having a well defined problem and then finding a different path to a solution, right? So the good thing about research is that it doesn't always have to lead you to the same place. And in fact, it shouldn't if it's done well. There are probably answers that are more correct than others. But particularly when we get into programming and talking about how do we solve these problems, there should be multiple ways to get to the same destination. KellySchusterParedes: Do you have any other tips? What's your third tip? Sean Tibor: My third tip, to be honest, and this is really to limit a lot of outdated answers. Like, we move in a very fast moving sort of space when it comes to coding. And what is true in Python 310 was probably not true in Python Three Four. Right? And so the solutions that people have posted there are sometimes dated. So my favorite thing to use is the Search Tools box on Google where you can choose the time frame in which to search. So if I'm searching for something that I want to be relatively recent, I will limit my search to be the past year. And that way I know that I'm getting stuff that's relatively fresh and recent. And then if I see that it's too narrow again, this is that whole filtering idea where I'm filtering it down and filtering it down. This is filtering for recency. If I see that I've over filtered, then I might say, okay, give me something in the last two years or three years to be able to help. So that kind of hint seems to help filter out a lot of the stuff where it's like, oh, this is a stack overflow article from 2011. Right. Can't do much with that. KellySchusterParedes: That was going to be mine. So that was one of the things that they often go and and we were having this conversation. It's funny, we had a lot of conversations this year already. I'm talking about print statement versus print function and how the change has whenever you guys can tell me the exact year three point in Python Three, did it change? Sean Tibor: I think it was Python Three, just overall. And Michael can probably help us out on the chat with them. KellySchusterParedes: Michael, give us exact date, please. It was changed to a function, but students will often go in and they need to be cognizant of what works in the code that we're in now. So if they're trying to do something and case in point, they were trying to do a regular print statement without parentheses or something, and it doesn't work, right? It doesn't work in Moo. It comes out of the sale. And at that point, at that younger age, they don't really understand even really how to do it. So if they're looking into things and they need to look at the timestamp on it and when that resource was put out and that happens in history and it happens in English and math. If you're going into an old resource, unless you're talking about the Bill of Rights or something that's been historically documented, it's no point of going into something that's even two, three years old, especially in the technology world where everything's moving so fast. You need to stay as current as possible. So we talk about looking at that date and seeing if that's a reliable source of information to use. Sean Tibor: Yeah, and I think it's kind of to Daniel's point earlier around how do you know what you're looking at is valid? The recency of it is one thing, and Google ranks according to recencies as well. So as articles become older, they end up being much like they get pushed down in the rankings quite a bit, right. So when we start looking at date, that's one factor. The site that we're going to is another factor, the keyword. Sometimes I don't think students or researchers realize that when they put in a word, google will often use synonyms for that word if it can't find the exact matches. So sometimes I'll use an exact match to refine my search and say, no, I really do mean python parentheses thing, like python three compared to like a print statement, right. Or print function versus print statement. It might use synonyms for that. So that's where looking at what it actually highlights and says it found is useful when you're looking at am I finding the right things? And then how do I refine this further? The other thing I was going to add along that same line is getting students to look past the first result or even the first few results. And what do you look for to be able to know, oh, I'm going to look further until I find the right thing. Sometimes it's date, sometimes it's the site, sometimes it's the highlighted words that it found. But I'm usually looking at the third or fourth item in a list sometimes rather than the first page, the first thing and the first results. A lot of students don't even realize that there's a second page of results. KellySchusterParedes: I wish Google would get rid of that kind of like summary stuff on the top that ruined the life of education. I'm just saying it actually ruined the life of education of most adults too, as well. I don't know. It used to be what paid used to be the higher priority ones. Now it's just always there. Seriously, because we're going to wrap this up because my kids, I have to go get them from soccer. I wanted to just reiterate the fact that for me. When we talk about always teaching the kids how to Google with research and doing this in the computer science class. It kind of opens up the doors because you have to remember we have students that have never even used a computer before. Literally have never had a computer in 6th grade to kids that have been in math. Higher level and computer science classes. I don't know. Parents are putting them in second and third grade or they've built scratch accounts. So we have this huge range of learners in the classroom. And so by sending them to Google, we're allowing them to expand their knowledge as much and as far as they can go. And that for me, is like a benefit beyond belief when I can say, I don't know, go Google that, or what do you think now? Go learn about regular expression, go about the real library. It's just amazing things. So it allows them to stumble on new ways of doing things. New libraries out there new code and also just helps me get a better gist of what's going on. Sean Tibor: Yeah. I think my final thought with this and to build on what you're saying there is that researching and searching is a skill. Right. It is something that you can practice and you can get better at and that you can refine and over time will become more and more valuable to you, the better at it that you are. But just like any other skill, you need to have an honest assessment of how am I doing? Am I getting this skill? Do I understand it? What am I doing to practice the skill so that I get better at it? And how do I know that I'm achieving proficiency? Right? And because search is something that we do all the time, we don't necessarily think about those things. We don't make that thinking explicit. We tend to do it well. KellySchusterParedes: Sorry, go ahead. Sean Tibor: That's because you're a teacher. Right. But I think most of the students don't really think about this. It's the same reason why they're searching with full questions all the time, which sometimes really works well and sometimes doesn't. But thinking about how you're practicing the skill and how you're getting better at it is what can make you more and more effective. And I think it really is one of the key skills of a 21st century learner. Not specific to Google, but the ability to research and learn new information is a valuable skill. And I think the joke, I think I saw it on a program or humor subreddit was a guy who put on his resume, I'm really good at googling things and they're like, yeah, we have an interview with him on Monday. Right. KellySchusterParedes: That's funny. No, I think it is a skill. And actually, I've seen an improvement in my research skills as well. Just from picking up coding, going into that whole mindset and being able to find things quicker. I still get stuck. I do get down the rabbit hole and then you do get into like a whole another time boxing. Sean Tibor: Time boxing. That's what you need. Set a timer. It's like pomodoro, but for research. Like you set a timer to stop yourself from going too far. KellySchusterParedes: There you go. Daniel, instead of teaching having the what did you say before? You said something. I forget where. You have another programming tool you should do a time boxing tool for research. Have you been the timer on it? Sean Tibor: There you go. I did want to follow up and say thanks to Michael Kennedy. He pointed out that the change actually happened from Python Two to Python Three, where print became a function rather than a statement. And it was one of the big changes that probably made a lot of people hate Python Three until they found out about F strings. KellySchusterParedes: Python Three. Sean Tibor: Exactly. No turning back now. KellySchusterParedes: No way. Sean Tibor: Alright, so I think we're pretty much done for our topic today, because I know you have to run and I have to get back to being a dad. But I do want to thank Daniel and Michael for joining us in the chat and anybody else who's been lurking out there. My daughter's been watching the whole time. She's so excited that we're on YouTube. It's like I'm a celebrity now. KellySchusterParedes: You're always a celebrity. You're the dad. Sean Tibor: Yeah, but now I'm a YouTube dad. Even better. All right, so, Kelly, we are coming up on the 100th episode. More stuff to come on that. We hope you can join us for that. It should be, I think, next week, but I want to make sure we have everything locked down before we publish the date. KellySchusterParedes: Wednesday. Wednesday it's locked down. I sent out the invites. Sean Tibor: All right, we're committed. So you've heard it here. First. Wednesday at 06:00 P.m. Eastern Time, we'll be doing our 100,000 episode celebration. We're going to have some friends joining from around the world. We're very excited about it. The people that we've met have been what makes this show so great to us. And so we want to take a chance to all come together and just celebrate being a part of a little mini community of people who teach Python and computer science. KellySchusterParedes: Yup. Hopefully get some educators to show up. This is a good time for them, hopefully. And that's kind of why we picked 06:00 P.m. As well. Sean Tibor: Yep. So look forward to that. If you want to learn more and keep track of what's going on, we're at Teaching Python on Twitter. You can also reach out to us through our website at Teaching Python FM. Any sorts of comments to be shared on the air during episode 100, we'd be happy to take those. And I think that does it for tonight. KellySchusterParedes: Don't forget us on LinkedIn. I'm almost 100 people. Sean Tibor: Nice. That's right. That's a good thanks for the reminder. You've been putting a lot of work into our LinkedIn community as well, and having a page there where people can follow us and keep appraised of what's happening and connect with others. So look for that on LinkedIn. Just search for Teaching Python and you should be able to find it right there on the search box. KellySchusterParedes: Cool. And that's it. Sean Tibor: Alright, so I guess for teaching python, this is Sean. KellySchusterParedes: This is Kelly signing off.