Sean Tibor: Hello, and welcome to teaching Python. This is episode 105, and it's all about PyCon and education. My name is Sean Tibor. I'm a coder who teaches. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: My name is Kelly Schuster Perez, and I'm a teacher who codes. Sean Tibor: Kelly, we're going to try to do a short episode. I don't even know if we're capable of doing that. How do we do, like a ten minute episode? Did we just stop talking? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: We stopped talking. That right. Well, we did do the wins and fails to ourselves, so you guys are saved from that. We did just do like a 30 minutes, 20 minutes sell out on ourselves to try to get to reflections, and that's always nice. And so I feel like we'll save everyone because we had a lot of fails this week. So Sean and I worked through some of them. Lots of imposter syndrome for me, ultimately. Sean Tibor: Turned into a win by the end. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yes, we're getting there. Sean Tibor: As long as it's a happy ending. That's the main thing, right? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Soon to be soon to be nice. Sean Tibor: Well, what we want to do is just talk a little bit about PyCon and education and specifically the education summit in a little bit more detail. I know we mentioned on episode 104 in the livestream that Kelly and I have been asked to help organize the education summit, and so we wanted to get the word out a little bit about what it is, how it works, how to participate, and kind of how amazing it is. Kelly, I think you and I went to our first education day. I don't know if it was a summit per se, but it was an education day at PyCon 2019 here in the US. And I remember that was like I think that was day one of our very first PyCon. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I didn't even know what I was doing. You were dragging me around, and I was just sitting there going, oh, wow, I'm here. Sean Tibor: Well, it was amazing because I think we're kind of, like, both looking around. That was in Cleveland. We're looking around going, wow, there's so many PyCon people here, right? How are we going to find our people? And it was pretty cool to go to the education summit, and they all arrived. They were all there. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, we met a lot of great people. I don't even want to go into naming people because I don't want to miss anybody. But we met I remember the first time we called after the summit, after the educational part, we called like Birds of the feather. You did a bird of a feather. And I think there were like 30 or 40 people there, all who teach Python. And it was like, wow, we're not alone. This is cool. Yeah. Sean Tibor: I think when I made that, I think I said to you, well, if no one shows up, at least we can sit here and drink coffee. And people just kept coming in and it was the most beautiful thing about just how engaged and passionate the PyCon community is around learning and education. And I think we all view it as a way to increase the inclusiveness of our community is through education and through teaching. Whether that's direct instruction or through writing a book or having a blog or creating content, anything that helps welcome people into our community is ultimately a good thing. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100%. And it's funny, I was sitting there looking at the 2022 and it's going back and we're talking about looking for people from colleges and universities and schools, but I remember like, last year we had a lot of K Twelve and a few college and universities, which just blew my mind. And of course we're representing the middle school there and looking for more people in the middle school. We met Dottie who was bringing it into their, I think, middle High, and it's just growing. So it's like now our schools can be from K to plus plus. Sean Tibor: I mean, surprisingly few kindergarten PyCon teachers out there. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Come on, that's a goal for me. It's a goal. Sean Tibor: They have to be able to write the words before they can do text based coding. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I don't know, we could full on Get Edgy blocks and Python blocks. Sean Tibor: See, we could explore that, right? It could be interesting. So I guess to just talk about logistics of the day. So Python Education Summit this year will be in Salt Lake City on April 20, 2023. It's a full day event, and I wish I could say we had a schedule prepared, but this is all happening right now. And that's one of the exciting things about this opportunity, is that there's room for everyone to help organize and contribute and participate in putting together this day so that everyone can get something amazing out of it. So right now we know that there's a date, there is a call for proposals that we have to review and approve so that it can get posted publicly, but then we'll have a call for proposals for talks. And one of the pieces of feedback that we got in the past was trying to get more opportunities for collaboration and cooperation of all the attendees. So we're going to be looking for ways to include that in the schedule as well. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, and I think last year was a really good starter with sort of a circle time, hands on opportunity. Katney brought in a whole bunch of boards and was helping a lot of educators at the end trying to get into Circuit Pie. But it's that whole idea of there's a variety of the talks, the lightning talks, the mini sprints. Really hoping to get some more mini sprints in there because that was really cool. Like, what are you doing with Request? Or what are you doing with Flask? Or what are you doing with Circuit Pie? Or what are you doing period? Would be cool. Just to get and really get your hands on it. Because I think as an educator, we never have enough time to just practice. We kind of get stuck in what we're doing because it's easy and we don't have any time to plan or we have a plan, and we only have time to plan one thing. So that would be really cool. Yeah. Sean Tibor: And I think the other thing that I really enjoyed last year, too, is just overhearing the conversations among people who really had such great and different experiences, right. They could say like, oh, well, I've been teaching this first because I think it's a great way to access this kind of learning moment. And another person would say, Well, I actually start in the opposite direction from over here, and I approach it this way. And everyone's knowledgeable, they're passionate about it. But also people who are brand new to this are asking phenomenal questions, too, like, well, why do you do it that way and not this way? And those sorts of conversations that we don't get the opportunity to have potentially in our day to day school lives or our teaching lives happen at PyCon and happen at the Education Summit because you've got a group of people that are really passionate about how people learn to code and how they learn to code in Python. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. And I guess we shouldn't just say schools because I'm thinking I was just getting the thought that there are a lot of educators out there who are doing this in neighborhood clubs. Not really kickstarters, but startups where they're trying to reach out to maybe underrepresentative minorities or whatnot, or just even just starting almost like a dojo club kind of idea. So those people are all amazing educators really trying to push Python, and we don't want to leave those people out either. Sean Tibor: No, I mean, that's the other great thing is it's just this huge inclusive spectrum of people teaching others in so many different ways, whether teaching Sean, standing in front of a classroom and demonstrating something or giving a lecture to writing a book or a blog post, having a video series. Neighborhood community clinics, we've got robotics camps, after school programs, adult learners, kid learners. I'm sure that there is someone out there right now who is in a retirement community teaching older people how to code in Python. There's someone out there. Wouldn't that be amazing? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That just made me think of I was watching a video yesterday from Coursera when they were meeting with Barbara Oakley andrew, dr. Andrew. I don't know how to pronounce his new Ng. I don't know how to pronounce that. And Dr. Chuck, who teaches Python for everybody. This is literally Python for everybody. So python educators for everybody. Sean Tibor: Yeah. So if you want to participate, we are working on more details about how to participate remotely as well. So one of the things that's important to us is the ability to include people that are not able to attend in person, so we're working on some details for that. There's also the Edgy SIG, which has been set up for PyCon through the Python Software Foundation to get more educators to come together in the special interest group. So we're going to try to tie that in. We have big, ambitious plans. I'm not sure we're going to get to all of it, but if we even get to most of it, we'll be doing pretty well. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. And I'm looking forward to just seeing some of the proposals that might be coming in, and it's going to be great. I just can't wait. Sean Tibor: Yeah. So here's the official call. If you would like to help organize the Education Summit, whether you are attending inperson or at home or from the beach or a mountaintop somewhere, reach out to us through the show. Contact us through our website, Teaching Python FM or on Twitter at teaching python. Let us know that you're interested. We're going to be having meetings very soon to help organize this. And even if you're listening to this a month from now, jump in, ask if you can participate. There's always something to do, always something to contribute. We'd love to have as many people included in this as possible. And if we get to a point where it becomes a wonderful problem where there's too many people to manage in one meeting, we'll start breaking up into smaller groups and working on different aspects of it. That'd be a great problem to have. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I can't even imagine that'd be so amazing if we had so many people and we actually filled in the venue, which is in the same place as last year, if you were there. So I'm really excited. I was just trying to Google how many days, because I have a countdown, countdown, countdown. How many days? Sean Tibor: I think we're we're right around three months away. So it's like, maybe 90 or 100 days. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. So we'll stay tuned for more information about it. Yeah. Sean Tibor: So looking forward to it. Hopefully we'll see all of you either there in person or there online. Let's bring out the community and see what we can do together. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely excited. Sean Tibor: All right, so we'll get that. Ten minutes and 24 seconds. We just missed it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Just missed it. Sean Tibor: All right, so for Teaching Python, this. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Is Sean and this is Kelly. Okay, signing off. You.