Sean Tibor: Hello, and welcome to teaching Python. This is episode 131, and today we're going to delve into lightning talks. My name is Shawn. My name's Sean Tiver. I'm a coder who teaches. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And my name's Kelly Shuster parades. And I'm a teacher who codes. You're too funny. Sean Tibor: Literally. Right before we started, Kelly told me I need to stop using the word delve because it irritates her. So, of course, I tried to work it right into the title. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I love it. Never a dull moment with you. Sean Tibor: No, I mean, honestly, like, it's with us working in two different places all the time and just keeping up with the podcast and not getting to spend as much time together as we used to. It's fun to poke the bear just a little bit and have some fun with you. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I drank then, same as you. I just drank this soda and I was like. And I drink Lacroix. Just kidding, silly. And I'm drinking water tonight. Sean Tibor: I know, right? Like, we haven't even hit the good stuff yet. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: All right. I'm so excited to be back and, uh, get done. And we have education summit done. I feel like done a little bit. Sean Tibor: And, yeah, you've really taken the. The lion's share of all the prep work and getting it ready and finding the speaker topics and reviewing everything. I'm really thrilled with all the way it's come together. And so now I have to step it up and be present for the actual day itself and pitch in my fair share. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. And we have some of the lightning talks scheduled already, too. Sean Tibor: Nice. Let's talk about this. This is the topic of the day for us because as this is now Pycon season, like, we're right there, we're ready to go. This was something that I didn't really know about or wasn't really aware of lightning talks before we went to our first Pycon way back in 2019, I think it was in Cleveland. And so a lightning talk, just to define it for everyone, is a short five minute talk by a presenter. And usually you sign up for it the day that you're giving it, maybe even an hour before you're giving it, or 20 minutes. So it's incredibly impromptu. It is. The expectations for production value are very low, but yet I've seen some of the most amazing ideas come from lightning talks at Pycon and at other venues. And of course, we're going to be doing them at the education summit. But you had this brilliant idea of, why not bring those into the classroom. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100% and you know what? We've done them. And I think every teacher is going to be like, oh, yeah, I do. Lightning talks in some way, shape, form. It happens. And we're going to talk about those later on in the show. But I was like, we can just call them lightning talks in class, and we could just use the terminology that's out there in the professional world. And having seen it in schedule for Pycon and Pycon ed, it was just like, so like, oh, yes, lightning talks. Yeah. Sean Tibor: So we've used these, especially around projects, I think are a really great opportunity. But you can also use this to help encapsulate research. You can use it to help students communicate ideas. You can use it even just to get people more comfortable with public speaking, which is pretty amazing, too. And so the topic sometimes matters a ton, and other times it doesn't matter at all. It's the format that drives a lot of this excitement and enthusiasm that I really like 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And I think going back just to the summit, for the Ed summits particularly, I think it's just like this great opportunity because we only have time for five extended talks, and those are short talks as it is, but we can probably add in a couple more. Five, eight, lightning talks even more. And that's just this really great opportunity to get some quick, efficient knowledge out there. Here, this is who I am. Here's what I do, here's my thoughts, and thank you very much. And it's exciting times. I like the lightning talks. Sean Tibor: Yeah. It's really become one of my favorite things to look forward to at Pycon. I love it at the education summit because it's even more relevant. Right. It's something that I don't get to hear other teachers, other educators talk about their ideas or something that they're passionate about on an everyday basis. So especially not in the realm of computer science or python. It's phenomenal, and I can't say enough. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Good things about it 100%. So I guess we started talking about the topic. We defined the purpose of lightning talks, talk about education summit, a couple of other benefits. What I like about lightning talks and Ed Summit is just this networking ability. When you get up on a stage for five minutes and you say something that's pretty cool or interesting, you have this person in the audience going, I'm going to talk to that person, or I know that person's name, and, oh, I feel the same way. And you get this engagement, this networking ability, you don't really know who you're. What is it birds of the feathers. You don't know who those people are right away. And these lightning talks really help with that. Sean Tibor: I agree. So let's talk a little bit about the lightning talk itself and what makes it a lightning talk. So we talked a little bit about the time constraint. Right. It can only be five minutes. And, of course, like anything else, it's arbitrary. You could make it seven minutes. You could make it three minutes, whatever you want. But five minutes seems to work really well. The second thing that's critical is that it should be one idea for five minutes. You don't have time to communicate more than one idea. So you're trying to think a lot about, what am I trying to share with that idea? And then the third thing is that you are not thinking about what the audience wants to hear during a lightning talk. You have basically that day or that hour to prepare it. You're not doing anything to try to tailor that message to the audience. This is really just about something that you are personally passionate about, interested about, excited to share with everyone, and that enthusiasm becomes infectious, and it gets people to engage with you. So I've always thought of lightning talks as the ultimate example of, if you can just reach one person in the audience and have them go, wow, that's cool. Because they think it's cool and you think it's cool, then you make that connection afterwards. That's the perfect lightning talk. You don't need to win over the entire crowd. You could have half of them checking their email or writing code or whatever. It doesn't matter. But if you get one of them going, that's awesome, and I want to talk to Kelly about it afterwards. You've won the lightning talk. Right? That's amazing. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And let's face it, they're teachers, right? So they're all on something else, writing notes, getting on their phones, grading, possibly. So, yeah, they're just great fun. Yeah. I don't know what else you can say about them. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I think that. Let's talk about how you would do this in the classroom, though. What are some of the. One of the benefits there? So as we bring this idea from the conference venue, where everyone's there and they're immersed in the conference and they're excited about it into the classroom, what have you or how have you brought that in? Like, how do you set the context for that first? When do you come in and say, today's the day for lightning talks? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So I actually use these a lot, and I use them for different things. So I used to use it a lot. During, when I taught legos, we actually had the class of teaching legos, and we had to do the next big thing. And it was almost like the elevator pitch. And that was the original assignment that you have five minutes. You have to pitch your robot, and you have to go in there and try to win the bid for the million or $2 million from your. From the investors. And so the kids had to go in there and really get the information, the key points of this robot that they built, why it's the next best thing, and why we should be giving our money to invest in it. So, in theory, that was a lightning talk. It was a five minute, very focused. It was precise. It was. It was showing their understanding of the bot, and it just, like, really got to the point. So I've used it for that. I use it a lot for peer sessions and peer review sessions. Encoding, I like to call it lightning talks and peer reviews. But they've got five minutes to level up. I always tell them, level up. Don't pick your friends, because your friends think the same as you. So you have five minutes to talk about your problem, talk about your idea, go through where you want to go with an app or where you want to go with this code, and just get in there and try to figure out the most that you can in five minutes. So, in theory, a lightning talk, right? Sean Tibor: Yeah. And what I really like about this is it's not just the, like, how to say this. It's not just what they're presenting. It's the fact that it makes it really accessible for kids. So if you told them they had to give a 15 minutes presentation on something, and they had three weeks to prepare for it, the amount of stress and anxiety that just, like, seeps from their pores while they're doing this or as they're prepping for it, you can just watch them, like, crushing themselves under their own stress about this presentation they have to do. They built it up so big in their mind, and then what happens is you do this lightning talk, and it's. We're gonna do lightning talks, and it's gonna. You're gonna go sometime today, it's gonna be five minutes. You just have to present your one idea or your one question or your thought process for what you want to build, and suddenly that becomes achievable. That is something they can do without having to have all that stress and anxiety and worry about it. And that helps them get better the next time they have to present or do a bigger one or whatever. They just get more and more comfortable with that process. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. And what I love sometimes, because it's kind of boring just sitting there watching one student, and everybody watches. So I pair up and I split the class. It's just pairs and five minutes, one person's saying it to their partner and then they rotate and they, the next person will say it back to their partner. So I can hear all of them at the same time and I can kind of grade while I'm listening. And you can do that five or six times. And then they become more expertised in their lightning talk because they have a practice opportunity. Sean Tibor: Nice. Nice. I feel like the next evolution of this is really like bringing in literal soapboxes and setting one up in each corner of the room and having them compete with each other in the marketplace of ideas. I like this idea a lot. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I think that would be fun. I think we might get in trouble. Health and safety. They can't climb up on boxes or something. Sean Tibor: Little tiny boxes. Little, little boxes. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So another way that I use this, and I use this a lot with the 8th graders because they, after lunch, just zone out. So I did this just recently, to be honest, with dictionaries, and I found seven or eight really short dictionary videos. And they, we somehow missed teaching dictionaries to this grade. I don't know what happened. So we had to teach dictionaries before we go on to request so they could understand JSon and whatever, the whole python. Sean Tibor: How did you miss that? They're like, wait, what are these curly brace things? Like, what are the. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: We might have taught them. And then they just say, we didn't learn to learned it. And my teaching partner, and she's like, no, no, we might not have taught it. So anyways, we did this. And I said, okay, we're only spending two days on dictionaries. This is something you should have known in 7th grade. We're moving on out all these nice little videos, three minutes, four minutes in length. And I leveled up the videos, depending on the students, because our kids go from like zero to hero in coding. It's there. There are kids, you know, that are going to top out and overcode me in a couple years. So anyways, I said, okay, you have 20 minutes. You're going to watch the video, and you need to teach the class in a three minute, four minute presentation on whatever you learned in dictionaries. So they took a five to 20 minutes presentation and they shrink it down and explain what they learned. And so everyone gets a little bit of the same information. Some get a little bit more, and it really helps them to try to piecemeal what they just learned. So it's like these introduction of new topics. It really works well, and it engages the students and gets them into, like, deeper exploration of the idea. Sean Tibor: Do you ever have a problem with rambling once they get going? Like, how do you help them focus or organize their thoughts? Do you give them any sort of structure before they go to, say, answer these questions or follow this format or anything that helps them keep that focus and the ability to communicate the one idea? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, with me as a leader, rambling, I ramble a lot. So on the new topics, no. We do set a timer so that we can get through. But on the student presentations, they have a checklist or a rubric, and they have to cover this set amount of information. So normally what the kids do is for a rubric or checklist, they'll put an information on each slide for that checkpoint. And so that helps them to organize. It just depends on the lightning talk that we're giving. Sean Tibor: All right, so then that leads me to the next question. Slides or no slides with code, I. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Think it's nicer for kids. They have something to talk about, and when they point to the code, it's more visible for the other students. I think with lightning talks in like professionally, I think visuals without a lot of information work better. Something that can click really quick. But sometimes slides get in your way. But I do think they help paint a picture. Sean Tibor: I agree with that. I'm thinking about using this in a professional context. And the thought that always comes to mind is as soon as you tell people in a corporate environment that they can use slides again, you have some of that stress and anxiety because then they want to over prepare. But they also always err on the side of putting too much information on the screen and then trying to cram their way through it. And I've found that sometimes it's better not to have slides and just say, you should write bullet points or index cards or something like that, that let you cover your thoughts and keep yourself organized verbally without getting caught up in the PowerPoint hell that we often find ourselves trapped in. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100%. And that's a whole nother topic that I would love to go down, but not going to go there, but we put code snippets, and I like to keep the code snippets three to five lines because they're really focusing on that small information. So, for example, when they're introducing new topics, they're talking about what is a dictionary, or how do you loop through a dictionary? Or how do you use some methods on a dictionary? And so each, each little video snippet has a primary focus, so they're really getting deep into that. The other reason why, the other way that I've used lightning talks in the class is like peer teaching, again, goes with the same topics. But, for example, we just did request, they'll come up and they'll explain their code, and I'll say, okay, explain your code where you imported the module and you had to go get the URL. And so they'll come up and just explain and they'll peer teach where they did it in their code. And although it's not really like a lightning talk, it's even shorter. It's like a two minute talk. So you're making sure that you're getting the kids up there and understanding the concept. Sean Tibor: Yeah. And I think this is also an important point, too, which is you're not looking for who is the most eloquent presenter who can speak their thoughts in the most concise and clear way. You're looking for evidence of understanding and evidence of enthusiasm, too. Right? Like, where's that passion that they have? The understanding is what we measure as teachers. The enthusiasm is just the icing on the cake. It's like, wow, that was great. It's fun for me, too. So that's where I think when you're doing this, you have to listen really carefully because it, one, it goes by really fast. But two, especially in this informal, ad hoc, impromptu sort of presentation style, the quality of speech sometimes masks the quality of understanding. So you have to listen carefully for that and look for those nuggets of information that says, okay, this person really gets it, even if they're not necessarily able to explain it as well as they'd like. Off the cuff, 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You know what? And I remember you did some lightning talks a lot in the classroom. And I remember a certain specific one with the mask you had. Was it a 6th grader with the circuit python? So you did it with. How did they create cool projects? Sean Tibor: So that was part of our project evaluation, was that they had to do a five minute demo of the project that they created, and that resulted with, in one case, with me sitting in front of the classroom with this gel pack across my eyes, one of those eye masks that has gel beads in it. And the kid had attached like a circuit playground to it, and they were going to use the temperature sensor on the circuit playground to measure stress levels and relaxation for their mom. Because her, her mom was, like, super stressed out, which was the best part of the presentation at all, was just the empathy that she had there for her mother and all that she was going through. It was amazing to me how into it they got because I was into it as the teacher. They were like, okay, who can demo this for me? I'll come up there and I'll put on the eye mask and be the guinea pig for you. And as soon as I did that, and as soon as I committed to the lightning talk with them, they were into it, and they kept going with it. They were really excited about it 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And you know what I really like, and this is selfish from a teacher point of view, I hate presentations, typically, and I can bang out 23 kids, and I think public school teachers are probably squirming, saying, we have 35, 23, 25 lightning talks in two days. We have long block periods, so we just like, quick, quick, quick, get them done. And I don't have to take a week to do the presentations. And it really works. And this is, these are skills, the soft skills or the skills that really aren't with computer science, particularly in my curriculum, but these skills are public speaking, critical thinking, explaining. I know that is something difficult sometimes. And how do we explain it succinctly and how do we explain it clearly? These are skills that you just can't do enough. I still need help. You still need to practice it. You can, can never get enough of those. Sean Tibor: So I would also add just the ability to think on your feet and formulate the thoughts and formulate what you're trying to say without a lot of preparation, without a lot of rehearsal. And the first couple of times you do this, it's going to be terrible, right? Like, it's not going to be good. You're going to ramble. It's going to go over time, but you get better at it as you practice it, as you do it more. And I think I always tell teacher friends of mine that ask me, like, how's it going in the real world? I'm like, first of all, school is the real world. Don't let anyone tell you differently. Secondly, this is going back to a place that I'm very familiar with and very comfortable with. I started my life in the corporate world. I'm back in the corporate world. But what's different this time is that all of the practice that I had teaching and presenting and clearly communicating ideas and doing things like lightning talks, where a student would ask you a question and you'd have to present for five minutes unprepared on that topic to be able to help them understand it. That was incredibly valuable for the corporate world now. And I had one of my junior engineers say, sean, you're able to clearly articulate things, and it always sounds like you know what you're talking about. I'm like, well, the secret is to always say it with confidence, even if you have no idea what you're talking about, to say it with confidence. And she's like, I don't. I'm not sure how that works. Look, give me any topic you want and I will speak for five minutes on it. It will sound good even if it's completely inaccurate, made up, and there's no evidence to support it whatsoever. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Like chaat chapt. No, I'm just kidding. Sean Tibor: Kind of like chat chibutee. Like, she had me do a chat GPT hallucination. Right? So she had me present on the environmental impact of ketchup. And I spoke for five minutes about the catch apocalypse and how the vinegar in ketchup is acidic and how it, like, can pollute the environment, and this can cause a change in the ph balance of our streams, lakes and rivers. That became sort of an infamous moment where they realized that anybody can say anything as long as it sounds confident people are going to believe it. What's important here with the lightning talks is that it's a skill that you can practice. When you pair that with actually knowing what you're talking about and using facts and logic and reason instead of making up stuff about ketchup and vinegar and ph balances, it can be remarkably effective at persuading people, at informing people, at informing yourself, because it helps you formulate those thoughts in a really succinct way. So I I love these lightning talks because they're such a great building block towards becoming a better public speaker and becoming a better thinker in general, 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And since we've already segued there other things about on the professional world besides like you a better public speaker, anything else that you would use it for? Sean Tibor: We use them for communications all the time. How to share information across the team and build relationships and community. Especially since my team is fully remote. We were all working from home, working from the office, all around the world. It's a way for us to be really connected as a team by doing lightning talks like this. Right now, we're doing more of this longer form. Explain how I did it concept where it's like half an hour to 45 minutes. But we've also done these lightning talks on a regular basis for each person, person to share. Hey, I want to show you all something that I discovered, or I found this really cool thing on the platform, or I just learned about this new thing in python. I don't know if you know about this, but let me show it to you. So it means that everybody gets the chance to meet with everyone else. Everyone learns something new that they didn't already. No one has to prepare for days or weeks to be able to put together a presentation. People don't stress about it, but yet here we have this sense of community where now you start to get a better sense of what everyone's working on, right. How they think about things. You learn interesting new tidbits of information along there. And to be honest, that's some of the stuff that I missed the most about teaching was when the students would discover stuff that I didn't know and shared it. It was the coolest thing ever. How do I get that now? By doing these lightning talks with the engineers, and they show these things that they're working on that I haven't even touched yet because they're working on something new and interesting. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I can imagine. I know a lot of educators are probably going, oh, I wish our faculty meetings were that way. And can you imagine? I love those standing meeting ideas. But you come in and every on a faculty meeting, you have, you know, two to five teachers just giving a lightning talk of what's going on in their classroom. Here's what I learned, or here's what a student did, or here's a bright and sunny moment. I think people might actually like going to faculty meetings if that was the case. Just getting to share a little bit of bright idea about what happened, that would be a cool, cool concept. Here's what I learned on. Here's a trick that I learned to work with this grade level because they're really getting squirrely. Sean Tibor: So here's how I would do that if I wanted to implement that program. Here's how I would do it. I'm shamelessly borrowing from the moth program. I don't know if you've ever heard it. It's a podcast show, and it focuses on storytelling. They have live performances. So long before it was a podcast, it was a live performance show show, and it's been on public radio for years. And some of those most interesting, beautiful stories get told there, but they don't let you just jump up on stage and start to tell a story. They have workshops and they have training on how to properly tell a story. How do you open? How does the middle go? How do you practice it? How do you close it out? All of those things about the craft of telling a story. I would shamelessly steal that model and set up. We're going to start doing lightning talks. But in order to give a lightning talk, you have to come to my workshop first. I'm going to give you a workshop on how to do a lightning talk, how to practice it, how to prepare it. Like in the ten minutes you have before you're ready. But this way, you can cover what makes a good lightning talk. What are the rules for it? Are you allowed to interrupt and ask questions? No. All of those things that make it a really good lightning talk. Then I'd probably introduce it as either a portion of another meeting. Like, we have these three people lined up for lightning talks today at the end of the faculty meeting, or do it as a lunchtime activity. Like, hey, we're going to do a lunchtime lightning talks round every other Friday and have people come in and so you could have one Friday be the workshop and the other Friday be the actual lightning talks and come up with a way to enforce the rules of it. Timer for five minutes. Right? What's your idea? You have to write it down and put it on a board somewhere so that you know you're committing to the idea and you can't just come up and ramble. Those sorts of things, I think get you to that place that you're talking about, Kelly, where it's. And now that we've done this, here's the benefit of it. I get to learn something cool from each teacher that's out there. I get a better quality lightning talk, and I get that person to person connection that we're craving, especially in a faculty setting where we're all so busy and we don't know what's going on in everyone else's classroom. You get that brief glimpse of that's something cool that person's doing, and I want to talk to them about it later. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So I just googled because you just went. So I'm going to go, I found the tips and we'll put it in our show notes. But be forewarned. So moss stories are told and not ready. So that's one of the tips. Have some stakes. What do you stand to gain or lose? And why is it what happens in the story so important to you? So if you can't answer that, it's not worth a story. Sean Tibor: Right. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: They say start in the action, have a great first line that sets up the stakes. So I was thinking about climbing this mountain. That's really good. Know your story well enough so you can have fun. So you actually have to know what you're talking about and what not to do. Steer clear of meandering endings. That's like me, meander sometimes, because you get lost in that. You're like, oh, yeah, there I was there. No stand up routines. They love funny people. But funny people tell funny stories. No rants, no essays, no fake accents. So I thought it was pretty cool. Sean Tibor: Yeah, it's really good. And a lot of the stories that are there are remarkable in so many ways. I've heard a story about the first successful hand transplant, which happened right down the street from where I went to college at the University of Pittsburgh Medical center. And it was in the middle of a blizzard in January, I think. And the hand surgeon had to try to get there to the hospital, to perform this transplant. And his story of the odyssey that he undertook to get there was fascinating. I heard a story from someone who was inside the Fukushima nuclear reactor when the earthquake happened, before the tsunami. But during the earthquake, he was inside the reactor doing maintenance with a team. Right? What struck me about each of those is this idea of. It was clear, it was relatable. It was something that hooked my attention. And so I think all of those things relate to a lightning talk also. And so as we take those ideas of storytelling, the format isn't necessarily a story in a lightning talk, but a lot of the same ideas really apply where you want to be engaging, you want to be clear, yet you want to be brief and get out of there. That's going to make you really successful with the lightning talks. And that's something that you can also teach. I promise you, any student, in five minutes, by demonstrating and role playing the way that you give a lightning talk, they will pick it up very quickly. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I love that. Well, now I'm scared. I was going to practice a lightning talk, but look, it's 30 minutes. Sean Tibor: We should demo a lightning talk. I think that's a really good one. I think you can do this. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Okay. I don't know. I actually wrote this one, so it's probably not a good story. But I have to wait till 31, so we just time it out. I don't even know. I've never even practiced. I just wrote it down like an idea real quick. So, anyways. Ready? Here I go. So I wanna share today, like, the idea of embracing our silly side. So I teach 6th grade, and whenever I get a new group, of students, I don't think they ever get to see my serious, mean 8th grade teacher side. And that's because as a 6th grader, middle school can be completely daunting. It is scary. Subjects like coding brings tears to their eyes. I always joke around that I'm going to have at least one 6th grader probably cry by the end of the nine weeks. And I really try not to make them cry, but it always happens. But at this age, like, students are just starting to understand their abilities and they're faced with anxiety. They have a lot of new challenges. So using humor and energy, we can really help use those traits and those that fun side to make coding more approachable and more exciting. So in my class, I have a vestiboard, thanks to Sean, and I have the ability to put quotes on this vestiboard. And one of my favorite things to do is to change the vestiboard every morning during six period and turn it to a dad joke. And so the dad jokes take a little bit of critical thinking because the kids don't really get the dad jokes right away, but they're these little tidbits where they go, oh, and you can see the humor passing by as they slowly get the dad joke one by one. And it's quite cute. Another thing I really love to do is to show like these short clips or funnies, because I feel that the humor, it really, it opens these pathways, this engagement, this curiosity, this less stress. And what we really want to hone in with our coders is that creative side, that critical thinking. With anxiety, they just fear about the grade. With humor, they embrace the challenges. So let's start with the benefit again. So science tells us that laughter, besides being the best medicine, can actually reduce, like release endorphins. And with endorphins, reduce stress and actually improve our problem solving abilities. So when we talk about coding the abstract side, we really need to have endorphins, happiness and problem solving. So we bring that in. Just a couple of other things that I like to do to bring the funny side. And this is embarrassing, but I do this thing. After foreign range, we tab over, so silly kinesthetic moves, some things that make them remember that after a colon, we tab over gives a little joke to us. It's our inside humor. Play some cahoots, do some gamification, anything that's interactive and can just release the tension. Making coding fun isn't about just keeping kids entertained. It's about effective learning. So all these benefits of reducing the stress and having fun and releasing these endorphins actually help our brain work better when students are relaxed. When students are engaged, their ability to absorb and apply these new concepts, it just skyrockets out of this world. And it also fosters this safe learning environment where I see that mistakes and silliness are a part of the learning and it's not about the failures. So use energetic activities. Incorporate games. To sum it up, you know, when you're teaching kids, and maybe even humans, adults try to engage in silly, energetic, fun, effective ways and set them up with a mindset that challenges our opportunities. That can be fun. And I encourage you to try one silly activity in your next lesson and observe just how it changes the energy of your class. That was not five minutes. Sean Tibor: That's really good. That's really good. Fast, let's break that down a little bit. So what I really liked about this, and this is why I think it works as an effective lightning talk. It was one idea and it was about the value of humor in a middle school classroom as an effective learning tool. Not as an entertainment tool, but as an effective learning tool, something that helps make learning better. And then you provided an example of the problem. What problem is this? Trying to solve? And you gave that great comparison of like 8th graders versus 6th graders and the stress levels that kids feel in middle school and how like, they get all tense and they can't learn effectively because of this pressure that they put on themselves. And then you gave multiple examples of how that, of how you employ humor and silliness in order to combat or address that, that problem. And then finally talked about the. And as a result of those methods, here are the benefits that we see. Students are more engaged, they're more more interested. That's more welcoming, I would add. The only thing I would add to it is I think it's also more inclusive. Right. When you're silly and when you're having fun, it's saying the door is wide open for everyone. Everyone can be silly. Everyone can be fun. Come on in, do some coding with us. And it makes it much, much better for people. So you have all of those together. And then you had that great closing, too, which basically said, hey, why don't you give this a try? It doesn't cost you anything. It's not going to hurt anything. It can also work in other environments, too. But give it a try in your classroom today. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. You're such a great listener. Sean Tibor: I didn't even take any notes. Also, one of the great things about the lightning talk, I mean, when you're doing 23 of them. You have to take notes. Like, it's critical that you write down who said what and when so that you can keep it all straight, especially if you're grading. But the nice thing about lightning talks is that they go by quickly. Right. And you can keep it all in your own head without having to take pages of notes on it. You might have a few quick ideas from it that you can follow up on later, but it's very digestible. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It is. And you know what? They're fun. They make you smile when, you know, the kids are on a timer, and they're like, so definitely put a timer in front of them. It helps. So turn your computer around, and I think now with the moth, you could probably write a good rubric with some of the tips, and maybe you call them moth talks. I don't know. Sean Tibor: Yeah. Yeah. I definitely like storytelling as well, and I think it has a slightly different place in your stable of tools that you can use. But I also think that once you have a good idea and it's something that you care about that you think is worth sharing, the rest of it all falls into place. Right. So some people start with the hook. Some people start with the problem. Some people start with the really cool thing that they just love, and they build everything else there. I've had hooks. I think my best hook I ever did was, I think my wife is trying to kill me on my birthday, and I had everyone's attention. The other one that I haven't used yet, but I have another one, which is, I want to tell you about the line of code that cost five figures in cloud costs. Right. There's something there. There's something that grabs people's attention, and they're not all winners. Those are some of my better ones, I think, but I've had other ones that just fell flat and nobody cared. But really, it's something that grabs people's attention to get you going and then holds that attention as you finish the lightning talk. So when you're thinking about structuring this, think about how you're going to approach it. Do you start with the hook? Do you start with the problem? Do you start with the really cool solution or tool that you found? Where do you. Where's your entry point into the lightning talk? And then build the rest of it from there? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100%. I lost it. I hope that gave a lot of teachers some ideas. And if you're going to the Ed summit, we have a spot for lightning talks, and I tweaked it a little bit so that we have the lightning talks before we have the extended talk. So if someone really catches your attention and you want to engage with that person a little bit longer after their lightning talk, we're going to have that opportunity instead of doing it at the end of the day. That way it gives you a little bit more time to really talk about the things that you want to talk about. I'm so excited about Ed summit. Sean Tibor: It's going to be really great. I'm super excited to be there and to meet everyone and to see them. So I'm looking forward to it. I honestly can't believe that this is going to be our fifth pycon. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I know, I'm so excited. Did I say I'm excited? I'm excited. And the schedule is posted, so I'm even more excited. That's done. Check. Sean Tibor: Actually, I think this is our 6th python Pycon. 2019 20 202-122-2324 yeah. Number six. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, wow. Excellent. Sean Tibor: We've been on site, we've been remote. We've been on site again. Remote again. Never lost our focus on Pycon, though. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm three for three this year, three on site, three off. That's crazy. Sean Tibor: I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Cool. You're four for two, I think. Sean Tibor: Yep, yep. But I think that just worked out to my benefit. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Cool. Well, anything else? Sean Tibor: No. A couple of things. If you're watching this on YouTube or you are watching on Twitter or LinkedIn or anyplace else, please like the live stream. Like, let's try to get more of that traffic happening. So, like them. I think there's a subscribe button on LinkedIn where a lot of people watch. Follow us on Twitter. If you've just been brought to us by the algorithm, subscribe to us on YouTube. Do all of those things. You can do it on every channel. That's fine with us, too. We'll take that. Also, want to give a huge shout out to our Patreon supporters. We don't do this enough, but we've got people at this point that have been supporting us for several years and it's a few dollars here, a few dollars there, and it helps us keep things like the live streams going, it helps us pay our hosting costs. It really makes a big difference. And I think one of the things that Kelly and I both want to do more of is do more content and more ways to engage with the teaching community around Python. Whether it's through the live stream, through blog posts, through LinkedIn posts, just ways to reach out engage. And the Patreon community has been a stalwart supporter of us. Thank you to all of you. If you'd like to sponsor the podcast, even if it's a dollar or two a month and you want to become a patron of ours, the link to the Patreon is in our podcast. It's also on our website at Teachingpython FM. So I know this is a little bit long winded about promotions and everything, but it really does make a difference. And I wanted to say thank you to everyone who's been supporting us for so long. We do this because we love it. We do it because we are not because we're trying to get rich or anything like that. It really. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I would love to be rich, but I don't think it's from this podcast because it's actually just something I love. Do you ever get rich for things that you love to do? Sean Tibor: I don't know. I'll let you know if I ever get rich, how it happened. But anyways, thank you all. Thank you to the community. We're excited to see you all at Pycon and at the education summit. If you're not going to Pycon this year, there are live streams available for the main summit. We do not have a live stream for the education summit this year. We are going to be posting as much of the content as we can online and, of course, posting things to social media. I'm looking into some ways that we can post to Mastodon a little bit more. So if you. You want more of that live feel to it, and you're over on Mastodon, will do that, too. So I think that's it from my side. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. And if you're at Pycon and you see us and you recognize us and just come say hi and just let us know that you're a listener and it really means a lot to us to make connections with our faces with connections. So come and see us. Sean Tibor: Yeah, apparently I'm a lot taller in person. Come, come find out and see. See what you think. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Sounds good. Sean Tibor: All right, so for teaching Python, this. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Is Sean, and this is Kelly signing off.