Episode 8 Done
Sean Tibor: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the teaching Python. This is episode 67, all about the mew editor. My name is Sean Tibor. I am a coder who 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:00:23] teaches and my name's Kelly Schuster frittatas, and I am a teacher that goes, I can't stop laughing. I'm really sorry. Well, 
Sean Tibor: [00:00:30] why are you giggling and Kelly, what could possibly be 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:00:33] causing that?
We have one of the very first person, people, persons that we met at pike con and when we first met him, I thought we met like the Beatles or someone super, super, all time famous. And we were just. God smacked and it's Nicholas . Do I always pronounce that correctly? Tyler Bay, 
Nick Tollervey: [00:00:53] you just broke up.
Sean Tibor: [00:00:58] Well, Nick, welcome to the show. We're really glad to have you here. And we're kicking off a whole new series that we're launching all about different editors for coding Python, but more importantly for teaching Python. So this whole series is not just about the things you might hear about like, Oh, vs.
Code is great for this or pie chart is great for that. Or you can use. Idle for getting started. We want to talk about how you use these editors for teaching and learning. And that's why we're so excited to have Nick on the line with us, because who better to talk about mew, the origins of it, where it is, where it's going and then how it fits into the broader ecosystem of education within Python.
Then our good friend, Nick. So welcome, Nick. We're super happy to have you here. 
Thank 
Nick Tollervey: [00:01:40] you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Your podcast is legendary, honestly. Brilliant. I'm just thinking. It 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:01:48] was just funny. Cause I remember the exact moment, like you sat next to me and I turned around, right. You knew who that was.
And he was like, yeah, at PI con and we were just, it was just a great time and a great memory and something. We hold dear to our hearts and every time we open up and download the new editor and I go mew, cause he wants me to sound like a cow. I always tell them about. How we met you and the kids are impressed that I know the person who started off this editor.
So thank you for sharing. 
Sean Tibor: [00:02:19] I dare say, I don't think we would've made it through that first year of teaching Python, if it wasn't for the music editor, because we were, we needed every bit of help we could get, and it was a huge help. So thank 
Nick Tollervey: [00:02:30] you for that. You broke up there, but I think this is where I say thank you.
Sean Tibor: [00:02:37] Well, why don't we start off then same place we always do with the win of the week. And so Nick will make you go first. The, one of the weakest something good that's happened to inside or outside of the classroom this week. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:02:47] Okay. So for me, surprisingly, it's inside the classroom. I'm actually a professional software developer.
Now I used to be a secondary school teacher in the UK. So. I sort of transitioned from one side of the wall to the other as it were, but I found myself teaching this week. I'm currently doing some work for the UK government, the ministry of justice. And what I do is run. They still want me and my colleagues.
It's not just me. We run the data platform. So government runs on data, anything to do with the justice department in the UK. So the courts prisons, please, you name it. Like terabytes of data that we handle. And this is all done by my colleagues, the analysts, and it was to a group of about 60 analysts that I was telling them all about Payson because they currently use a language called R and they're all very interested in learning Python.
So I spent about an hour talking about Python and I was the captive Python developer in the room. And they could ask me lots of technical questions and things, and it was really good fun to actually be teaching. I love. The pedagogy, the skill of teaching, the presence of being a teacher. And what was really funny, what made my day was one of my colleagues, Tom said to me afterwards, he said, you could tell you were a teacher in a previous life, you know, because you come across as very teach wish when you're presenting.
So, all right. Not lost it. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:04:07] That's excellent. I think once a teacher, always a teacher it's always in you and you're always trying to educate, even when people don't want to be educated, it's kind of my downfall. That's all I do in life. It's like, did you no 
Nick Tollervey: [00:04:22] sound new Greenville. 
Sean Tibor: [00:04:26] All right, 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:04:26] Kelly. Over to you for me.
Well, I'm going to. Tell my story of a win that did not happen in the classroom and did not happen because of Python, but kind of goes back in line with my design teaching days. My sons have afford that we help them build. And at first we did all the cutting and the building and over the four years that we've had this, it, it has been painted because I've allowed them to paint.
They've unscrewed things. They've tied stuff on. We've done some. Editing to it. So as you say, or re factoring of it, and then the other day we had a whole bunch of wood down from an old roof part and it was laying on the ground and the kids were like, can we please just use this to build? And I said, no, I don't want to know.
Don't worry, mommy, we got this. And my. 10 year old and my seven year old with me just holding up. So no one got an eye lost or a foot, you know, banged on or a finger cut off. They built another little platform off of their, for, and they are addicted and now they wanted to add like a roof and it's, it's insane.
So they are little doers, little makers, and it's making me so happy that they just love to, they'd rather choose to be outside than behind the computer coding all the time. Like mommy. So it was a good one 
Sean Tibor: [00:05:45] this week. That's a wonderful activity. Like that is the best thing you can do to foster creativity, imagination, problem solving, you know, here's some wood I'll help you make it safe, but not, maybe not too 
Nick Tollervey: [00:05:57] safe.
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:05:58] Right. As long as they don't fall, 
Nick Tollervey: [00:06:01] there's always a danger in learning though. Isn't there, you're taking a risk. So yeah. Maybe not losing 
Sean Tibor: [00:06:07] an Iris hopefully, 
Nick Tollervey: [00:06:08] but you know, like exactly, it's a, it's a managed risk, especially in the classroom. That's exactly, 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:06:14] exactly. When I lose any fingers, you know, my son just started playing the trumpet, so we at least need those three fingers there.
Sean Tibor: [00:06:23] Fair point fair point. Well, my win this week was a little bit borrowed. It, I actually snatched it away from Kelly. I was covering her class today. She had to leave for a reason and I was covering her class and there was this sixth grade student who was working in Python turtle, and she was very excited and very.
Interested in getting a background image onto her turtle screen. So she was exploring the documentation. She was trying to understand how the method works, the whole thing, and she couldn't get it to work. She's like, I can't do this. It's it's using a JPEG mic. Well, let's go look at the documentation. Oh, look, it says you need a GIF.
So she finds a GIF of SpongeBob sheep. Downloads it copies it over, gets her file name. Right. And when she hit run and SpongeBob appeared, there was this audible gasp. Like she was so excited and, and I said, wait, wait, stop right there. Like, okay. That feeling right there. That is why I code right that moment where it's like it worked and it's amazing.
And it did this thing. I said, Everything else is just details, right? Like that's the reason why we make this stuff, because the joy that you get of having something working that you've worked so hard to understand and implement is everything. And I told her about how I was trying to instrument a fast API container and.
And when I first saw the tracing metrics and everything show up at the screen, I did the same thing. It works. So I said, it never gets old. You just change what triggers it. Oh, 
Nick Tollervey: [00:07:56] absolutely. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:07:57] And that's just such a great thing for this girl. She's one of those kids that likes to just do things, get it done, get the grade completed.
And she's been getting everything, you know, coded. And she does the basics really well, but she was not the one that was pushing. And when I left her. I was like, where's the documentation. Read that documentation command a find, get screen I'm out of here. And you're like, just leave it. And so I love that she had that moment.
I'm sad that I missed it, but now I'm going to be seeing SpongeBob everywhere. I guess 
Nick Tollervey: [00:08:30] the other things, I just want to point out that I'm really impressed that she went and read the documentation and she went and did the research because fostering that sense of autonomy. And well, we were talking about, you know, being brave and being put in a dangerous situation, but it takes a bit of guts to go out and research this sort of stuff.
You're obviously doing something right. Because, you know, I have to admit 90% of my day is just Googling stuff. Why it doesn't work rarely. And then I have those moments just like, you know, your students. Well, you kind of Chad bopping and going woo. All on your own with a laptop. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:09:06] I think it's because I finally learned how to read documentation.
So now I can finally teach it. I've been really teaching strings objects and method. I finally, this year after teaching it, I was like, Oh my God, that's a string. That's a method. That's a, that's a list. That's a method. Oh my God, here's the documentation. That's a method. And Sean goes, yeah. Yes, teaching it and then finally getting in.
So I think I've got a better way of teaching it to kids. So we do use good documentation. That's easy to read in the Python. 3.9 documentation is. Spot on. That's good. So they enjoy that. 
Sean Tibor: [00:09:45] Yeah. And yeah, it was funny though, because it's like, these things all go together. My fail of the week happened like the next class period, maybe half an hour later.
And the fail was that I was teaching. And so we were doing this class coding challenge. We're in lieu of a quiz or an exam or multiple choice. We give them a problem, like write some code that will do this and they have to figure it out and there's no one way to do it. They could solve it in a variety of ways.
And my fail was that I let them ask me too many questions, cause this is the one thing that I want them to do, where they just have to kind of struggle their way through and apply what they've known and learned and, and look to their resources. And once I started answering their questions, I had kids like.
Queuing up to talk to me and everything. And I just, I find it was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. We've done this wrong. Go back, figure it out. If you don't get it, it's going to be okay. It's just code. Like, no one's going to die. The sun will rise tomorrow. It's okay. But it took me a solid five to 10 minutes to realize the trap that I had dug for myself and then 30 seconds to get back out of it.
Yeah. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:10:52] I'm trying to think of my fail this week. I don't know. Do you have a fail this week, Nick? We like to do fails. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:10:58] I have a fail of the day. If not our, the work that I do again, going back to my work work, we have we've we have a piece of software that we're trying to deploy the latest version of this.
This thing that our analyst, friends, our analyst colleagues use. And we've been trying to update this thing for two months and. My team is a very strong technical team. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any of them to anybody for, for work. There are outstanding engineers, all of them, and yet it feels like we're all cave men again, you know, just bang the rocks together, chaps, you know, it might work if you tried switching it off and on again, it's, it's that sort of level of stuff.
And I think, you know, it doesn't matter how experienced it. It's, it's very humbling. Really, you know, cause the computers, you know, pardon my French is going to bite you in the bum eventually, you know, and, and that's, what's been happening this week is that we've not been able to get this thing deployed.
It's a bit frustrating, but we're working together on it, which is an important. Point, you know, the sort of Hollywood hacker solitary CODO with a hoodie in a dark room is just, it doesn't exist. You know, all of my working life as a coder has been collaborating with people, with working with people. And so we're working as a team.
So in that sense, it's not a fail. We've just been able to deliver what we're paid to do. Yes, we'll get there. We'll get there. Well, we'll have 
Sean Tibor: [00:12:28] to send you one of the mugs that Kelly made is like the power of yet, right? Like you just add yet onto that. You're like you did, and you will get there. Like, it just may not be tomorrow or the day after, but you will get there.
Nick Tollervey: [00:12:40] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:12:43] I think I had like a little bit of a personal fail, but I guess kind of skipped over it to avoid failure. So I guess that's a, my fail, you know, I was looking at the dictionaries again and we were, I was trying to recreate. A new dictionary for class schedule. And I started to think about it and my mind went blank and I was like, guess what kids, we're not we're going to can do dictionaries right now.
It's too much stuff. We're just going to code it tomorrow. So Sean gets to do dictionaries with seventh grade. So. Because I'm not going to be there tomorrow either. No, but I, I opened up the, I don't know what happened. I opened up the code and my mind went blank and I was like, Oh my God, what, how, Oh yeah.
And I couldn't remember the pluses. And instead of going to Google it, I was just like, yeah, I just don't want to research right now. My mind's not ready for coding. It's a big fail. I didn't try. And when I did it and even I didn't even do it and I know it came back to me and Eric's probably going to be cursing in his kitchen right now because he's like, I talked to you about all the dictionaries, but Hey, it's okay.
We all have our, I tell him I had like a brain, a brain fart and I couldn't think so. We're done, but Oh, well, We move on. You'll come back to it. I'll 
Sean Tibor: [00:13:51] come back to it. Yeah. So let's just jump right in with the, the main topic and talk a little bit about the new editor and Nick. I think this would be a great chance to talk a little bit about your background, because it seems like it's a pretty big factor in how you decided to come up with this concept and how to write it.
So let's just start in. When did you have this vision or when did you think about like, I need to create something new for editing and for teaching Python. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:14:19] Oh, okay. So the short answer is one rainy Sunday afternoon in a December weekend. And I foolishly asked myself how hard can it be? And so by the end of the afternoon, you know, maybe two or three hours, I had.
A single file of Python, but that file contained the kernel of mew. You had maybe, you know, there are several buttons across the top now, but there might've been only three or four in that first version, you know, there was a very simple editor. You could perhaps load save. Create a new file. Run the file.
And that was, and quit, sorry. Yes. So there was five Pfizer. You gave everyone and exit, at least they could get out. Wow. Famously editors are difficult to get out of. There's an Edison VI that is just impossible to get out of. If you don't know the magic incantation to get you out. And the reason I asked myself that question is because I was working as a volunteer for the parts and software foundation.
So I obviously wasn't working. I was. Contributing my time and effort to the PSF, working with other technical folk in the UK for the BBC microbit, the PSF was a partner in that project. And the initial Python editor was browser-based and being a. Conscientious engineer. One of the things that I did is I took out the code that I'd written for the browser-based editor.
I took that out to teachers kind of user group, you know, technical teachers would get together in the local area and, you know, hang out and moan really, let's be honest. We're all teachers here, a moment about what was going on in the classroom and blah, blah, blah. And I would turn up and I would present.
What we were doing and I would want feedback and I would get them to play with micro bits, which were very rare. It hadn't been released. So I would turn up with, you know, six or seven of them and they all wanted to have a go and see what was coming and things. And it became clear that the Brown, so it just, wasn't the ideal way of interacting with the microbit because you have to a type, your code, be downloaded.
That's now somewhere hidden in your home directory and you've got to try and fair it around and figure out where that is. Then you've got to drag it onto the microbit. Then you get syntax error line three. So you have to go all the way back and do the thing. And what I found, and this is actually I forgot a button, one of the other buttons, it wasn't run, it was flash.
And so what it would do do that whole process, the equivalent of download from the browser, put it in the file system, copied over from the microbit, do the thing and so on. So that sped things up. Very quickly for teachers. Now, I was a secondary head of music in the UK, and I used to have to set up as I'm sure you folks do my classroom.
And pretty much, at least once a day, eight class would be turned into turmoil because. Something has gone wrong. A kid's fallen off their chair. The beaters have all been spilled on the floor. The piano is gone clunk and it's out of tune or there's a pallet or something. And there's only just a little bit of disruption and you've lost the attention of the kids.
So my aim with that. With new was to throw away all the potential hazards or bumps in the road that would stop them from engaging with the kind of write some code, watch it work, write some code, watch it work. Write some code. Why not write some code, download a thing when snap folder it's out. I can't find it, sir, sir.
I can't find mine. Okay. So there you go. You've you've lost them. They've got out of the flow. So that's how you start it. And that Sunday afternoon hack kind of took off really in a, rather than expected fashion. And we got some feedback, uh, folks from the raspberry PI foundation gave feedback. So I'll carry on, was exceptionally helpful with that.
And we have some quick wins, I think. So for instance, we put zoom buttons on, this is like the next two buttons. And for me, zooming in and out is just, I dunno, I don't do that, but for a teacher. And now I think about it, you know, you think, of course it's obvious for a teacher teacher wants to be able to make that code scene, that the clock back of the classroom, I want to zoom in.
And I remember showing that to a group of teachers for the first time they will win. How did you do that? Three lines of codes. It's simple, but for them it made a huge. Difference. And so that is what led to the while. If we engage with teachers and we engage with learners. Then we can get some really useful feedback.
Our we're very upfront saying that mew is the beginners editor. And if you're technical enough to ask us questions, like, could you explain how the I'm trying to think of a technical question now it's half past eight and he evening at the UK. My brain's just gone. Great. Could you explain how, how new yeah.
Part is after that syntax treats? So it knows what to suggest it or blah, blah, blah, blah. If you're asking that sort of question, you shouldn't be using muse. We see new very much as an American friend said, it it's like training wheels. You know, you're learning to ride a bike, but you need some help to get there.
For me, it feels like the toddler stage in child development, you know, babies, they don't move. And then you've got like two or three year olds who can run around and they're exploring their world. But there's that toddler there's that. Toddler stage where they're pulling themselves up. They're having a look around, they're taking their first steps and falling over, but they pick themselves up and that's what mew is.
It's the toddling stage. And then you should move on to. If it's a studio code or whatever, sort of professional, proper editor, 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:19:53] that's what shine keeps telling me.
Sean Tibor: [00:19:57] Also a certain amount of pragmatism to it. Right. As long as it works, right. As long as you're able to effectively communicate what you're trying to do. And so we'll use mew all the time on screen and in the classroom, everything, because, you know, it's a very simple and clear way to communicate ideas through code.
And it's clean. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:20:16] Yeah. And it's clean interface, I think. Yeah, that I think this for, for me, when I want to just jump in and quickly show, I either go to CoLab or mew and it's just this really quick clean interface. It, I can just flash up on the whiteboard or wherever and it's, it's so easy. It's not intimidating kids.
Open it up and they're not freaked out when I show them another word editor that I love. I loved, I used probably charm I use visual studio code, but when I first show a sixth grader, those two and the first days, they're like what? And code. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:20:51] Yes. We spend a lot of time thinking about mew as a pedagogical tool.
It is a presentation tool. This is why we don't zoom button. Then what? We have the themes as well. We can talk about that maybe in a little while, but yeah. You know, the back of our mind is that, you know, I felt that being a teacher, my collaborators there's about six or seven of us who are enthusiastic enough to keep contributing.
And that they're all involved in code clubs, or they were teachers, or they are currently teaching or they're working in the education sector in some other technical sense. So they've all got some festered interest in this, but yeah, my view is it's your friendly first steps into coding. Really? That's what we want to try and.
Make it fun for folks. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:21:33] Shawn's probably gonna yell at me. So I'm probably skipping somewhere in the questions. But I also think though that the progress that you've been making has become more advanced now that now it's meeting more of our needs. And even our, some of our eighth graders and Sean, Sean was like, whatever you want to code in, but they're like, can we just download Mo mew again?
Because now you have the third party library feature. And I know in the past we were having issues with that when I first started coding, I think, and now we have that. So it's just, it's been growing with my teaching needs. So it's been my comfort blanket along the way. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:22:08] Would you like your, the pedagogical experts?
You know, I was a music teacher now in a lot of ways, that's an advantage, but in other ways, I don't know what the current best practice or the current bumps in the road are for teaching coding. So we absolutely want folks who know about this to tell us what's going on and we can change that. Or we were delighted to do that.
And we love getting, you know, book reports that are clear and tell us, you know, how to recreate the problem. So yeah. Keep giving us books. It'll improve me. It's an evolutionary thing. 
Sean Tibor: [00:22:45] I think one of the things that's really nice and this gets into one of our questions about how it's developed. I mean, because it's open source and because there is that encouragement to contribute.
It was a really cool moment in the classroom. When I had a student who was like, Hey, this thing isn't working. Right. And I said, yeah, I actually, I do think I know why that is. And so I'm going to go submit a bug report for that right now. And we submitted the bug report together and I pointed out here's where I think it is.
And then I think later on, I even spent a little bit of time and kind of figured out a solution for it. And then was able to share that with the students and the student, not only. Saw that this is a, a program that, you know, is not perfect. Right? They see that their own code doesn't have to be perfect, but they also saw that like, wait a minute, this is something that I could potentially do a bug report on that.
It's not just something that you go to a faceless corporation, it's something that they could affect. And I thought that was a really great lesson about how open source software can work as well for the students, because they don't necessarily think about how their software is made. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:23:44] This is a culture thing.
As well, I don't know about you, but I want to encourage people to feel empowered with the technology that they use or feel emancipated, even in, in some sense, because in a lot of ways, you know, you get your mobile phone and it's not really your mobile phone. It's, it's the company's mobile phone because they're the ones installing software and only Apple are allowing certain products on the platform and things like that.
And it's understandable why they do that. But with open source, your student has been able to see, well, I can change this. That's a real, it's like the young lady in the previous example that you get, if, you know, she had that kind of work, it works, you know, SpongeBob appears, you know, it's that feeling of, I can, I can effect a change here and you know, you.
Are free to contribute and we will listen and we'll fold this in and you know, we've got code with a bit older now, but you know, 11 year olds have contributed to mew. I think, you know, Josh Lowe edgy blocks yet. Josh. He he's. Awesome. But he, he does this thing called Porter moon because it rhymes like portaloo, which is new.
That stands alone. You know, you could just put it on a thumb, thumb drive and he takes it to his library or whatever, when it was at school. Cause the school network admins wouldn't allow wouldn't install mew. So he would just. Take it around. He did that and we, we have that as part of our downloads. And he's, he's still doing that now that he's he's left school and he's, he's actually now a professional software developer.
So it's because of these experiences that, you know, he he's, you know, well, someone like. Josh is just going to fly anyway. Cause he's so brilliant, but I'd like to think that it's because he had those experiences, those positive experiences of being able to contribute and see that his contributions were taken seriously and they were folded back in and then the next version comes out and you know, that little thing that used to be blue on that it's green.
How was that? Was mine. My change that, you know, you've got a sense of pride. I've contributed something to it. And I feel that 
Sean Tibor: [00:25:48] that's a deliberate choice, right? I mean, that's a choice of the team to say we are going to open our doors to two new improvements and everything. And so I think that's also the metaphor for the teaching.
That we all do in our classroom too. Is that if you close them off and say, no, you can't do that or no, you can't do that. Or, you know, yeah. I hear what you're saying, blue button. Great. But no, we're not going to do that. Right. If you shut them down, every door closes off. And someone like Josh, the fact that, you know, he had the opportunity with those open doors to be able to contribute.
Certainly. You know, helped him along the way. And that's 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:26:24] huge. I just, you know, I always do this in all the podcasts and this is why I carry around a book when we have podcasts, but I just thought of a new lesson plan. So, and you might get a whole bunch of unrelated, not really helpful get hub requests.
I'm sorry. Read better warn your team, but that's one of the things for the newbies. So I, I emailed you when I was, and I told you, Oh, well, I just submitted a horrible log report. Cause I forgot to put the log. Even though the warning says, please put the log and some nice person was like, Can you insert the log and like, Oh yes, I forgot it was supposed to do that, but that's getting, I'd have never written a log.
You know, I've never put anything in to get help. I tried to do it at PI con and they try to help me in, but it's so scary as a new, new coder. You just don't do those things because that's public. So being able to teach kids or something, here's how you do it could be a good 
Nick Tollervey: [00:27:13] lesson. Yeah. But Kelly, I know exactly how that feels because I didn't.
Become a software developer. And so I was 30 because I spent my twenties as a teacher. And because I'm a late bloomer, but this, I know what it feels like to, you know, feel slightly intimidated by this tech sort of situation, you know? You don't want to make a fool of yourself. It's like turning up to school band for the first time and all the big kids seem to know how to play the clarinet.
And you're stuck on like 99th clarinet honking, just two notes. But yeah, after a while you pick it up and you know, this is why it's important, encouraging and welcoming. And so people see that it's a bit the fun. And like you said, strong, it's, you know, what's the worst that can happen. And you know, it's not like you're going to sort of launch nuclear missiles or photons or PDAs, you know, or things going to go.
But don't drink and then you'll get an error message and you can Google that and you'll improve it. And essentially that's what I do. They really that's a professional developer is, is just a slightly, perhaps more higher level version of that process. It's broken. I better look up how to fix it. 
Sean Tibor: [00:28:15] Yeah, well, and for the record, Nick, I was 38 chair baritone, not 99.
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:28:25] See, I was, I was a flutist. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:28:30] I don't know.
Sean Tibor: [00:28:34] You gotta be in the horn 
Nick Tollervey: [00:28:34] section.
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:28:40] So I kicked quit band. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:28:43] It was probably people like me and Sean who put you off.
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:28:49] So this isn't on the list, but you had a new, new update just recently the beta B four. Yeah. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:28:56] Okay. So the B is for beater and we're doing a beater release every two weeks. So how do I describe this? You know, in an academic year, there are various sorts of points in an academic year, so we're Northern hemisphere.
So I'm in the UK. We start September. Okay. First term is always moving. Towards Christmas that sort of promised land the light at the end of the tunnel. And for me as a music teacher, there was like Christmas reductions, you know, Carol's so I'm so fed up with Carol's. I never want to hear one again and so on and so forth.
And then. January is preparing kids for exams. And then, you know, summer term is when we have exams and then everybody goes a bit silly and does school trips and stuff. So there's a particular sort of cadence in the academic year. It's the same for software projects. And it depends. Where are you in the kind of the.
The life cycle of the software project tells you what you're doing and where we are is, I don't know. It feels a little bit like the exam season. We're preparing, we're preparing and we're going to be releasing, do a final release sometime soon. So we're doing the equivalent of revising. And what that is is providing beaters and beaters are incomplete.
Versions of mute out there still. Good versions that they might have books, but we're polishing. If you see what I mean, that's what a beater version is. And so we're releasing every fortnight now, a new version until we get to 1.1 final when we've. Fixed as many books as we can find, we've crossed all the I's and crossed all the T's or done it the other way, round, whatever it's supposed to be.
And, you know, we've updated the documentation, all our translators. Cause we've got new. It's used in China, Africa, South America, India everywhere. And so it's been translated to the different locals as well. I have. The cutest video of some Chinese school children who had been wrote, taught how to say in English.
Thank you, Nicholas. We love using mew at me in that sort of Chinese school uniforms from their school teacher. And so that's another part of the beat releases that we will maybe finish the user interface changes, and then the next beater. Release after that will be let's fold in the new translations.
Okay. Cause now that the user interface is solid, we can start to tell people to change, you know, to translate the buttons and things. Cause we're not going to change them anymore. So it's all part of that process. Then we release it and then we'll all be a bit city for the end of the summer term. And then it'll start again in September where we sit down and go, okay.
So what, what are our goals? Yeah, what's this, this year's year 11, you know, I'm speaking British, you know, you've got grades where you have yeah, yeah. GCSE, which is like, you're graduating from high school sort of thing equivalent. And you know, what's, what's that year, like, you know, who've, you got to concentrate on, you know, who needs the help who's going to fly, you know, that sort of stuff.
So we do the equivalent sort of thing. What features do people want? What features do we want to see in. Because a part of this is, you know, teachers need to tell us what they need, but we're software developers, all of us who develop new we're professional software developers. So we know what we think teachers need as well.
It's a bit like when you first learned to play a violin. You're told to hold it like that. And that's really uncomfortable. Why nurse should I, but okay. After a few years you realize why you hold it like that and you loosen up and things like that. And so this is why we want to give you a debugger that works in that particular way, rather than this particular race.
Because when you graduate from UW and you go to visual studio code or pie chart or whatever, it might be. The debugger will work in that sort of a way that we've done our step up so that, you know, it's no longer this seven 47 flight deck of buttons and in coherent sort of messages, it looks familiar enough that it's a recognizable debugger.
So. Yeah, that's a, that's another aspect of what we're up to. So 
Sean Tibor: [00:32:52] yeah, when you first came out and I think we were, we got in three years ago, so we were coming that 1.0 stage. Well, I think one thing that's important to note here is that mew is a modal editor. So it has different modes that you can choose from based on what you're coding.
And I think at the time we saw Python three PI games, zero circuit playground, and the microbit. And since then, there's been a lot of new features and new modes added. Can you give everyone a little bit of an update on some of the new modes that are out there, or some of the new features that maybe they have missed out on that are coming in this 1.1.
Nick Tollervey: [00:33:26] So we have a web mode, so you can write very simple web applications. That's not finished yet. I'm working with some friends in a London based company who, you know, you should be at the click of a button. You should be able to parcel up your web app, send it to their servers, give you a URL so that you get the Hey grammar.
I'm on the internet type moment. So that's, that's coming. We've done a lot of work on the microbit mode. Carlos, one of my fellow volunteers works the microbit foundation and of course they have a version two coming out, which has changed an awful lot of things. So he's done, it's all under the hood sort of stuff.
What else? So I'm trying not to be very right. Technical that's 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:34:08] okay. Sean likes the technical. Okay. That's how we grow. Go for it. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:34:13] The set of chips called ESP 86, six and ESP 32. These are, I've got one next to me. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:34:20] Sean's got like 40 of them. 
Sean Tibor: [00:34:24] I've got, I've got a feather version of it here. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:34:27] You know, you could get them for a dollar, you know, for a big box of them, a dollar each sort of thing.
The important thing about those chips is that they have wifi and Bluetooth. So all of a sudden micropolitan that runs on these chips can talk to the internet and you can, you know, Make your weather station or, you know, take silly photos of your cat coming from the cat flap or, you know, all of that sort of stuff.
And another volunteer from you Martin. He works at a university in Denmark and he uses the ESP chips with his students. And so he's created a new mode, especially for ESP chips. So, you know, And, you know, you buy a particular part from this thing, plug it all together. His students make that thing in the first term, and that's how they're introduced to his, his sort of design and technology sort of degree.
He's, that's his part of it. So he's made a lot of changes. There are a whole bunch of bug fixes, 1,000,001 bug fixes. One of the most requested features about the shortcomings in version one was that people couldn't. Download packages from PI and, you know, PIP install this, that, and the other. So we have that feature.
Now I wrote a really terrible version to make it work because you know what they say about software, make it work, then make it work properly and then make it work efficiently if you need to. So I made it work and then Tim yet another volunteer. He rewrote it and did it properly. Tim, he's a pipe and core developer.
That's, he's very good at this. And he's also, he, he runs a kind of a kids coding club as well. So education is something he's very passionate about. So he's, he's done amazing work on that. That is very, very difficult technical work that he's done and talking of difficult technical work. You'd be surprised how awful it is to try and package things such that a beginner can be told, just download mew.
Okay. Now click the install button. So networks getting to that is like, you know, Atlas holding up the heavens or, you know, trying to launch a satin five and Tiago who is based in Portugal has essentially automated all of those very painful steps. I would rather stick forks in my eyes or rip my nose up and down a cheese grater than have to package mew because it is so painful and so intricate.
And so. Prone to error, but Tiago has done this amazing work so that I just need to issue one command and I can install a 15 minutes later. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:36:58] It's the biggest, like, so first quarter, second quarter I always go through and I, and I always tell them, I'm like, okay, this is the one time I'm going to tell you to do exactly what I say.
Don't talk to me. If you have a PC, I don't want to talk to you. Just go do your thing, go download it. But all you Mac people just do what I say. And then third quarter I, we downloaded the new version and I was like, didn't hit all the firewalls and we didn't have to, it was just much so well, Dante, I go, I think I even tweeted it 
Nick Tollervey: [00:37:29] well, yeah, just what Tiago has mentioned you, because remember.
Mew. Isn't just an editor. Well, it is just an editor, but it's an editor that comes with Python. You know, it's the answer to the question, but you know, what should I download if I want to learn Python? And the answer originally was, well, first of all, you need to download Python. Then you need to go to the command line.
They need to PIP install this thing, and then you download this other thing then needs to tell it to point to your virtual M's that does this thing. And it might as well be written in highly graphics. These sorts of instructions strip again. The instructions that you really want is, you know, download the thing, install it.
Now, click on the friendly looking snake. And I hope you like our new splash screen hours have been spent on getting that done. You know, it's friendly and you know, we want people to go, Oh, This is going to be fun. So 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:38:18] with your positive vibes on the quotes, every time I have to shut down mew to open it again, just so I can see another quote I showed Sean, I was like, look okay.
And he's like, wait. I'm like, 
Nick Tollervey: [00:38:27] okay. So here's the lesson plan for you. If you look and I'll send you the link, I'll send you several links. After this podcast, I'll send you the link though, on our developer documentation, it tells you how to submit a first port request to make changes to the code. And the thing that we suggest you do is add a new message of the day to the list.
And so one of the things you could do is encourage your students to think, well, if I was going to give a message to a student, somewhere else in the world about learning to code, what would that be? And then perhaps they could submit a poll request. And if you have any problems with that, I'm happy to help, but you should be able to do that through the get hub webpage, rather than having to download new source code and set up as a developer, you should just be able to see that code.
And in fact, what I might do is try it myself, right? The baby steps instructions, and then you can sort of. Go play with that and see how it works. Well, you 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:39:27] just gave an extra tidbit because people are always asking us to give them curriculum or some lesson plans. And I think that's absolutely wonderful.
That's a great one for everybody. Get in there 
Nick Tollervey: [00:39:36] and learn some good. We're going to have the most awesome messages of the day. I think as well. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:39:42] I think. As long as it's not mad PSAs or something like that, the Mr. Type don't let Mr. Tibor submit any of his quotes allowed 
Sean Tibor: [00:39:49] to anymore. Apparently I'm making the sixth graders cringe.
So, but what I think was really phenomenal for us when we first started teaching. And you touched on this briefly is that this is designed for. People who have never written a line of code before. Right. And that's true both for the students and for the teachers. So if you're that teacher that is just trying to stay two steps ahead of the students to teach them if it's your first time teaching it or you're learning it also, mew is fantastic because you don't have to learn about setting up a virtual environment or trying to explain what that is or any of those things.
It's. Let me download it. Let me get it going. And then I can use this to start writing some code, showing some concepts, communicating and presenting these ideas, and the students can stay with you. You can all go together as this cohort, learning together in a way that's pretty challenging. And then, and then they can graduate.
Like one of my favorite things I've been able to do this year in eighth grade is now. You know, we've gone beyond mew. We've gone beyond CoLab the things where everything's all together and now we can start to have the conversation about, okay, well now here's where you would install a regular Python installation.
Here's where you would install your own editor and the reasons why you would do that. Not just because it looks cool, right? Like, Ooh, dark mode. Right, right. It's because it helps you put your ideas into play better. Right? It helps us talk about more advanced things. And that's where mew fits really nicely.
And it worked really well for Kelly. And I was that as we were learning this and teaching it for the first time, we didn't have to worry about all the complexity of getting all those things done because you and your team have already handled that for us. You went through and figured out the pain of how do you get it to install on everything from a calculator to a reframe trader and everything in between like the yoga, it works.
Nick Tollervey: [00:41:34] Yeah. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:41:35] So we've kind of forced that graduation on our kids. Cause we know we, we try to push them through that spiral. But even during the class challenges, the ones where the kids are at the, you know, it counts really hard against their grade, a whole one point or two, they sometimes go back to mew, but we force them.
We go. Mew and sixth grade comfy cozy and you know, very easy to manipulate to teaching some CoLab. And then Sean's got them investigating a lot more editors and it's right. It's that comfort zone, but you have to push them sometimes out of their comfort zone just to see what they can 
Nick Tollervey: [00:42:09] do. Oh, absolutely.
It's the same in music education, you know, wouldn't everybody be able to just be able to play the simple tunes that they know, but actually. To become a good musician. You've got to practice the stuff you don't know. That's why you practice and that's often painful, but after a while you get to enjoy that sort of stuff, you get better at it.
It's the same with coding. It's the same thing. So 
Sean Tibor: [00:42:31] speaking about going beyond, you've been up to quite a bit since we started, or since we last talked, you've been venturing into a lot of other spaces. Can you tell us a little bit about what's next or what compliments mew in the education space that you've been working on?
Okay. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:42:46] So I'm trying to work out how I get into this conversation because once I start, I won't stop. So hold on. I said, I'm inspired. Okay. And I'll start with my wife, my amazing wife. I'm inspired by what she does. She's a music teacher and. Happily we have, I don't know, 600 years worth of music education to draw upon.
And my music education. I went to a music conservatory to finish my training. That's where I met Mary and she's a cellist and all this sort of stuff. I was using textbooks that were written 300 years ago about, you know, how do you write a few, well, read this book from 60 97 or something like that that will tell you we as technical teachers of technology.
We've only been doing computers for 60 years teaching perhaps since the eighties, which is kind of when I was at school. Right. And so we haven't got that long arch of history where people can go, you teach it like this, and then there's going to be a revolution. No, you teach it like that. And then you've got a counter revolution and different ways of doing this sort of stuff.
And so I did what every good lazy engineer does. And. Try to sort of ask myself, well, surely somebody's done this sort of stuff before. And that's when I connected the dots between my experience as a music educator and what Mary is doing with her first access strings courses and things. And what. We do when we're trying to teach coding, because they're very similar projects, educational projects, you can't learn to code in three months, no matter what anybody else might say in the same way that you can't learn to play a musical instrument in three months.
I mean, to some extent you can learn to play, you know, you can play your three chords on the guitar after perhaps a couple of weeks, but could you say. You play professionally? Well, no. Anybody who plays like that will go, Oh, I'm not that good at the guitar. I can only play these three chords, but I'm enjoying myself as were.
So I started looking into the world of music education to work out well, how do music educators. Keep kids or any learner, keep the wind in their sails because this is a complicated, difficult fail, often fail in a high stakes situation. You know, we've all been in school concerts, you know, and there's always been that kid who's fallen off the back of the stage or, you know, played a wrong note or something like that.
You know, how do you help these people get to where they want to be? And. The other thing that I noticed is that when it comes to documentation or learning resources online, there are two extremes. There's the stuff that perhaps the three of us might use in the classroom, which is all, you know, hello world, make the led, blink, you know, can the robot trundle forward since there's something in front of it and turn right and then trundle off and, you know, there's that sort of stuff.
And then it stops. And then there's the stuff that I read all day every day, which is Amazon's, you know, API documentation for how you do. I don't know, ingress controlled in a Kubernetes cluster or something like that. You know, I'm not making that up. That is something I had to read today, but it might, I might as well be speaking cling on really?
Okay. And this is highly technical stuff and you wouldn't show that to a beginner. So we're two sides of a river. How do you forward that river? How would you help somebody you get from blinking lights to, you know, pushing a website to an AWS cloud instance or something and knowing what that means?
What's the equivalent in music, you know, it's being able to play three blind mice it's as if all of music education was either how to play three blind mice on the piano. And then Beethoven piano concerto. Right. You know, you've got to get from one to the other. And at some point concert pianists were learning three blind mice.
So what did they do to get to where they are now? And so I've been asking myself this question in the UK, we have a system called. Grading really, you have it in martial arts, it's just the colors of your belts. So if you're a white belt, you know, you're falling over your toes and you know, you, you can't even kick yourself out of custard sort of thing.
But when you're a black belt, you know, you look like Bruce Lee, your you're sort of breaking concrete with your eyelids. And, you know, you're taking on seven people at once and things like that, but there are. Belts in between my son does TaeKwonDo, which is why I know about this sort of thing. It's the same with music.
You start with grade one, which is three blind mice sort of level. After about six months, somebody could. Take their grade one and achieve that. And then you have grade eight, which is approaching professional level. There's musicality. You get it in ballet, you get it in lifeguards, in the UK. I'm sure it's similar to the world over basically they're stepping stones.
And when you start on the first stepping stone, you can't even see the other end of the river, but you can see perhaps two or three steps ahead of you. And you can see perhaps people who are on those steps and they look. Pretty cool. They're doing their martial arts or their music or their ballet and things.
By the time you get to those, you can look behind you and go, gosh, look at what I've achieved, or look at these people who are coming up. And yet you can see further to the other end of the bank. And so. I've been working with a bunch of well kids and parents in London until COVID got in the way and some other folks around the world to try and do something similar, but for coding.
So we call it code grades. You is a very important part of this because the first two or three grades the answer to, well, what do I need to download to get started is new. And so code grades are a series of steps that gets you to cross that bridge from. Hello world too. I wanted to play something on Amazon sort of level documentation.
And so that's, that's what I've been working on really, as you know, in my spare time with people getting feedback from folks and the way it works is quite simple. You make up a goofy project. So you have your itch to scratch and you present your project according to whatever level grade you're taking.
So grade one, we might want to see that you understand what a loop is of what conditionals are, you know, how to assign values to a variable, get input and output from the user simple sort of stuff. In fact, John, do you remember, you sent me that project where there's this wonderful picture of you wearing what looks to be, you know, shower.
Kind of calf and strange glasses and your student had a hypothesis that sir would get angry if you know, his temperature was rising and she could use this circuit Python thing that was cellar taped to the side of your heads to measure the temperature and so on and so forth. And in that 10 lines of circuit Python that she created.
And then the way that she described that project, which we featured on are made with mute. Blog actually, that is the perfect encapsulation of a grade one project. It's somebody. Making something cool and having fun. But of course, and this speaks to what you were talking about, Kelly, about pushing people.
You get to grade two, we expect a bit more and you know, by the time you're a grade five, six or seven, the higher levels, especially grade eights, we are saying, you know, we want to see your GitHub repository. We want to see that you're triaging books properly. We want to see the documentation, your unit tests, what's your continuous integration doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all of this stuff.
But you get there by doing all the baby steps. Previously. So it's a scaffolding ready to help you get to where you want to be to do the stuff that you want because. Just like with music, you might be happy playing just your three chords on a guitar because that's what you're into, but you might want to end up being scared.
Yeah. Or Brian May or someone like that, in which case you work like stinks. So yeah, maybe you want to be just somewhere halfway there. I don't know you stop when you, when you've achieved, you know, where you want to be, where you're level. So that's kind of the other education that I'm working on at the moment.
And hopefully. COVID kind of has got in the way really makes it hard to do anything when you're locked in a shed. Like I am, this is a podcast. So you can't see, but Sean and Kelly looking at me from my garden, shed broadcasting live that's quality 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:51:13] space in London, 
Nick Tollervey: [00:51:17] but yes, I'm close enough. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:51:20] I used to live in Rome, so.
Okay. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:51:22] Okay. Aware I am. Mark is just down the road by the way. But yeah, so that's what I've been doing. And now that lockdown we're coming, hopefully fingers crossed out of lockdown. I can start to reengage with folks who were preparing to take some grades who is examining these grades. Well, these are actually friends of mine who are professional coders.
So what you get at the end of it, you present your project. It's supposed to be like a friendly code review. You do some pair programming with this professional coder as well. So they get a feel of. Where you're at. I've tried to write the assessment process, which has done through a website in such a way that it makes it easy for them to actually very quickly score what you're doing and write comments and things.
And at the end of it, just like with music grades, you get some written feedback and you get a score and you get scores for different aspects of the coding that you've been doing as well. So you can see perhaps where your weaknesses are and you get suggestions and things like that. Of course, you get a certificate as well.
Now this is so important because. In computing. And I feel this, especially as well, because you know, I'm a tuba player. That's kind of what my undergraduate is. And, you know, imposter syndrome is a thing. And a lot of the time when I'm speaking at conferences or taking part in technical discussions at the back of my mind is if only they knew what I was, I think long queues, rarely, but you know, at some point they're going to say something and I'm not going to know anything about what they're talking about, but the thing about.
Having a grade or having someone exactly examine you is that now you've got somebody who is a professional coder has said, well, you have achieved the level required for grade five Python. And here's a, here's some feedback about that. And here's the certificate approves it. And because you are a professional.
Bestowing that kind of thing on to a person that they can't argue with that. And I know this, that, I just want to tell you a musical story here, being a tuber player, you don't get to play the tuber until you're kind of like 12, right? Because you start to grow at that age and then you're big enough to play the tuba.
And that was what it was to me. I didn't start music lessons until I was about 12 and a couple of years in my music teacher said to me, you should audition for the local youth orchestra. And I was horrified. I said, I can't do that. I'm not good enough for that. They're all big kids in that orchestra. And I'm only a little squirt or what are, you know, all the kinds of excuses that kids come up with.
And Malcolm said, but Nicholas, you passed your grade five and that's the minimum requirement for the orchestra. And they haven't got a tuber. I think you should audition. And I was like, Oh, I don't want to audition. But your grade five, Nicholas. You're good enough to do that. And I couldn't argue with him and cause he was, I imagined a little bit like you too, pushing kids out of their comfort zone, you sort of set you on here's the application form, fill it in our phone.
You'd have to make sure you've done it. And he did. And I got in and I felt 10 feet tall, thin. And it was because of that intervention by that teacher that I became a professional musician because Malcolm pushed me and. I got into this orchestra and that lifted me up and that's, cause I couldn't argue with him.
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:54:40] That's brilliant. That's brilliant. 
Sean Tibor: [00:54:42] So, and so I know we're coming kind of, to the end of the time we set aside here for people who want to learn more about code grades and about AMU, where can they find more information? How do they get involved in and what looks like help for you from the broader community?
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. 
Nick Tollervey: [00:54:57] We love getting feedback and help this, the important thing. So if you're asking yourself, Oh, you know, they probably don't want to hear from me. The answer is absolutely. We do. There are several places you can go. If you want to just learn more about mew and what's going on and how people use it.
We have a blog called made with doc mew, mew, top level domain on the internet, like.com or.org is actually malicious. So I've registered a website in malicious called made with. Don't you, that's the name of the website? That's the blog. That's where we announce where we have made new beats release or where somebody will write an article about how they're teaching with it.
This is where we put your article, for instance. There is also the website and you'll see, there's a pattern here and that's that code with dot mew under the Maricia space website. It's nice and sunny down there. I should go visit it someday. So code with mew is where you go to download new and we have tutorials there, how to guides and things like that.
And if you're a developer. There are links to our developer documentation there as well. And we have a chat channel on a service called gutter, which you can log into with your Twitter, get hub, maybe Google credentials, and that is a live chat. And we would that there's a support channel in there and you can come ask us questions or give us feedback or things like that.
There, there is also the get hub page get hub is where we host our source code and it's the. Central location where the software developers collaborate. And if you have a GitHub account, you can create an issue for us. So if you have a bright idea or you want to change something, or you want to submit a new message of the day or something like that, You do it through GitHub code grades?
Is it? No, I forgot. The name of the website is either code grades.org or co grades.com. I'll check that. I think it's code raise.com. 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:56:49] Yeah. Gates, grades.com. I'll put 
that 
Nick Tollervey: [00:56:52] in there. So that is currently in a holding pattern, but right now I'm spending my kind of lockdown in forced free time to actually create the next version of the website where you would be able to say, I want to.
Take grade one, Python. It arranges the time for you to meet with the developer online and all the kind of process and Gubbins and things that you need to get to get that working. So the first version of that, the alpha version will be coming out pretty soon. In fact, we did it for September because I've got some collaborators in Africa who actually want to use it.
So it needs to be finished. Yeah. That's it really, those are the places where you can find 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:57:28] out. Excellent. And we'll put all those in the show notes as I was typing while you were talking. Yeah. I'll 
Nick Tollervey: [00:57:34] make sure I send through sort of URLs and things as well, probably tomorrow now. Cause it's, it's getting right here in the UK, but yeah.
Nice. Well, 
Sean Tibor: [00:57:40] we'll wrap up then and just want to thank you again, Nick, for hopping on the recording with us. It's really great to hear from you and great to see you. It's been a couple of years since pike con in person. So it's always wonderful to reconnect. And we're really thankful for all you've shared with us today about mew and code grades and the pedagogy of teaching computer science that are of doing it well, and we just, again, we would love to have you back on for a future episode to talk more about.
Anything pretty much anything you want. So for us on teaching Python, you can send us an email through our website@teachingpython.fm. We're also at teaching Python on Twitter. Kelly is continuing to produce new items, new things for our teaching Python store, lots of fun stuff. I think I have a t-shirt about being able to light up unicorns coming in, in my daughter's size so that she can wear it, but just a lot of fun stuff that continues to happen in.
Now that are 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:58:38] really cute, 
Sean Tibor: [00:58:40] really cute ordered in this size for myself too, but that maybe for my next purchase. So, you know, you can find that on our website as well. I will make Kelly put the direct link to it in our show notes as well. So anybody who wants a unicorn t-shirt for coding, feel free to grab that.
And you can code that unicorn with me. So for teaching Python, this 
Kelly Schuster-Paredes: [00:59:00] is Sean, and this is Kelly signing off.