Sean Tibor: Hello and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 90, and it's all about equitable learning. My name is Sean Tibor. I'm a coder that teaches. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And my name's Kelly Schusterparedes, and I'm a teacher that coats. Sean Tibor: So, Kelly, we have a pretty exciting guest to share with everyone this week. We have David Cavallo joining us. And welcome. David Cavallo: David. Sean Tibor: It's wonderful to have you here. David Cavallo: Thank you very much. It's really a pleasure to be with you. Sean Tibor: So a brief introduction. Kelly, if you would share a little bit about David for everyone. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So I saw David's name in the book Things to do with a Computer Ford 50. And this is a great book. We shared it out on our podcast a couple of times, I think a while ago. And there's a lot of great people in there. Tom from Bird Brains wrote an article in there as Kelly. And I saw David's and I read his article, and it really connected to some of the things that I enjoy talking about, computational understanding South America. I mean, right there, it just stopped. And David is the director of San Jose Enavesion e d'sano Aventado in Chile, which is he's the director of Innovation Center in Advanced Design. He's a researcher at the Institute of Advanced Studies. David Cavallo: Usp stands for San Paulo, Brazil. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: San Paolo. Been there a junk professor at the Mindful Making Lab in Chile. And he focuses on learning and computation, particularly for improving learning for just equitable society. So as you can imagine, when we saw that, we were like, yes, we have to get him on our show. There's so many more other things he does. He's a distinguished visiting professor at UFSB, which is US. David Cavallo: Sul Dubaiya, the Federal University of South Dballia. Also Brexit. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, wow. David Cavallo: Although I'm not there anymore. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Not there anymore. He was the chief learning architect and vice President for education, One Laptop per Child research scientist and codirector with Seymour Patport of the Future of Learning Group at MIT Media Laboratory. And I love that he hates writing BIOS and addressing himself. So that's a good thing. I dressed him for him. So welcome. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you, David. David Cavallo: Thank you. I want to emphasize how important I think your podcast and other such things are that really to get deeper into the culture, the kind of things that we believe in that can happen through computation and learning with computation. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Thank you. We are really excited about the podcast, too. This is where most of my lesson plans come from. We talk to amazing people, and I go, that's a great idea. David Cavallo: So the pressure is on. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: The pressure is on, David. Sean Tibor: All right. So before we get into your background experiences, David, and before we get into our conversation, let's start in the same place we always do, which is the winds of the week. So a place where we can talk about something good that's happened inside or outside of the classroom and you can share anything you want. David will make you go first because you're our guest, and it's always fun to make the guests go first. David Cavallo: Oh, my gosh. When's the week when that we had this last week or it's just when you're going to mention it's. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: One you're going to mention if it happened this week. Awesome. Some people hopefully you're having a lot more wins in your life. So it could be as Kelly as I don't know. I'm trying to think of Sean, some of the Sean's silly ones. He is just being able to wake up and get to class on time. David Cavallo: Take our whims where we can. But I guess I really want to mention the kind of movement and excitement that's happening in Chile at the moment that there's a new government, a lot of young people, more women as ministers than men for the first time there ever. But also developing of a new Constitution that arose out of people looking at the inequality that was ongoing, the environmental crises that are happening, violence in society, and saying we really need to make it different. And so from seeing the lab, we're really working on a kind of computational tool for kind of like participatory planning for urban planning, urban development that is trying to give voice to people that don't usually get voice but using computation for it, because before we had kind of static design tools or we had just kind of talking your way through things and written, and that left a lot of people out, particularly in a country like Chile. So we're taking the things we get from programming computers and working with people that are new to it, but to express the ideas, the kind of things that you can do more computationally, like, Kelly, how do we look at it systemically? How do these different things fit together in terms of waste and Greening and all of that? So I'm taking that in our new mindful making lab at a different University in Chile as wins of the week, because it's really exciting. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That is exciting. Go ahead. Sean Tibor: It's definitely amazing. And I think it's a great example of what happens when people understand that they can make a change, that they're not powerless, that they have the ability to make a change, especially when they work with others. One of the things that I've appreciated so much about computational learning and teaching computational ideas to people is that it is very empowering. It is something that they can use to change whatever part of the world that they want to, whether it's the world that is just around them and just in their own family or their own household, all the way up to changing their country and changing the way that they work together and establish their place in the world. So I think that's a tremendous one to share and a really good one to call out and there's that level of excitement around it. It's a really important thing to do. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I can't add anything to it. You said it. Sean Tibor: All right, Kelly, your turn. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Okay, let's see my win of the week. So it's a new quarter of kids, so brand new group of kids. And did I have a win this week so far? I did. I actually sat there and I actually had a really good day yesterday, which was funny. And I'm going to tell the story as a win because sometimes starting a new quarter, you have to imagine right now I teach 6782 classes of each, four quarters in a year. So that six times. Four. That's 24 times. I teach the same thing. And I sat back, minus the couple that Sean taught earlier this year. I sat back and I was looking at the kids, and a lot of the kids that I'm teaching this quarter are ones that I have taught 6th and 7th grade. So I'm like, were you in my class, Mr. Tibor? And they're like, no, yours? Oh, yeah. Because half of them I taught them virtual learning. So they look a lot different. I just remember their names and just looking at them and talking to them. And then we were going over a few aspects in 8th grade after they had it, and I said, it's like riding a bike. And we started talking about code. And they just were, oh, yeah, you have to put an end in front of that input. And oh, yeah, that's when that object. And I was just like, yes, my work has paid off all these crying for the past three years, and now I'm getting to reap the benefit. And I didn't have that opportunity before because Sean taught 8th grade. So it was a nice win yesterday. It was a nice win just watching this last quarter of 8th graders before they go to high school. And Sean's probably tearing up because that was his moment seeing it. And so that was my win. Sean Tibor: That's a really good one. And that is definitely one of the most fun things, in addition to teaching people for the first time, but seeing them be able to recall and reapply their previous knowledge and be able to get going that much faster and feel that confidence of, oh, I already know how to do this. That's a big win. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, it was. How about you? You had a good one. Sean Tibor: You said, yeah, I have a really good one. And I have to say something that has never happened to me in 25 years. And it was a moment of connection that I didn't expect and I didn't anticipate. And it was straight out of the blue. And it was the most amazing win of the past. I don't know, several months. But the short version of the story is that I'm originally from Anchorage, Alaska. I was born and raised. I grew up there. And then I left for College and I haven't lived there since. I visited from time to time and my parents still live there and I have a bunch of extended family. But I live in South Florida now. And every day someone finds out that I'm from Alaska and they say I've never met anyone from Alaska. That's what I hear all the time. It's pretty common because for those of you who aren't familiar with United States geography, Alaska and Florida are about as far apart as you can get, about 5000 miles apart in very different in many ways, culturally and socially and climate and everything. But I live here now and I love it. I'm by the ocean. It's great. And on Saturday, I was wearing a T shirt that I had gotten the last time that I was in Anchorage. That was for the local University, the UAE Wolf. And I took my son to the park and he was playing on the playground and I was hanging out in the shade watching. And this woman came over and said to me, I know this is weird, but why are you wearing that T shirt? And I said, oh, well, I grew up in Anchorage and just wearing the local school shirt. And she said, well, I grew up in Anchorage also. We got to talking and it turns out that she went to the high school that was across town from mine, not far away. We graduated the same year from high school and have several mutual friends. And she and her husband and family have been living here in Florida, about 5 miles away from me for the last nine years. So we have this amazing connection. We got this moment to send a picture to our mutual friends of the two of us hanging out in South Florida together to kind of shock them a bit. And it turns out that she has children who are about the same age as my kids. So we're going to get them together for a playdate and hang out. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: My son's got a new friend. He's happy I made a new friend. Sean Tibor: But I can tell you this is the first time in 25 years that I've ever met someone from Alaska that I didn't know before, but knew people that I did so that there was that connection. And when I reflected on it, it occurred to me the combination of events of me wearing this particular Tshirt and the backstory is the only reason I have that Tshirt, because I'm not used to wearing Tshirts for other people's schools. I barely wear Tshirts for the schools that I went to, but I got it when I was there in September of last year for my uncle's funeral, who is the facilities director at UAA in Anchorage for many years. And every time I wear it, I think of him and I honor him by wearing the T shirt. It's just a small thing, but because of that I made a new friend and a new connection across the country that was surprising and delightful. So that was my win this week. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very nice. And not to switch really topics. Kelly, quick, but I'm really so excited to talk to David. But did you have any fails? Yeah, I have a major fail that I need help with, and I'm going to use this as a podcast thing and maybe you can solve it real quick. I ordered these, GEMMAS. Okay, they're not the Gemma Mo. I emailed Prophgy. I emailed Scott at Ada. They do not show up on my computer. And then when you plug them into a PC, you already know the answer to this, don't you? I plug them into a PC. It shows up as a trinket. This is only for Arduino Arduino. Sean Tibor: It does not support circuit Python. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It doesn't even show up. Sean Tibor: Right, because the USB drive of a circuit Python device is something that's built into circuit Python. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And I ordered Gemma MoS, but I think I got the wrong one. So if anybody wants Arduino, email me. I have about 40 of them. Sean Tibor: We will use them for something. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Another fail you learn every day. David, anyone? Sean Tibor: My fail this week is really home automation fails. That was my Pandemic project was to make my house. I wouldn't say a smart house, but maybe a little less dumb. And everything's been haywire this week, so lights won't turn off lights. Our bathroom light was on for three days straight until I figured out how to fix that. Just lots of little things. But I've made myself a little checklist of here's, all the problems and issues that I need to go resolve, and I'm just knocking them off one by one and apologizing profusely to my family as I go to make sure that they're okay with it. So that's been my fail this week, and it's not a major deal. It's just an annoyance, but something that I can go fix. David Cavallo: At least that reminds me of what I say. I wasn't going to say that at first, but it is my epic fail, which is that I've been saying for years I wanted to learn to play the cavaquino, which is like the small string instrument. It's like, I think it's about an octave off from a ukulele, but it's used in Samba here on this wonderful music. And so I'm like, I'm going to learn it next year. This is my year to learn it. So my wife gave me a kawakino and it's like, okay. And my epic fail is that I still haven't even seen the damn thing. And so that really is my epic fail. I hope that this inspires me to get busy. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Okay, I'm going to send you the link that we did with our 6th grade advisory class today on time management. And you have 30 minutes blocks and you have to schedule these things, otherwise they don't get done well. David Cavallo: That'S exactly right in my mind, I'm telling myself, all right, because I usually put too many things on my plate, and then they always take longer than I expect. It was one of the things in software that I could never understand. How do you want me to tell you how long this project is going to take if we've never done it before and it's nontrivial? Twelve months, 20 months, who knows, right? So I'm really bad at that. And so it's always been my excuse. Like, all right, I'll just finish this and then I'll get to it. And of course, you finish that, and that takes longer. So you have three more things on your stack. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's crazy. That's crazy. Sorry. I'm going to jump in on Sean, tell us a little bit about your bio. First of all, do you code? I mean, that's a silly question, but do you code? And then what do you code in? David Cavallo: It's changed. When I worked at the AI lab at Digital a long time ago, everybody would say two custom codes. You'd build big systems for them, and they'd say, oh, we're going to look at the problem and see what it is, and then we'll choose the most appropriate language for that problem. But at that point, it was a lie because everybody programmed on a complex system in the language they were most comfortable in. But the world's changed since then. And I think what's become good now is that you really do have those languages that if you're doing this and it's communication on the web, whatever it might be, you have languages that are better for it because they take care of some of the stuff you don't want to be bothered with. It doesn't get you closer to solving the problem, Kelly. It does, but it's not the big way of thinking about the problem. So that's changed. And so now it's like because of so many things going across the browser, there's JavaScript. But I think for learning and for beginning, I'm still very much in the Python camp because it's interpreted, which I think for students is really important that you do something and you see what changed because of what you did. And you don't go through the extra steps of compiling, et cetera, et cetera. And it has tons of libraries, so it can get you into different kinds of places to do things. And then as you move forward further, it also has nice ideas and stuff so that development debugging environments, you can do serious things in them and not just get stuck. So changes. And I'm much more eclectic than I used to be, but I think it's a good thing. I think it's a sign of advance. Sean Tibor: The only thing I would add to that in terms of what I've been appreciating more and more about Python lately as well, is that it feels like the language is a thin layer on top of the thinking. Right. So that you are thinking about the things that are interesting and important to solve, and you're not spending time on the things that are not interesting are not critical to solving the problem that you really want to solve. Right. Would you agree with that? David Cavallo: No, absolutely. I think that's exactly right. Because especially working with students or people that are new to programming, you want that thin layer there. You want them to really be focused on, even to the existential point. It's like, why should I care about programming? Well, you want to make something happen, you want to see something, you want to understand something. And so the less the fewer layers that you have in between that, all the better. You want to think about the actual project. And that's that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It was funny today we had a class challenge. I do little class challenges. This is a second day, mind you. This is how mean of a teacher I am. They came in the 7th graders. I was like, what are we going to do today? What are we going to do today? And they're all talking and I'm like, class challenge, what? And I was kind of getting a little frustrated with this group because they're very talkative and they like to give up a lot. This is a particular group of 17 kids that I've known last year. They were the same way. And I said to them, if you can't even write the problem in English, then you're never going to code it the way you want it to. And so they said, what? I said, look at the problem. And the problem was taken was one of Sean's writings, his code. So it's a little bit empty. Not really, but it writes it out like a word problem. So it said something like, we're going to calculate to see if a triangle is a triangle or not based on three angles taken a number for every single angle on a separate line. And here's a sample of what the output would be. Right. And the kids were like, I don't even know how to do this. I said, okay, in English, in the comments, write your first step. Well, what do you mean? I'm like, what's the first thing you think you have to do? It says on the board. And it was an interesting take. Some of the kids I have a kid that has only been coding for two days, solved the problem because he was like, okay, what is angle A? What is angle B? What is angle C? Okay, if I add angle A? And he wrote it, and I was laughing and I was like, I like you, you're cool. We're keeping you. You've only been in this school one year. I like you. And then I had kids that I know could solve the problem in code, but they couldn't formulate the question because the code, like you said, Python was such an easy language for me to pick up as a never code before person because I could say it in English. And so it's one of those days if you want to be really mean to your students. David Cavallo: You could take Sean's story, get them. How would you program to find out what are the two furthest points from each other, from the US, push it a little bit, because then you say, remember, the Earth is a sphere. And so it may not be a straight line on a plane. It may be. And what would you choose from? But how would you do that? One, what struck me is that it's a pretty cool kind of challenge. I love to do those challenges with students. Well, in a couple of ways, because one, you could say you're going to hit these in your projects. I really work a lot with students, with projects. And so the challenges are going to be the things in the language that help you to think about, oh, I can use this part in this project or things there. And then that's where we'll get a lot of things running in the classroom. But also it's like push people out of your comfort zone. And wasn't as much a programming project, but one of our projects here. So the Pontanolas region in Brazil, that's the world's largest inland wetlands, I believe. So it's long the mountains and in the border. So we're on a project there, and we're like, okay, make some models and using trash, but little programmable devices. It was before Arduino, but like Arduino and computers and programming to do this and make something. And so the day we arrived there, the temperature was 90 deg and the humidity was 90%. And so, man, it was hot. So what do the students want to do? The students wanted to how do we cool down the classroom? And it was a residential school. How do we cool down the classrooms and the dormitories and the classrooms is all the buildings are small and they're just with windows on just two sides, you couldn't quite get across. Ventilation had an angled roof, and there was a little window up at the top over the door. And you think, all right, how do you cool this down, given that you only have a few fans? How do you cool this down for everybody? And when you say cool it down, what does it really mean? So the students at that school, middle school students looked at us and said, well, you guys are all from MIT. You must know this. Exactly. We're like, man, beats the hell out of us. So it was great. They saw that when we took that challenge and we David in with them, that was like a key moment, that it wasn't like we weren't afraid to show that we didn't know or let's choose another project because we're totally confused. But it was a really good thing. Sean Tibor: You know, what I find it interesting, too. The most important part or the most interesting part of it is not the answer. Right. It's setting up the problem. It's defining the problem. And then the process that you go through and the various paths that you take. I mean, to Kelly's point, we can put literally any problem on the board. Right. And if it's a well designed problem, it means that students have almost an infinite number of approaches that they can take to solving it. And there may not be one. Right answer. I mean, something like calculating the number of triangles, is this a triangle or not based on the angles? Yeah. That's probably yes or no. Unknown: Right. Sean Tibor: It's a binary outcome. But for a really well designed problem, the answer becomes the least important part of the whole thing. Right. Especially from a learning perspective. Have you seen that in other places, like in the work that you've done with, say, One Laptop Per Child or with the Mindful Making lab that you're working in now? Is that something that you encourage? How do you encourage that? How do you bring that part to the forefront? David Cavallo: Yeah, absolutely. I think the key thing referred to this is that if we're really thinking about learning because basically, again, who knows, ten years from now, our kids are in middle school now, so they'll be in their twenty s. Ten years from now, what are they going to have to face? What will they need to know how to do? And it's unlikely you have a simple answer right off the top of your head for these things. You really need to have the spirit that yeah, I like challenges. I want to dive in on this, that it's like, oh, I don't know. How do I start to figure this out, given that I don't know. They'll call it resilience, but have the capacity to keep at it until we get a solution. And this is what I tried to write about, an emergent design, which is basically a lot of the times as you're going through this, things pop up. Right. You don't have a total view at the beginning and then something you see whether advantageous or disadvantageous. And then it's like, how do you build on that or how do you get around that and do that? Language in education, unfortunately, is kind of Minsky used to call there's too many like suitcase words. And a suitcase word is like just take a suitcase, pile a bunch of stuff in it, and it's all there. So like project and problem. Working with a group of teachers in Tennessee a couple of years ago, we define project and problem exactly the opposite, but exactly in the same way. Right. So we always talk about project based learning, trying to say, here's the project, here I'm going to do. And as you build your project, all these problems show up and you solve those. But for them, it was the exact opposite. Oh, yeah. Do you have a good problem at the beginning? And then I don't know how they define project, but it was basically so it was the meaning and intent that was the key thing that we call it this. You call it that? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. I was thinking when you were talking, I'm like, oh, yeah, all these words are popping up at your time. I'm like, oh, yeah, design thinking. Oh, yeah, critical thinking. Oh, problem solving. We've been so worried about all these names of educational what's it's that we forget the major point of the story. The major point of the story is getting kids to think, how does that happen while giving them something to solve? If we give them all the same thing to solve, or if everyone has, like Sean said, the same exact cookie cutter answer, there's really no thinking or problem solving involved. It's just getting, as Will Richardson said a couple of weeks ago, our thing is just being schooled how to solve your answer versus learning how to solve a problem. David Cavallo: That's where computation is really critical because your program works or it doesn't. Right. It satisfies your objectives or not. And you have this kind of concrete feedback about, am I thinking about this? Well or not? That's not just a matter of opinion. And then you get kids as they really start to get into it. You get this idea like you can have in mathematics also about, well, that's a beautiful proof. That's really nice code. So it's not just did it work, but even like, what ideas do they use? How was it put together? Was it expressed eloquently and let's say in history or current events is like to take the horrors that are going on now. It's like, should they enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine? Nobody has the right answer to that. Right. And you can take arguments on both sides and then you just have to go through that. And this is why I really think both the computation and the mathematics and education are so important, because it's the only place you can really prove something or disprove something, show that it works, or show that it doesn't work. And as the projects get more sophisticated, you have to think in more sophisticated ways in order to deal with them. And it's shareable. So it's like the way that other people can comment. You can see what it do. You can include other people's ideas. But it's one of the reasons I think no matter what you go into, it's really an important talent to develop. Sean Tibor: The other role that I like that computation plays is that the two different I'm sure it's many different levels. There's kind of the computation that you can hand off to a device versus the computation and the thinking process that you must keep inside your head. And I always think back to when I was growing up and I took a long pause from being involved in education from after grad school until I started teaching again. But when I was growing up, there was always the Disclaimer, well, you're not always going to have a calculator with you, so you're going to need to know how to do this computation or this calculation on paper or in your head. And literally since I left College, I've had a calculator with an arms reach of me ever since. Right. David Cavallo: Or a phone. Yeah. Right. Sean Tibor: Now it's even more than that, which is you're not always going to have an encyclopedia with you. Well, I kind of do. I have these information access devices. I have computational devices that are available to me. And when you extrapolate out the direction that vector that it's taking in terms of the capabilities of those devices, it makes the importance of them and the importance of understanding what they can do well and what you can do well as a thinker to be even more important. So this idea that having a calculator nearby is a fantastic tool and it helps you offload those calculations and those computations that are not necessarily core to your problem or maybe things that you don't want to spend your time on to do computational devices in addition to just the calculations. But the programming that we do, the coding that we do, the way that we set up the problem enables the person, the learner to really focus their learning on the things that are those more abstract, the relational, the making connections, the problem solving, and away from the rote calculations that we've emphasized in the past, like when I was growing up. As you think about computations and as you think about how to emphasize that, have you seen anything that you can share with other teachers and other educators around how to appropriately position this idea of calculations and offloading calculations versus keeping some of the computation and the thinking in your own head? David Cavallo: Yeah, it's our challenge now. Right. And I think Seymour used to say something like making a fire used to be an essential skill. Right. Not so much in the last few centuries. Right. That you've gotten past that. So, yeah, it used to be. But now, no. And it was never the most important part about developing mathematical and computational thinking. Right. It was always this other stuff. And I think it was where on my personal trajectory, I went wrong because when I was young, I was really fast at being able to calculate quickly and correctly. And then when I had to do real mathematics, I'm thinking, hey, I'm great at math, and all of a sudden it's like, oh, my God, I don't know what this is, where the deep part of the mathematics is. This is why we would care about it. And it's why. Yeah. Offloading it to machines. Absolutely. Why bother with that? And I think it is some of the most inspirational part about working with Seymour and working at the lab at MIT was that this was the thinking, but that computation opened up to this rich doing of mathematics, of doing real mathematics and not just arithmetic. It opened up things that were really hard to think about otherwise. And then you realize it's not that, oh, I'm not good at math. It's like, no, I didn't really have the right environment in which to do math or think about math and all of that. Other people have picked this up. Now Conrad Wilson has the book The Math Fix, which I like, and keep Devlin from Stanford. He does these nice projects in high school level but really needs to be all the way through school. So the hard part is how do you affect this change? How do you get it? So that people say, oh, no, this is an essential skill and you're robbing our kids from the chance to develop because you're focusing on this other stuff as well as even from the supporter side. If you take the depth and the meaning out of the mathematics in order to make it more palatable, you're actually making the problem worse. And again, this is where I think computers because make a difference because it opens up so many more spaces for this exploration, investigation, for projects, for problems, by programming. You're still expressing your ideas in a formal language and you have to express it well. Where the bigger part is, how do I solve this, as you were saying. But now there's so many more things that can happen. And so it isn't only you have the chance for diversity in this learning by doing diversity of thought, diversity of interests, diversity of approaches that was too rigid before. And a lot of people just fell out of it either because they didn't see the purpose or they never Kelly quite got this part and then everything build on that later. So instead of thinking of the strong things in Psych of young children really developing mathematical knowledge through their interaction in the world, and then when these things come together so the classic example of like, little kids will say 125-7312, right? And they're happy, they know the names of the numbers, but then they'll also do things like, all right, help set the table for we're having two more people and everybody has a plate and everybody has a fork and all of this. And you get this mapping. So you get to join between ordinality and cardinality. And then all of a sudden there's this huge boost of what they do. And it really is the mathematics for understanding the world and things that you can do in order to get that. Now we really extend that because the way of representing, the way of interacting with it isn't just through written symbols on paper. Nothing wrong with them. I'm not saying don't do that, but I am saying is that it's really extended by the kind of things we can express computationally to do all different kind of things. And man, this for me, this is important. But getting that change in perception is the key part towards getting real change. So that it is. I mean, of my failed proposals as my fail of the decade, even, is that when MIT campus first became totally wireless, there was wireless throughout the whole campus. A professor from mechanical engineering. And I said, you know, lecture labs aren't necessarily the best way to teach this stuff, particularly in introduction to Engineering courses. You have the professor, who typically, usually, almost always is the most knowledgeable and experienced in the ideas, maybe not as knowledgeable about the newest tools that are there. Right. But really, in terms of the ideas they are. So why do we have them just give the lecture and then you go to the lab a couple of days later and you work with someone less experienced in order to do your lapse. When we have everything wireless and digital, why don't we just do this right in the classroom, take some of the problems, work through them with the professor, get the kind of thinking. But that got shut down on the basis of, well, it was good enough for you, it's good enough for them. But now it's like we really can rethink and restructure how we approach all these other things where computational approaches really help. Sean Tibor: Interesting. I'm going to go I have a really good one for this. So my son is six years old and he's in first grade, and they're teaching him a methodology for doing addition of larger numbers. Right. So it actually ends up being a recursive approach where you work down to a base case where you have all of your numbers reduced down to single digits, and then you can add those concatenate those digits together to get the final answer. And it was interesting because he's very proficient at this. David Cavallo: Right. Sean Tibor: He can do it like give him the numbers and he can set it up and he can do the problem. But then I had the conversation with him to say there's an idea behind this that you're using called recursion, which is that you keep repeating this and breaking it down until you get to, like a base case. David Cavallo: Right. Sean Tibor: Something where I didn't call it the base case, but until you get down to the individual digits and then you can put them all back together and reassemble it, and that idea is called recursion. And so you should go in and blow your teacher's mind by saying the next time you do this. Well, that was a really nice recursive problem and see what they say. Right. David Cavallo: You've been talking to your father again, haven't you? Sean Tibor: They know, but it occurred to me that we're teaching these methods that are an interesting way of solving a problem. And this is one of many methods that he's learning, they're giving him options. But this idea of teaching it as recursion by even saying that it has the ability to go down to a simplest case and then reassembling everything is not a concept that I learned until College. Right. No one ever called it recursion when I was learning it. But just having the awareness of these concepts in addition to the rote skills is, I think, an area where we can start to make these changes. So as we teach computer science, there's the way of teaching it to say, here's the syntax and here's the things to memorize, and here's the idea to copy and paste and reapply or change the parameters to make it work versus let me explain the thinking behind this. Let me explain the methodology or the approach that we're taking. So that to your point, those ideas where I may be more knowledgeable with my experience can be shared and adopted by the students so that then they can take those ideas and apply new ways of thinking and new ways of implementation and implementation around it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm jumping in there because this ties in a little bit. So this was my thought process between the both of you. So one of the biggest issues in my mind and what I see and how I deal with it constantly is coming up with that computational problem. So we're used to it, I think in our classroom, Sean and I, and I did design thinking. So everybody had this agency and everyone made a different project. And it's really hard because at the end of the day, we have to grade it. Right. So for most teachers and this is a bad generalization, I apologize in advance if this makes someone cringe. But most teachers were not taught in that manner, and they do not know how to assess somebody's solution that is completely opposite. For example, if a solution seems extremely easy, but it solves the problem really well, is it less worthy of an A than a person who worked 40 hours to develop a really complex, like, Rube Goldberg solution that doesn't really solve the problem as efficiently? And I think a lot of teachers come up with that issue. What would you say? Like, how do teachers come up with these problems, one, when they probably never were schooled that way, and two, when they probably don't know how to assess? So what kind of recommendations? Being a person who helps solve major problems in real life situations, what could you give as some idea, blow my mind, solve the world educational system? David Cavallo: Well, that's exactly right. There's a nice book by Kwami Anthony Apaya. What's it called? Moral code. But he takes four huge issues binding feet of girls in China, duels slavery. I forget the fourth. And it's like, how do they change? Sometimes in education, we get told it's like, well, you got to pilot it, you got to approve it. You got to do this kind of rigorous testing on it, and then somehow it's going to be magically added to the system and it doesn't work like that. Right. You get these big paradigmatic changes, not just by that. Although showing these contradictions is important. Right. So it should be that you say, show kids great learning, especially for us when they haven't had that opportunity before. The teachers didn't have the opportunity before. And you show the results should say, yeah, why are we doing it in this way where so many kids fail? But it hasn't. But it is. Right. So you need these kind of examples to keep building up that make us question some of these things about if the grading and assessment are driving what we do and we know that the grading and assessment is far from perfect, we've got everything turned around backwards. So how do you start getting things realigned is by showing these contradictions, making these things happen because it should be grading. I've had the luxury of teaching at a University level where you can say, I have an AI grading scheme and they go, AI, this can't be good. And you say you get an A or you get an I incomplete until you get your A by doing the work. Because the point that you showed is like, and you see that as kids get older, you really see this. You have this student who was just struggling, failing, and all of a sudden they made a kind of breakthrough and they went forward. Are they as far advanced as some of the other kids in class who were ahead? No. But in some ways for me, they deserve the best grade or some that really create. I'm used to tell students like this all the time from the beginning of the class, which was that don't just do this really short, limited project that you know you can do and you knock it out successfully. I prefer if you take something really hard, really big, only get partway there. But show, yeah, you're really on your way of getting there. That also values more. On the other hand, you don't want to, you know, so this part of making it competitive or especially the schools where it's like you have to grave on this set curve. It's like, come on, what is this helping when you get seen point where students said, oh, I missed class because I was really sick or this happened in my family, I missed two weeks and the students won't share notes with me because they're worried, oh, well, you missed it. I'm going to do better on the test and you don't want to curve. Those things are just getting the way of learning. Let's just accept that. No, but we still have to work. You don't want to get fired on certain kinds of things. And so you try and make it better and you still try and make it go forward. I think we started to look at system change as a learning problem, and that helped a lot. And so we started talking about stealing from economics of microeconomics and Macroeconomics. On a micro level, you're like working with these kids or this classroom or even this school, and we're doing these kinds of things. And how do you advance that? But at the macro level, it's these kind of system things that can really inhibit practice or really expand practice. When teachers get rewarded for computers got into the schools because of really adventurous, really creative, really wonderful teachers. That's where they first came from. And these teachers did wonderful things almost without exception with kids doing this way back when with very simple computers. But then it kind of got standardized. And not that standards themselves are bad, but that you can't adjust and it became too restricted and you lost what was good. And we started teaching people things in the name of computer literacy, like Microsoft Office and stuff. You're like, come on, no, teach them how to build one. But that's not computer literacy. Right. But we've advanced since then, and we advanced because of you, other teachers, the teachers that listen to you and others doing more things and pushing on these boundaries and not saying, oh, I got to follow this set thing, but finding your way and your voice with it. In the project in Thailand, when we first got going, we were able to take MIT as an independent study period. So we took January and we made because we needed to go to lots of places. So we made teams of three. One person that really had a good understanding of learning, one person that really had a good understanding of the technology and someone that could speak Tie. Okay, we sent them all these different places with the idea of like, the teachers and some of the kids. Sometimes we're able to do with both would, you know, program learn. The program would make projects start to get used to project based learning instead of the kind of road construction, do things with Lego, robotics and stuff like that. And so I think, okay, after this month, everybody's going to be in relatively the same place, and then we can keep building from that. But no. And it was so dumb on my part not to realize, of course it's going to happen. Well, 30 different people went to ten different places. It was actually more than that. But each one had their own passions and things. So one was a documentary filmmaker. So in that place and the head of the center, there was Bump photography. So all of a sudden, this part about constructing and making using computational and digital tools started to include for the whole country what they called photojournalism of telling stories in digital format, which was, Holy cow, that was great. Someone else worked in this kind of Indigenous area in the north, and people coming from really kilometers and kilometers away. So they made a digital magazine so that they could be shared across all these places. And then that's what they did. So each place kind of took on the ideas of the people that went there and their enthusiasm and their passion and being open enough for this liberated the teaching, liberated the students. But then what we're able to do is start to spread people to different places also. So this place wasn't the only place of photojournalism in this place, the place of using robotics for agriculture. And they started to spread and mix because not everybody in the same place is going to understand the same things. So it was this part about just as we've accepted that students don't just learn something because we told them nobody has changed. Most people accept that. Yeah. It's not so simple, but we haven't gotten that far with change in school systems. We try to write the best plan or have the best reform and then assume that all the teachers and administrators and everybody the parents are going to understand what's meant in this plan and then all of a sudden switch and start doing things in a different way. Of course not. Systems need to learn, and these kind of things need to learn. And you need to be as thoughtful about systemic learning and as thoughtful about implementation as we are about working with kids. Now, I haven't even gotten to it. I had comments from Sean. Go ahead. Sean Tibor: It's making me think about how impossible it is to separate the personalities of the teachers and of the administrators from what they're teaching. Right. And that we may have this mythical thought of a standard like this ideal we're going to be teaching that every student is going to know all of the same things because they've been taught to the perfect curriculum. But that's kind of like making it homogenized. Right. Even if we could do that, is that what we want? Right. Because students learn in different ways. Teachers teach in different ways. And the best things happen when we can marry those two together in exciting, unexpected in different ways. That's where the real learning happens. Right. It's not from achieving all the check boxes on the curriculum plan. It's by going beyond that. David Cavallo: Yeah. You wouldn't want everybody you wouldn't want the teachers personality values to be divorced from the kids. You don't want them to be enforced so that you're getting that because you don't believe what I do. But of course not. But is Carol Sperry, who was a New York City school teacher, and then she and colleagues opened the New York computer school. She always told us she worked with us in time and she's done amazing stuff. She says it's all based on relationships and it should be. And that is what makes human social learning so strong. And it's what in a lot of ways lost going to Zoom when Kelly said, it's like I'm seeing now in the flesh, really for the first time, as opposed to this little square in my screen and think how much better that makes it, which also often points to the ways that we tend to disempower really great technologies because we use them in ways that obviously it's not as good as being together in a group. It's better than not being able to be together at all. But let's use the computers for where they really have moved the world forward so much, much more than just in this other way that it's kind of like not so powerful. Kelly, I've stopped you three times. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So please, no, it's okay. I just take notes. Anyways, so I was thinking because we get this question a lot about sharing our curriculum, and I haven't been able to nail it down really, because not to say that we're completely unique, but I do believe I didn't get into coding because of the people I met who tried to teach me how to code. I'm not a coder. I was a biology major. Rote learning was my thing. Tell me to memorize the parts of a nucleus and cell. I'm on it and parts of the bones. But I think what the difference is, Sean, when we were teaching and how we developed our course was we have basic minimums. And I think this would go the same for any course out there. I would go to any school and say, this can happen, but our basic minimums are one. Can they code? What definition is that? It could be anything. Can they code internal? Can they write simple username password? Can they code first? And if they do not know how to code or do something yet, can they search for a possible solution to help them solve it? And I think we've bet and made our whole curriculum on that. Everything's at a basic level of that and everything that we do above and beyond is just icing on the cake. So that's what I got from all of you guys talking. Sorry, that was my summary because we have five minutes left and we could stay with you forever. And I'm going to say this before Sean says if you ever need someone to come to Chile to help all your teachers learn Python, we are the ones to go. I speak somewhat Spanish. Python's, English. Sean Tibor: I'm a really nice person and sometimes funny. So I haven't always that no. David Cavallo: It would be great. Sean Tibor: I think it really brings up an interesting point here. David, do you think you articulated it very well? Is that intuitively? Everybody knows this. This is something that everybody knows, even if they haven't thought about it, because no one ever says that 7th grade English curriculum was the best, right? Oh, I loved it so much. You can tell they put the time into it. Now they say my 7th grade English teacher was the best she cared about me. She taught me things in a new way. I remember the things that she taught me because of who she was or that 9th grade physics teacher was amazing because he did these labs with us that I loved. And the way he got us to learn was because he was really funny or any of those things along the way. It's not about the curriculum. It's about the person that is creating that environment for learning. So I think maybe we should change our standard response to say, the important thing that we're sharing is not our curriculum, it's you. You are the one that is the most important thing in the learning, and we are here to help you and support you with the conversations that you need, the training that you need to think differently about these things, the skill development, the mindset, the approach, not the here's your curriculum. There is no perfect curriculum. It's the people and the relationships that matter. David Cavallo: Yeah, it's really true. And people also value more the idea of narratives. So that how you think about things. How this kind of goes is being really important. And so you have the idea of relationships, which you build better, not just by one person talking the whole time and everybody else kind of taking notes, but by doing things together. And that is where your values, your ideas, the creativity really shows up. And then doing things where the teacher is also doing, Kelly, this is what you want to get. The last time I taught you the intro computation course, a couple of things with that. One is that all the students had cell phones in this class in Brazil, and I asked them, how many apps are coming from Brazil and none or very few. How many apps did you make? You put any app on your phone? And that was, like, blew their minds. Like, why would you try to do that? Started the class then, but it was a nice music video. Popular music kind of really good, although I played it so often as I was developing the material, I kind of got tired of it, and I worked through how it has an animation as the music video to the music. I started the class, like, how would we make this? What would you think about? And we started to deconstruct it together, not deconstructed together. Then look at it deconstructed and then modify it in their own kind of way. So, like, reading programs as much as writing programs and doing it to do something creative and not just like, how do you work through a four group or something like that? Doing the things together made it much more interesting for everybody because I know when I teach, if I'm teaching something I don't like, I'm a really lousy teacher. Sean Tibor: Have you ever had one of those moments where and I'm starting to feel this where you realize just how many different things you've been involved in over the course of your career and how they start to become cumulative, like the effects of having these different experiences and different portions of your both education, the work that you've done tend to build on top of each other and layer on top of each other in the way that you do your current work today. I mean, just looking at your bio, you're more than just the words that are on the page. But someone that has been involved in a lot of these key moments, working at the MIT Media Laboratory or working with one laptop for a child, these have been kind of key milestones in learning and computation. But as the person who's lived through that, how does that kind of affect the way you view the world today? David Cavallo: How much time do you have? I think what's important from my point of view is that no matter what I was doing, the focus is always on learning and learning from it and then what you're actually contributing. So trying to be in the position where your ideas and your actions can really matter in as many dimensions as you want, but also that you do build from previous experience. You don't want each thing to be such a discreet experience that then there's no continuity. And other things I admired about Seymour was that from the beginning, and this is since the early sixty s, the focus was on how programming computers can really help for learning in ways that other media do not. But this is in the early Sixties, so of course, everybody said it was crazy. Even Watson from IBM said maybe a school system will have a computer for data processing, but kids won't program them with rudimentary computers, still doing extremely powerful things in the development of Logo and how you could think about do mathematics in a different kind of way. But what changed and what? I admired each project that Seymour went to, and I think we've carried this on built from learning from the previous ones. What went well, what didn't go so well? How can you improve it so that it wasn't, again, a bunch of discreet experiences, but we're constantly thinking because nobody has the answers to any of these things. How do we learn best? Well, we're still figuring that out. What's the best way to use computation? Alan Kay likes to say we're still in the Stone Age in regarding these things. And so what will computation look like 30 years from now? We hope very different from now, but it doesn't mean well, don't do anything now. Until then, you only get to the future by hacking your way through the present. Sean Tibor: Well, David, thank you for doing this with us. Thank you for doing this together. My kids are welcome. It's been great to chat with you. I know Kelly has got students banging at the door, ready to go. It's been an absolute pleasure and I know we would love to continue our conversation in the future, so thank you very much for joining us. I'm going to sign us off here just by saying if you have thoughts for David for us ways to contribute to the conversation. You can find Kelly and I on Twitter. I'm at Smtber. Kelly is at Kelly Parad. You can always submit feedback to us through our website. David Cavallo: Also. Sean Tibor: It's teaching Python. Fm so for teaching Python. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This is Sean and this is Kelly signing off.