Sean Tibor: Hello, and welcome to teaching Python. This is episode 109. And I guess the topic this week is what did we do over our podcast? Sabbatical. My name is Sean Tyver, and I'm a coder who teaches. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And my name is Kelly Schuster Peretz, and I'm a teacher who codes. Oh, I got sean, you're supposed to. Sean Tibor: Kelly, we haven't done this for a while. Who teaches? That's what I do. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. Did I say a coder who teaches? A teacher who codes? You're a coach. Yeah, we said it right. Sean Tibor: Honestly, these days, after your boot camp, you're like, equal parts both. I think you could go either direction on it now. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. I'm a teacher who learns. Can I do that now? I have been on a full on learning journey, and by the sound of my voice, you can tell this is like, how the past six months has been exhausted. Exhausted. Sean Tibor: But honestly, so much good progress. Like, you're telling me about all the things you're doing. I'm like, that's so cool. I haven't even touched that yet. You're getting to build that out and learn it. You're making some major progress in a very short amount of time, and I'm really excited for you. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I know. I'm excited to share that. We got one more week and my team and I are finishing up on our product and we'll talk about that in a second because it's something that I've been dying to do forever and this is just like the start of it. So we'll talk about that. I'm just so excited. And you, and you. Sean Tibor: Why don't we start with the wins of the week first and then we can get into all the what we did. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Wins of the week. Yes. Sean Tibor: So, Kelly, what's your win of the week? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Just being able to sit and talk to you. We had a nice little chat beforehand, which is something we never really do before a podcast. And I'm going to say that's my win today sitting down and both of us having a time off. I have a day off today, so it was nice. No school. No school. No school. So just being able to sit and relax and know that the end is near is a huge win. My project, like I said, is on the 25th and then the last day of school is the first. So I am just looking forward to that. And I guess it's a good feeling. And I think that's a huge win for me to know that both the school here and the boot camp is almost over. Sean Tibor: I know that feeling. It is really nice to sit down and talk again. I've been thinking about the upcoming podcast season, right. What are we going to do when we come back? And we've been off running and doing our own things for so long, and I just thought to myself, man, I just really miss Kelly, and I'm glad that we get a chance to sit down and record together again. Because as nice as it was to be on Sabbatical, it's nice to be back 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So what are we going to do? We're going to share you're going to share some things that you've been learning in the past, what, three months? Two months. How long will we be at out? Two months, right? Sean Tibor: Yeah, it's been two months. I think our last episode was back in March, and we talked about hardware and all kinds of fun stuff. And the next few months, we've got some guests that were lining up to talk about more fun things. Everything from hardware and Python web development. I want to get Eric Mathis back on the show and just have some conversations about generative AI. And a lot of that is coming out of PyCon. There's just some really cool interactions and engagements there. And I felt like I was doing it wrong. Like, the entire time, I felt like I was doing PyCon wrong because you weren't there with me to do it. So we have to find a way to get you back next year in Pittsburgh. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. It was really sad watching from the classroom. I felt kind of like COVID, like watching it. I had it on big screen and watching the talks with Reuben and Nisha Talagala and who else? Some other you had a couple of others that talk sorry, I can't remember off the top of my head, but it was nice. I had it on the screen and all the kids were like, Is that Mr. Tibor? Is that Mr. Tiber? I'm like, yes, that's Mr. Tiber. Why aren't you there? And I'm like that's a great question. We'll discuss that later. Sean Tibor: Rethinking her life choices in real time right there in the classroom. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's such a busy April. April was crazy. But yeah. Sean Tibor: Let'S go through some of it. What are the things you've been learning in your boot camp? What are the major highlights? Your sister got married over the sabbatical, which was really cool. Yeah, sister got I mean, I'm assuming she got married. You didn't actually tell me that. It happened. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It happened. She got married, which is a win. And we won't go into all that. But yes, that was great. We had the Innovation Institute, which was also great. I got to meet a lot of amazing people who were teaching Python, which was funny, and had a great argument with a woman who is at high school teaching JavaScript, and her boss wants Python. And he was like, I'm loving this conversation. Like, anytime, anytime. I'm so in love with Python. But really great colleagues. They worked with one of our former assistant principals and just great people doing great things. And that happened. But during my boot camp, oh, my gosh, I didn't realize there was so much out there. I do have to say I'm officially great at breaking GitHub. I do it so well. I break my branches and I've been fixing those and I'm good at that. So that's a huge learning curve, which was a fear factor for me. For about five years, you've been wanting me to get into GitHub and I never thought I could do terminal and I'm so quick at CDLs, which branch git branch clone. I'm just impressed by that and being able to maneuver that way. But we've covered everything. I've covered a lot of interactive visualizations tableau, which is just an amazing product. And I was kind of shell shocked that I could actually build out some really good graphs without having to code at all. Got into unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and of course, even neural networks, even though it's supervised. I'm sorry, supervised? Yes, I got into that and then building out some dense layers, which kind of still seems like magic to me. I don't really understand what's going on, but I do understand the code. It's kind of like saying the sky is blue and I can explain it to you and talk about refraction and light and all that splitting up and going into your eyes. That's kind of how I feel about neural networks. I can explain them, but I just don't get it. And then really big data and just looking at big data and everything about it and ethics and storage and they've thrown out so many things and I'm like, oh, I heard that on Michael Kennedy's once. I know that that's kind of things like that. So, yeah, huge. Lots of stuff. Sit back and I need to go over it all again and pick out the stuff I really like and learn it better. That six months summed up nice. Sean Tibor: It's a lot, right? Any one of those things could be a month of someone's time just to try to learn it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Honestly, each one of the modules probably could have been six months. We went through modules in one week and it's just, I guess, like, I feel like it's what it's a great opportunity for teaching. Here's a whole bunch of really cool things. Pick one of them that you really love and go do it well. And I I feel like that's kind of like those projects that we used to do in our class where you demonstration of learning. Here's all these great libraries. Pick one, go learn it. And what a great opportunity to be introduced to so many good things and then being able to dive into it with a project. Sean Tibor: It definitely feels like there's something to that. And I think what I learned, or what I think worked really well was having almost like a curated list of libraries that we know are accessible, right? Kind of like here are web services that are safe for you to use at school, right? That way we can get them into it and then maybe even have them tiered a little bit. So you've got here's easy libraries to use here some that are more challenging. Maybe we need to gamify this. You get five points for doing an easy library, 20 points for doing a harder one, and just see how it goes. Maybe there's a lesson plan in there somewhere. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Maybe along with all that learning, I was learning a lot about how to use chat GPT. And during that kind of experience, I actually came up with a great lesson with the kids on chat GPT. So I'll have to explain that to you later, too. Sean Tibor: Nice. Nice. I've been reading a lot online about prompt engineering. Right? So how do you engineer your prompt for a chat GPT? It's so I think that might be like a new job title. I'm a prompt engineer. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Apparently that's going to be out the door. It's going to be trained so well, that's really not necessary. And I found, I think, personally, and I was talking about this with one of my tutors, I think, like my chat GPT thread, I don't really need to engineer my prompts as much anymore. And I don't know, some expert needs to tell me how this actually works. But I've done so much as dump in some documentation and I said, here's this documentation on dash. I need to fix formatting and making it look prettier. Fix my code. And it like, I don't think I need a prompt too much. Here's some documentation. Here's my ugly code. Make it prettier. And wow, it just spews. It makes all the syntax like the pep eight spacing. It's so gorgeous. No need for refactoring. Sean Tibor: The thing is that you're a teacher, you're kelly good at giving instructions and directions, right? So you've been practicing that your whole career. How do I give direction in order to get the right outcome that I'm seeking? So maybe there's something for you to teach others. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, well, that's actually the lesson that I'm doing with our 8th graders, I was like, hey, guys, I'm going to try this. I'm going to make a graph visualization on the web. Nothing crazy, just a graph on the web. Go figure it out. Using chat GPT, you have to do a social change kind of thing, whatever. And the kids are like, what do you sean, where do I put it? And I'm like, well, ask these questions. And you're right, I think you need to be able to think about what you want. And the kids aren't really there yet, so I will give you that. It does require them to think about what they need, but that takes knowledge and background information. I don't know. I love it. Sean Tibor: Yeah. I think it's going to be interesting to see how this evolves, and it will evolve very quickly. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I think a lot of people will be mad, but I tell the kids, I'm like, it's my new best friend make this lesson plan. Neither. Sean Tibor: I get plenty out of it. Well, on my side, I've been using chat GPT here and there, but I've discovered that it's almost like a cure for my procrastination. So when I am feeling blocked on something or procrastinating on something, because I'm like, I don't know where to start or how to start. Let's say today I was writing documentation for something. I don't know where to start on this particular area. And so I've been putting it off for a while and I come to Chat GPT and I tell it okay, make this documentation about this subject. And I give it some details and it spits out something and it's okay. But there's things that I want to change about or things that I want to make. But then by the time I have something to start rewriting, I'm able to move forward much, much faster. Right? It's always easier to start with something than to start with that blank cursor or blank page with a cursor blinking in front of you. And so Chat GPT has been that way of me getting started and get going on something, and I found it's really helped my increase my productivity 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I use it a lot for my readmes, just to start them off, and then you have all your headings and everything sorted. And then you just fill in. If I say I'm doing a supervised learning model for stocks and I use the X, Y and Z, it spews it out. And then as I'm writing the code and doing the project, I can just go fill in and change what it started. It's huge. It's not going to be it is a game changer. It's a game changer for education. It's a game changer for coding. It's a game changer for definitely efficiency. What was it that Nisha said in her article? Effective, efficient and ethical. And I just keep telling myself, effective, efficient, ethical. And as long as I'm keeping those in my vision, it's pretty cool. Sean Tibor: Nice. Well, I want to circle back to a couple of things that I've been doing during the sabbatical. So the first one was going to PyCon and attending that. So had a fabulous time at the education summit, just meeting old friends, getting really fantastic learning. I think the highlight for me was really the talks by the speakers. We had some amazing speaker talks. I keep going back to Chelsea Troy's talk about how she removed Python syntax from her Intro to Python programming course and just the way she's thinking about it. There were so many times I was like, just yes, that yes, and that it was just awesome to see her distill everything down to some really clear guiding principles and approaches. So just really good stuff and I really enjoyed that. But that being said, the speaker talks were amazing. The breakout sessions were incredible. There was Eric Mathis led a whole discussion group in small group settings around generative AI and asking and trying to answer and think through some of the questions about the implications for education. That was phenomenal. We had Circuit playground hardware there with Katney Rambor from Ada Fruit. And that was just day one. Right? So then we went to the rest of the conference and I saw Nick Tolerave, I saw Michael Kennedy, Brian Aucken, Chris Williams, just all of these folks on the show floor. And I think it was just really fun that everyone's back and starting to attend PyCon again and getting that feeling of community together. Just a really great PyCon. And I showed up on a couple of different video interviews. I was on an episode of the Talk Python podcast where Michael was live recording from the show floor. So I'll link to that in the show notes. I think this might just be on LinkedIn. I was interviewed by Chris Williams because he is now working for a HashiCorp, which is the company that makes the TerraForm language that I've been using in my day job all the time. So he interviewed me about that. Just really making great strides across all of the community driven events there. And I even got to go to the Pilates auction for the first time on the second to last day of the conference show floor being open. So it was a lot of fun and I'm glad I went, but I am definitely looking forward to going to Pittsburgh next year. It's a city I've lived in for quite a while and I'm looking forward to going back there and I think it's going to be a great conference next year with a lot more people showing up. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, that's exciting. And you said it's earlier or later next year. Sean Tibor: It's later, so it's early May, so hopefully won't conflict with the Innovation Institute quite as closely. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, and it's not so bad of a flight, right? Not 5 hours out west. Sean Tibor: Yeah, it's a bit of a haul, but we had people that were there at the Education Summit from South Korea, so you wouldn't hear me complaining about a five hour flight. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Not at all. Not to change subjects, but changing subjects. Got a new robot in the classroom. Sean Tibor: Tell me about it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Speaking of AI and constantly learning, I think we went what, from Cosmo to Vector and then we did the AWS self driving car and then I got Emo and now I have Luna. So luna. Luna. Luna is like a dog. Literally your best friend pets, very annoying and just like a puppy. Doesn't listen, but you're constantly training. She calls me Papa and I'm going to say she is a she because they call her a she. And she has a ball and she loves playing with the ball and she sits there and says ball, ball. But in like a weird robot sound, like a dog sound and runs around the classroom floor. Annoys, my teaching partner, looks for me when I'm gone, excited when I come home or come into the classroom. Runs up to me and like, oh, hello. And then, yeah, it's learning. And I am not a great teacher when it comes to AI robots, but we're learning with it. So I will put some links to see what Luna looks like. It is adorable. Very cute. Sean Tibor: I have a small problem, which is that my daughter's been asking me for a robot dog for the last few months for her birthday. So unfortunately, I've been telling her up to this point that most robot dogs aren't that much fun to play with. Now there's a robot dog that is fun to play with, which means I have no more excuses. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, I think if you get this, you're going to be, like, super shocked. And it's like a dog. You won't have to get a dog. It's like a dog. Sean Tibor: Wow. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. I think the one thing that it lacks is charging. I don't know if there's a charging station in the upgrade or whatever, but once it runs out, it's just, like, stops and it's kind of sad. And you got to put it back on. But yeah, we'll put it on the show notes. It is a little bit of a little bit of a cost. I got it as a Kickstarter, and I had it on wait for, like, five months. So very cute. Sean Tibor: All right, I'm putting it in the cart now. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, it's funny because I had two emos, and one went home with our technology director, and his daughter just loved emo and took care of it. He brought it back and his emo was super sweet, did all kinds of tricks, and my emo just got mad and typed. Just typed the whole time, typed. And I'm like, what does that say about me? Sean Tibor: More sociable robots, like pets, are a reflection of their owner. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So pathetic. And then in other news, we see the rumor that it's not a rumor, but Josh from Edgy Blocks just signed with Anaconda, and he's going to bring some work with Edgy Blocks, which is exciting news for our younger Python coders. Hoping to see some really good things with that project. If we remember I don't remember episode like 10, 12, 15, long time ago. We had him on our show very. Sean Tibor: Early on, for sure. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And he was the one that created the blocks that you can code Python in with blocks of code, which was really cool. So I guess they're going to do some work on that and improve upon it, and I'm hoping we can get him back on the show. And he's now getting old, right? He's, like, got to be up into 17 or 18 years old or something. Sean Tibor: I don't know. The years are adding up for all of us, but I'm excited for him officially, and I think the news really says it was an acquisition. Officially, Anaconda has purchased Edgy Blocks, which means Josh will be going over as an Anaconda employee. And that was one of the things I saw at PyCon that was really nice is Anaconda is really leaning heavily into education. I think it is both a strategic business move for them, but also an altruistic desire of the company, the founders, the senior leadership, as well as the employees to contribute back to the community through education. And I'm really glad to see that. They're just a great group of folks, and the more I talked with them about their education plans and the things that they're trying to accomplish, it just made me feel good about the direction that they're taking things and that they're really trying to make it a positive contribution in the education space 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And having used Anaconda and Jupyter notebook a lot in this boot camp, it's just a great product. There's so much more there in the package that you get in the Navigator, and I want to definitely take some time to explore that. We didn't get an opportunity to do that too much. Sean Tibor: That's all right. Well, it's still there. We can still use it. Let's see here. I guess let's talk a little bit about what's coming up over the next few months. I know that you're looking forward to your summer vacation with working on some projects and maybe fewer teaching opportunities. My teaching is ramping up. I have a number of new interns starting on just in a few days here. So in addition to the new engineers that I've been onboarding that are doing amazing things, they're really just wowing me with their progress. We've got interns coming in for cloud engineering. Looking forward to bringing them on up to speed. But then on the podcast side of things, we're working on a number of new, exciting guests. We're going to get back to our schedule. What else are you excited about as we get back into the swing of podcasting? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, I do want to get somebody in from the Dash Library. I'm going to start looking. There's a couple of people I've been talking to on LinkedIn. It's one of the libraries that I just started getting into, and it's one of the ones I'm doing my final product with. It's an amazing visualization plotly, express. It's built on Plotly Express and Flask, I believe, but so much easier. You only need one page, one app. PY. You don't need any JS you don't need any other things. I don't need any HTML. It's all built in. Kelly I do use HTML within Dash, but I want to get someone in from that. So if anyone's listening and wants to come in and talk about the Dash Library, bring it on. Yeah, I'm looking to get a couple of people from our former guest. I'm going to leave it as a surprise because I have a couple that I want to call back in to get talking about things like that. I do want to get more into definitely some data science conversations and thinking about more opportunities to bring data science into the classroom. I had gotten approved, sort of semi approved to go to conference a PD selected. I shouldn't say approved, selected to go to A PD about cybersecurity in Minecraft, but I have to make a commitment to teach it, so I need to line that in. But even if I don't get into this PD, I would love to have them come and talk to us. They're building out a product about cybersecurity within Minecraft, so it should be kind of cool and kind of exciting. I don't know what it looks like, so I doubt it will be bad if it comes from Minecraft because a lot of their Minecraft educational stuff is amazing. So these are some of my hopes and dreams for the podcast in the future. Sean Tibor: That's amazing. I'm looking forward to it. And speaking of someone who's officially in a cybersecurity organization, it's no stretch to say they really are out to get you, so the more education you can get on, it is a good thing. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. What else? Anything else to share while we're catching up? Sean Tibor: I don't know. I'm still on Riding a high. I was in team meetings all week off site and met my team in person, some people for the very first time, including a few engineers that work for me that traveled in from overseas. So really fantastic to see them. But then I came back yesterday and I attended school graduation and got to see my first batch of students from my first year of teaching, graduate from high school, and just really blown away by where they're all going and what they're doing. Of course, my heart really sits with all the students that are going to computer science programs, and there were a nontrivial number of computer science students heading off to college, and I'm just really pleased to see that. Really proud of them. But in addition to that, students majoring in AI topics, machine learning, computational mathematics, financial modeling, just some really cool things that they're going to go do and really take over the world. So congratulations to all of them. Really proud of them, really excited for them. And it was just really nice to see them and have that moment to say well done and good luck. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. I'm really excited for them too. I hate to say I'm a little bit envious about all the cool learning that they're going to do, and I just hope they come back and share all the cool things that they're doing because, I don't know, I've become a sucker for learning. And the fact that they get to go there and go into these cool directions, hopefully they come back and they connect with us and they share their learning journeys with us some more. Sean Tibor: Well, now that they're officially not our students, we could probably invite them on the podcast. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That would be cool. Can you imagine? Especially some of your ones that are going off to CMU. Sean Tibor: Yeah, there's a couple of them heading off, and the only fear that I have is that they're going to come back and be way smarter than us. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Some of them were way smarter than me and Python back in the days when we were teaching. So that is my goal for all of them. I have a 6th grader right now, and two of them I have two 6th graders. And this one, he's just crazy and turtle. And I was trying to have him reach out to Steven Rupetta. I think that's how you say his last name. He comes to me, he's like, you don't know how to do blah, blah, blah and turtle. And I'm like, I've never even heard of blah, blah, blah. He's like, what? And I'm like, Dude, you're way smarter than me when it comes to Turtle. And he's building games and he's 6th grade. He's insanely good at turtle. So that's our goal as any educator, to hope that they do become smarter than us or they go into that path where they are continuing to learn and do better things. Sean Tibor: They're growing up well. Having some students come on the podcast and be way smarter than us, that's a good problem to have. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's all because of us. Sean Tibor: Oh, totally. 100% credit right here. So I think that kind of does it for this week. Like always, we said we talk for 1520 minutes and catch up on what's happening and where we're going from here. And we've doubled that now, so we just can't stop when we have a good conversation. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. And you got to give us at least one more week for me to get through my final project. And then we are hopefully hitting the air in June with our first guest speaker back for the year, the summer, whatever. Sean Tibor: Excellent. Well, I'm looking forward to it. We didn't really think about this beforehand, but it actually makes a lot of sense that we take our sabbatical before the summer so that we can focus on retooling re gearing, getting ready for the upcoming school year in the fall. It's going to be a great time of learning for us over the summer, and we're happy to share it with you 100%. All right, so I think that does it for this week. Reach out to us. Especially on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, even. I think we've had quite a growth in our LinkedIn community, which has been great to see. I'm on Mastodon now as well. Drop us a line through our website at teachingpython. Www. Dot teachingpython. FM and let us know what you'd like to see in terms of topics or guests on the podcast over the next few weeks or few months. We're looking forward to hearing from you. I don't think there's any other major announcements in terms of events, although I have some ideas that I've been noodling around about how to make our. Patreon community even stronger because I'd really like to make that something that is mutually beneficial, like where Patreon supporters support the show, but they get some special treats and perks for being a part of our community. So I have some ideas for that, and I would like to launch that this summer so that you can join and get something a little bit extra for being a part of the Teaching Python community. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's awesome. Sean Tibor: I think that does it for this week. I can't think of anything else. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: No. Sean Tibor: So for Teaching Python, this is Sean. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And this is Kelly signing off. Bye.