Robyn Brown 4/15/15 Robyn Brown 4/15/15

Game of Code Week Starts Now!

The Bold Idea leadership team is passionate about a lot of things — improving computer science education for K-12, using technology to solve global challenges and empowering girls in their roles as builders of tech. It’s that passion that fueled our drive last year to create Bold Idea and what still keeps us motivated.

By Robyn

Yet in full disclosure, we’re also really, super passionate about something else. Something that we talk about ad nauseum and get super geeky over: Game of Thrones.

And so, in honor of the season 5 premiere of the epic show, we’re declaring it "Game of Code" week on the Bold Idea! blog (starting today). Several of us will share our review (and our kids’ reviews) of online games that teach coding fundamentals. Even though these were designed for younger students, we still had a blast playing them ourselves. Try them out today yourself and with your family. Let us know what you think!

To officially kick things off, here’s the ever relevant Sesame Street and its parody of Game Thrones. Enjoy!

The Game of Chairs will determine who will be king or queen of Jesteros. Four players will march around three chairs while music plays until one remains. Who will take the crown in this game of musical chairs? Robb, Cersie, Joffrey, Daeneyrus or....?

Robyn Brown 3/30/15 Robyn Brown 3/30/15

Motivating Pre-Teen Girls to Learn How to Code

If you ask an 11-year-old girl, “Do you want to help stop bullying?” “Do you want to stop deadly diseases?” or “Do you want to feed the homeless?” you’ll hear the answer: “How can I help? Where do I start?”

If you ask her to start a computer science class next year in school and you’ll hear: “Do you think I know enough math for that?” “I don’t think I’ll be good at that” or “Will that me me look less cool?”

By Jenn Beecham

She has the confidence to save the world, but for some reason something is holding her back from “Hello World.”

The Gender Stereotype

There has been a lot of buzz on gender stereotyping and what kids think of when they assign genders to certain careers and activities. Always has since featured its famous “Like a Girl” commercial on many venues, challenging what it means to be a woman.

Watch the brand new unstoppable #LikeAGirl video. Join Always in our epic battle to keep girls' confidence high during puberty and beyond. Using #LikeAGirl as an insult is a hard knock against any adolescent girl. And since the rest of puberty's really no picnic either, it's easy to see what a huge impact it can have on a girl's self-confidence.

In a survey of elementary-aged girls attending one of our workshops, we asked some open-ended questions about who they thought of as a computer expert. We got several "Bill Gates," “my dad,” a few “my brother” and some generic answers like “hacker.” No one mentioned a female figure. We asked them what they thought a computer expert could do and most were centered around solving problems. Yet even though they were problem solvers, there was a disconnect that they too could solve problems with a computer.

Computer Science Completing Part of the Puzzle

Helping a girl identify a personal problem that she sees her or her peers face every day inspires her to solve it. Providing her a team of friends gives her the community and support she needs. And teaching her the skills of computer science empowers her to execute on her solution.

Girls are interested in solving problems more so than just learning a pure skill for the sake of learning it. In a Generation STEM survey from the Girl Scouts, it became apparent that over 2/3 of girls surveyed liked to build things, pull apart and put them together, find out how things work and do hands-on projects.

Why does purpose drive motivation to succeed? Research from Stanford points to a sampling of hundreds of high school students who were asked to read a few paragraphs about how foundations learned in school can help in “bettering society.” The students were then asked to write a paragraph or two on how they could apply it to their own life. The students who were part of this study saw a rise in GPA and overall academic success. It could be seen that once a student saw a problem as their own, they were more likely to put pieces together in their head. The student did not see the skills as something meaningless taught at them but more as something that could help them in the future. As one student put it, “Science will give me a good base for my career in environmental engineering. I want to be able to solve our energy problems.”

The Story of Lila

Lila is a middle school student with a curiosity for researching the causes of diseases. As she treks her way through middle and high school her school gives her the tools to develop her science background. Computer classes are offered as electives that she is encouraged to take, but Lila does not see the need for them immediately.

As Lila enters college, she realizes that there are many technology solutions out there to analyze scientific data and generate the answers she may need. Lila decides to pursue computer science on the side but faces obstacles on many fronts. Her advisor warns her that her lack of prior experience may make the classes difficult, and does not provide much support for learning them. Lila accepts the challenge and continues. Her classroom is male-dominated, and while they are friendly, she does not always feel like she belongs. She receives less attention from the teaching assistant when she wants help on the assignments. She finds herself discouraged and considers abandoning learning this skill altogether.

Helping the Blind Navigate a New Space

12-year-old Grecia Cano started middle school with her friend Andres Salas. While the first day of class may have involved a little bit of getting lost in a new building for Grecia, for Andres the challenge would last for weeks. Andres was blind and any new building took weeks of memorizing direction and spaces to navigate. Even then, any changes to the space and obstacles would constantly present a challenge.

Grecia wanted to help him. One day her teacher Maggie Bolado mentioned the Verizon Innovative App Challenge to her class, and Grecia already had a inspired idea. Together with the help of her friends Kayleen, Cassandra, Jacquelyne, Janessa and Caitlin, they created Hello Navi. Prior to this moment, none of the girls knew how to code. With help and lessons from programmers at MIT Media Lab, these girls were able to put together an app that could take a blueprint of a new building and use step-by-step voice to guide a blind person through the building.

The app not only brought these girls together but as Andres described it, “I have adopted six new sisters, because they care for me and made this happen for me.”

Today Hello Navi technology is being implemented in many other schools to aid their disabled students.

Lila Saves the World

Just as Lila is about to give up on programming, she meets a mentor who believes in her. She pushes her to see the end goal of her skill, and to not get stuck in the day-to-day challenges of learning programming concepts. Lila soon learns enough coding to manipulate data to understand the genetic code of different HIV viruses.

As she continues to fulfill her lifelong dream of understanding the cause of diseases, she picks up coding on the way. Her determination to cure AIDS drives her to unfold a computer program that can predict all the ways the virus can mutate. Her research becomes utilized by other scientists to find a vaccine against HIV. Lila saves the world.

Education through Social Impact

The story of Lila is more plausible than wishful thinking. Rather than just teaching girls STEM and bringing awareness to the subject, the goal should be showing these girls how STEM can help solve problems they care about.

“Rather than just teaching girls STEM and bringing awareness to the subject, the goal should be showing these girls how STEM can help solve problems they care about.”

We’ve seen in our classes that just asking girls what they want the world to be aware of can lead them to learn basic HTML in an hour and create a website. Their determination to put up as many links, self-written articles and images as possible in order to generate the message they want everyone to hear naturally brought them to learn how to make headers, bodies, links and style sheets. For us, framing the class as “Social Impact” rather than “HTML” was enough to take the edge off and still achieve effective learning in the girls.

To read more inspirational stories about girls (and boys!) changing the world through code, try the links below:

Enhancing a Disabled Student’s Learning Experience – At E.H. Markle Middle School, a group of six 8th grade students developed Voice Notes+. Their app allows students with disabilities to easily use their mobile phones to record lectures and customize the notes that are recorded.
Helping the Thirsty Gather Water – Six 12- and 13-year-old girls form one of Asia’s biggest slums decided they needed to solve their village’s water gathering problem. In the village the neighborhood communal tap often saw long lines and arguments over who got to draw water. The app they created allowed members of the community to sign up for times to gather water, and this written record would stop disputes over who was there first.

Robyn Brown 3/20/15 Robyn Brown 3/20/15

Life Lessons from the World's First Coder

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace — better known as Ada Lovelace — is commonly considered the world’s first computer programmer. There’s a lot we can learn from Ada’s life.

As I sit here typing an article on my laptop, listening to Spotify and periodically checking Facebook, the history geek in me is compelled to think on the woman who sparked my — and everyone’s — digital dependence nearly 200 years ago.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815 – 1852), better known as Ada Lovelace, was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and is commonly considered the world’s first computer programmer.

There’s a lot we can learn from Ada’s life, depending on who you are. To young girls, I would say: pursue math, dig deep into your questions and never be satisfied that you fully understand anything. However, I would not recommend having an affair with your math tutor (which she did) or thinking too highly of yourself (which she also did).

I’m too old to develop an interest in calculus, so here are three other life lessons that Ada has inspired in me. (All the italicized quotes are hers).

1. Imagination and technology must co-exist

“What is imagination? It is the Combining faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new original, endless, ever-varying combinations… It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.”

“We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

While attending one of Charles Babbage’s weekly salons, a 19th-century meetup of scientists, writers, explorers, botanists and big thinkers of the day, she became fascinated by a demonstration of Babbage’s “Difference Engine.” The thinking machine, as her mother referred to it, was a mammoth mechanical contraption that could calculate polynomial equations. One of her friends later commented that Ada could not only understand its working, but saw great beauty in its invention.

Operation of the re-construction of the Babbage Engine at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Shot during a gigapixel shooting assignment of the historic device, see www.xrez.com

Ada's interest in technology began earlier when she toured the British industrial midlands to see the new factories and machineries. She was especially impressed by the automated weaving loom that used punch cards to direct the creation of the desired fabric patterns. (It can be argued that the punch card looms were the earliest form of programming). Ada’s love of poetry and math primed her to see the connection between the two devices and the design-based applications for what would someday be referred to as the computer.

2. A vision will get you through the uncertainty

“Though I see nothing but vague and cloudy uncertainty in the foreground of our being, yet I fancy I discern a very bright light a good way further on, and this makes me care less about the cloudiness and indistinctness which is near.”

Pioneers have a tough job. Whether they are charting unknown territory or disrupting common ways of doing things, devotion must be central to their thinking. They have more naysayers than advocates, more ‘what-if’s’ than examples. I’ve been thinking a lot about pushing through the cloudy uncertainty lately. This year our bold idea to empower students to use coding for social change is starting to take shape. We’re several steps closer to becoming a functioning non-profit organization. And yet the reality of the program is still nebulous. More progress creates more questions. It’s our vision for a future of young change agents that keeps us moving forward.

More than any other pioneer of her day including Babbage, Ada was a visionary. While Babbage wanted the Analytical Engine (his later project after the Difference Engine) to calculate long tables of perfect numbers, Ada saw its full potential — to create music or graphics and work with symbols as well as numbers. The idea of a general purpose machine (think of the devices we use today) was groundbreaking in the 1840s, but it’s clear from her Notes that she thought about it quite a lot and had a solid grasp on the theory behind it.

3. Evil robots will not take over

“The Analytical Engine has not pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.”

And now we can all breathe a sigh of relief — the robots will not inherit the Earth. The anti-robot protesters at this month’s SXSW Interactive can pack up their “Stop the Robots” signs and head back to class at UT. We have been having discussions on artificial intelligence since the inception of the computer. The question remains alive today: Can machines think? Ada’s resounding “no” would be dubbed “Lady Lovelace’s Objection” a century later by computer pioneer Alan Turing.

As technology continues to evolve in the 21st century, the fear and fascination of AI will continue to inspire our SciFi movies and motivate technology leaders. Earlier this year, Tesla founder Elon Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute because of his fears. And on the opposite spectrum, Google’s Eric Schmidt wants people to know that robots are our friends. The company incorporates AI into the very core of its current and future technologies.

During Women’s History Month in March, it can be easy to reflect on Ada Lovelace as a female pioneer in computer science — and that she was. The reality, though, is that Ada’s contributions are more profound and inspirational. Due to her computational thinking and active imagination, she was able to envision a future where computers are part of our daily lives, allowing us to interact with all forms of a digital content, in addition to calculating terabytes of data. As Walter Isaacson summarized in The Innovators: “Thus did Ada, Countess of Lovelace, help sow the seeds for the digital age that would blossom a hundred years later.”