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Hello, and welcome to how to teach computer science the podcast. This is episode five. How do we teach programming? I’ll be answering that question and many more with the help of today’s special guests.
, I do think it is really important for children to learn to program. I know we’re talking about it can build up resilience and it can be really creative and it helps you think outside the box.
ChatGPT and the other AI things, are all really great for writing bits of code, but I think, it’s a lot more valuable to be able to understand what the code’s doing, and then that way, if you have an error, then you’ll know why that is.
And we’ll hear the full interview shortly. My name is Alan Harrison, and I wrote the books how to teach computer science and how to learn computer science available in online bookstores, more detail at the companion website. HTTCS dot online. That’s the initials of how to teach computer science HTTCS dot online. So last week’s episode with Andy Colley proved to be an epic. Even with drastic cuts, it was still 43 minutes and this week proves to be just as difficult to edit. So there will be no more wasting time with silly jokes.
I’m just going to.
What?
oh, so it seems Alexa is listening and has a joke for me. Let’s see how this goes.
Who’s there?
A hardware interrupt.
Oh, dear.
All right, let’s try something else. Alexa. Why was six afraid of seven. Because 7, 8, 9. ​
If you like this content, please subscribe. Tell your friends, buy my books at HTTCS.Online. Leave a review on Amazon or at the very least buy me a coffee, details at HTTCS dot online on how you can do that. Every week, I’ll transcribe this recording and blog it at HTTCS dot online slash blog.
So if you don’t like my voice. …
We’re talking about programming today and soon I’ll introduce my guests, but remember in the books HTTCS and HTLCS each chapter starts with a story from the hinterland of our thrilling subject. Today’s story takes place in Boston, Massachusetts.
It’s April the 10th, 2019. Late afternoon. The final stage of the pipeline of algorithms is executing. Dr. Katie Bouman sits at her Mac. And watches open mouth as the picture starts to appear in the upper left window. She and a team of computer scientists, astrophysicists and electrical engineers have been working on this project for three years. Five petabytes of data on half a ton of hard drives from telescopes around the world, arrived here at MIT over a week ago, and the algorithms have been churning it ever since.
The black hole, Doctor Bouman is analyzing, looks tiny from earth. About as big as an orange word on the surface of the moon. Refraction limits what we can see with our telescopes. So the very best image of the moon from earth consists of 13,000 pixels. But each pixel at that distance would then contain around 1.5 million oranges. To take an image of a black hole we would need an earth sized telescope. We can’t make one of those, but we can connect telescopes around the world, giving us lots of low resolution images from different angles which could be processed by computers into a single image. That’s what Dr. Bauman did creating an earth sized computational telescope called the event horizon telescope. Just like several different, low res images of the same face can be used to generate an accurate prediction of the real face. We can use these sparse noisy images and put them together to create a more detailed image. Doctor Bouman has spent the last three years building a computational pipeline to do just that with the images from the radio telescopes around the globe being fed into the algorithm, which eventually produces an image. The full story can be heard on Dr Bouman’s Ted talk, but what excites me is that the programming language chosen for all this computation was Python.
So it was at around 6:45 PM. On April 10th, 2019. A researcher took a picture. Of Dr. Bouman at her computer in an image, you can see in my books and is reproduced on the cover. We can see a code window on the right of her screen, which looks like the matplotlib Python library.
We can see the now famous image of the M 87 black hole, but most importantly of all, we are privileged to witness the joy of discovery.
Dr. Bouman presses her hands to her mouth eyes wide open in wonder. An algorithm, her algorithm has unlocked one of the secrets of the universe.
So you can buy. How to teach computer science or how to learn computer science, to read that story again, and many more. I did put lots of hinterland of our wonderful subject into the book. So that you can share it with your students or enjoy it just for itself. As for my story. Well, I learned to program in the eighties home, computer boom. My school was one of the first to get the BBC micro . On which Mr. Charnley taught us to program. And of course the first thing we did was write a program that went a bit like this:
10 PRINT. ‘Mr. Charnley is an idiot’
20 GOTO 10.
And then press run.
Mr Charnley was not an idiot. he was a very good computing teacher I got an a in computer studies in 1984. And it’s all been downhill since then.
So that was my classroom experience. But today’s guests are going to tell me a little bit about theirs.
It’s time to introduce my special guests on the podcast today and I’m delighted to have Harry and Anna Wake with me, who are the young creators of Mission Encodable. So please do tell us a little bit about yourself. Harry first, perhaps, and then Anna. Harry.
Yeah my name is Harry. Of Mission Encodable and I’m Anna’s cousin. I think a lot of our interests are quite similar, a lot of what I’ll say will also apply to Anna, but I’m studying maths, computer science, physics, and further maths at A level currently.
And about two years ago I made Mission Encodable with Anna, which is a website that teaches students to code in a fun and engaging way.
Over to you, Anna.
So yeah, as Harry said, we have very similar interests, but I am the other co founder of Mission Encodable, and I’m doing exactly the same A levels as Harry.
But it’s also fair to say that outside of doing computer science and programming, we also like climbing and swimming and running and all those activities,
I think we do both like all of those, so it’s quite handy. Just means that whenever we have to write a bio out, it means that they both look almost identical, like they’ve been copied. It’s because we are just very similar people, I think.
yeah. Thank you for the books, by the way, they are really nice.
Yeah, very nice. Nice little little book, yeah. So I wrote the first one, which is sat over here, for teachers. There you go. That one, the teacher one, but this is full of stuff that teachers need to know, and you don’t need to know, not unless you’re going to teach it, which is something you could do in the future.
You think, ever think about going into teaching?
I have read quite a bit of pedagogy stuff recently, just because I find it interesting, and it is funny because the more you learn about it, the more you watch your teachers doing things. cold calling, found it.
Yeah, I often think about that when, I make this podcast and there’s lots of other teaching podcasts and YouTube channels and stuff out there and just books generally, and I think, do the kids know what we’re doing?
Would the students, if they knew what we were doing, would they try and undermine the pedagogy techniques? That would be mad. So you don’t undermine cold calling, do you like keep sticking your hand up and annoying the teacher who’s trying to do cold calling? No, I mean I’ve
never quite got to the extent of some pseudo reverse pedagogy, but yeah, it is really interesting and I’ve got teachers who do more of it than others do as well, it seems.
Yeah, that’ll be interesting, if I can talk to you sometime about, about the good teaching and the bad teaching that you’ve seen. in classroom, but we’re going to try and stick to computer science today.
So while we’re on the subject then so your experience of learning programming in school, I was, I must admit, I did my homework, I was watching that video you did with Craig and Dave from nearly two years ago now, I think, where you were introducing Mission Encodable, and you were saying that you were Coding for fun during lockdown.
Yeah, so during lockdown I think Harry and I, we started to have our Zoom meetings at the time. Yeah. We called them our executive meetings and we’d just make little projects. I think the first one we did was in Scratch. And very imaginatively, we called it Wake Mania. It had lots of games, all sorts. It was a bit like a board game and then you could play it with your family
so it was really nice. And then we made a website. And it had lots of puzzles and things like that. I had a Caesar cipher all kinds of, number pyramids, all that kind of thing. And that used just HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
But it was quite fun. And, we had a lot of fun designing it and making all the problems work. And then we entered that into the coolest project competition. And we did win, and we’re very pleased with ourselves.
Brilliant. Brilliant. Coolest projects. That’s run by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, I think, isn’t it? Did you have to go to a prize winning for that?
No, because it was in lockdown.
Of course it was. Did you have a, did you have a Zoom prize giving ceremony?
It was a YouTube prize giving, wasn’t it? Yeah. It was like a live stream and I think, we both watched at the same time waiting.
I’ve got kids roughly the same age as you. One who’s just gone off to university, and one who’s in year 11, and she went through secondary school when there were no trips anywhere.
So she didn’t do any school trips at all. From year seven to year 11, it’s pretty sad. So everything happened online.
You’re that generation that loads of stuff just went online during a really important part of your life. How was that for you anyway, ?
Yeah, it was strange, I think, but I think we also adapted to it rather well, or at least I seem to. There’s a lot of benefits that have come out of it. I don’t think Anna and I would be having these little meetings each week had lockdown not happened. There are positives that have come out.
Like this, the way that we just jump on a Teams call and everyone just does that now, Teams, Zoom or Google Meet, whatever, so the world’s changed and one of the problems we’ve got as teachers. Is we can’t work at home a lot of teachers are leaving the profession because they’re seeing their other halves working at home and going, I want a bit of that.
Yeah, quite, until all schools go online, that’s going to be a big problem.
Yeah, there is discussion about that now, isn’t there, whether virtual remote teaching could be a thing and if everyone could just stay at home all the time and more people signing up to programs that do that.
I don’t like the sound of it very much, so I’m quite glad I mostly avoided it. But,
yeah, do you know, I think there’s a place for that for certain students. There are a lot of students who, have trouble going to school for various reasons, disability and so on. And I think, so online schools really need to happen. But I don’t think it would be good for everybody. Not all students need to do that.
No, I agree. I think there’s a nice social aspect of actually going into a school and seeing your friends and seeing your teachers and things.
And I don’t think you get that online, but then equally, there’s a persistent attendance issue at the moment. So for some people that find it difficult to come in for all those reasons, I can imagine it also has lots of positives. So yeah, it’s an interesting one.
It is, yeah I read something recently come back to technology this is primary school children going to school and they’re unable to read a book. They’ve never seen books before and they swipe the cover of the books as if it’s an iPad or something.
That’s quite scary, isn’t it? I’ve heard of people getting to secondary school in their computing lessons, having never used like a proper monitor and keyboard before, and they start swiping at the screens apparently, but I’ve never heard of it with books.
Oh yeah so yeah kids unable to use a book when they start school is quite tragic. Okay, don’t get me wrong, I love my Kindle and that’s where I read everything, but that’s mostly because I’m 50 something now and my eyes have stopped working and so I can’t read the text on ordinary books these days. Kindles are great for that.
So I want to First of all, ask you about learning programming and what it was like for you learning programming in school. And before I go into that, I’ve just interviewed Andy Colley who’s on last week’s podcast by the time this comes out.
And he wrote the Python course for Repl. it. Yes, I know we all know about Repl. it and that’s a A big deal for you guys, I’ll talk about that in a minute, but so he knows a bit about teaching programming, Andy Colley, and he said
I’ve seen so many programming courses that go variable assignment, input, output, and now recursion. Yeah, absolutely. And there’s this giant pit that you fall into. You’re on your back like a turtle and you can’t get out. And I see that look on the faces of students all the time
. Those are the words of Andy Colley. Have you experienced that in the classroom? Have you found yourself suddenly lost by where the programming teaching has gone?
I think a lot of teachers. Yeah, teachers know not to do that, I think as a general rule. Not all, but the majority, I think, they’ve taught for long enough to know that, you do have to transfer your knowledge in a way that students can understand as well. But if that is happening, something’s going a bit wrong, I think.
Yeah, so what I’m driving at is you probably had decent programming teachers
Anna, what was your experience like?
It was all right. I think I was quite lucky because my dad is also quite into programming and he when I was, not super little, but probably. Year six or seven, we would make like Python games and all that kind of stuff. So he taught me a bit of Python before I got to school. I think for a lot of people it just becomes quite dull at school because the projects, they’re all very samey and they can get quite mathematical and that some students find that hard to relate to.
Yeah, I guess you guys are, like, not typical students, really, because you probably a bit like me, learned how to program before you went to school or before you went into secondary school, at least. And you said about mathematical problems and stuff, and I was watching that YouTube video you did with Craig and Dave nearly two years ago now and you were quite keen to put into your product mission encodable, which we will come to in a minute stuff that wasn’t mathematical. You did madlibs and a band name generator, I remember. Was it important for you to put in stuff like that rather than just oh, this is the volume of a cuboid
yeah, absolutely. I was going to say earlier, if you can create games and. actual projects with your programming, like right from the beginning, like with my dad, we did connect four and tic tac toe and that kind of thing. And it just, it shows you what you can do with the programming that you learn
and I feel like occasionally that’s missing from the projects that you do, like finding out the volume of a cube is all very well, but it’s not really showing you how important it is and all of this so yeah Harry, do you want to talk about mission encodable yeah, not being mathematical.
Yeah, let’s hear- harry, what’s Mission Encodable?
Oh I’m very happy to give you the elevator pitch. Thank you. So Mission Encodable is a website that Anna and I made about two or three years ago now, and that we are always working on it and we designed it because we wanted to make learning to code more interesting.
So I think, as Anna’s just touched upon, a lot of tutorials are just. Quite dull to be frank, like they will talk a lot about mathematics or other things which aren’t very relevant to students lives, and we were seeing a lot of our peers get quite switched off by that, I think, and we really liked coding, so we didn’t want to just watch that, so Mission Encodeable was what we made to try and inspire people a bit more and to find, the more enjoyable aspects of programming, because it is really creative.
So it’s a free course and it teaches Python. All the way up from students not knowing anything about coding, having never written any code, or knowing what an IDE is, or even what Python is, all the way to being able to answer some of the very top tier questions in their GCSE computer science exams. So it’s split up into several different levels.
I think we’ve got nine at the moment, although by the time this comes out, hopefully that will be incorrect, we’ll actually have 10. So there’s lots more to come. But the principle of it is that we want to make learning to code really fun and enjoyable for everybody. So there are lots of projects in there.
There’s step by step walkthrough explanations, so teachers, students, everything they need to know, and they get to see it applied in practice in a really fun and engaging way.
Yeah. That’s brilliant. I’ve had a play with it and yeah, I can see what you mean. You build up the skills and then there’s a project and it’s something interesting.
Like you say I mentioned the band name generator earlier and the Madlib it’s quite a good incentive to, to get all those skills because you can make something that’s fun.
Yeah, good. And like I say, I watched you talk about it on your YouTube video it must seem like ages ago now, with Craig and Dave and just as an aside, I know Craig and Dave very well and we’re fans of each other’s work, I think. So the book that I’ve just sent you a copy of how to learn computer science, haven’t I?
And if you turn to the foreword, you will see a foreword by Craig and Dave, because they were very supportive of my book projects and and Dave actually proofread the whole thing and gave me lots of pointers.
When I was working on the book, I had this brilliant class, which I pretty much took through computing from year seven to year 11.
And they did brilliantly in summer 22, and but they asked me about Craig and Dave. Oh, you, do you know Craig and Dave? And I became a minor celebrity when I went on Craig and Dave’s youTube channel and that like they made me keep putting it back on. Oh, Sir show us when you did that collab with Craig and Dave. And I went, what’s a collab?
And but they started asking me questions and this thing happened and Craig and Dave, neither of them know this and they’re going to listen to this podcast and they go, oh my goodness. But I got asked a question. And a perfectly innocent question, so I thought, and the class asked me Sir, are Craig and Dave married?
And, I know you’re ahead of me here, because I know you’re teenagers and you know what that question means. It’s not what I thought it was, and so I said yeah, I believe they are. And there was suddenly a whole load of whispering like, I told you, I told you! And I went Told you what, we knew they were married, like whoa guys, they’re married to separate people. And so it took a little while to sort that one out.
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about Craig and Dave Yeah
it was a few years ago and that was more or less at the very start of Mission Encodable for us, so that was really generous of them, I think, because, we were very small at that point, still are quite small, but, at that point, we had very few people on our website, so it was really generous, I think, of them to give us that platform initially, when no one had really put any trust in us at that point, that was great and we’ve done a lot more work with them over the last few years as well actually, haven’t we? So it’s not just been that one thing, there’s a lot more that’s gone on. Perhaps Anna could talk a bit about that.
Yeah, so you might have seen on our website that we have lots of, mission encodable in partnership with Craig and Dave, and that’s because we’ve done a lot of work with Craig and Dave they have their programming site, Time2Code, and we have Mission Encodable.
And we’ve worked really hard together to make sure that our levels perfectly align. And they cover all of the same concepts in each level. And Time2Code will cover it in perhaps a more pedagogical way. It uses the TIME framework, which is a bit like a version of PRIMM throughout. And the programs are a bit more serious, and Perhaps a bit more mathematical throughout, and then on mission encodable, you have the more kind of fun and guided projects that hopefully are more relevant to, or relatable to students like Mad Libs that you mentioned.
So I think it’s really great because you can use both to make your. Learning to programming experience really well rounded because you can have the kind of set like guidelines of time and then you can go and maybe make some more fun projects to test your skills or you can go through our projects and our steps and then go and look at time to codes projects just to test everything.
So it’s been really good and I think yeah, very generous of them again to reach out to us to do that.
Yeah, good guys. Yeah, absolutely. No it’s great. So how does a teacher get onto Mission Encodable and start using it in their Classroom.
It’s very easy to get started with, so probably the best thing to do, honestly, is just have a look at our website. So it’s missionencodable. com and you can look at our tutorials really easily. You just have to click the big orange get started button and you’ll see everything you need to, so you can see our whole course.
You can see it all mapped out in front of you, so you can use that to figure out roughly where your students are at and what you’ll find in there are different tutorials. Separated into levels, so you might have level one, which is the introduction to print statements and inputs. So if your students have never coded before, that would be a great place to start, but we do also have lots of other levels, the more advanced coders.
What teachers might do if they maybe don’t feel as confident teaching the programming themselves or, they want to set it as homework, for example, you could give your students a link to a level of mission in and have them do that. Or alternatively, you could teach them. Bits and pieces from the front end of the class, and then you could show the mission encodable, as a revision resource or as some projects to do.
So there are lots of different ways to use it. The other thing that I would say is that we do have a teacher’s page with lots of resources on it. So if you want, perhaps a sheet and a spreadsheet to track what your students are up to in our course, you can download that from our teacher’s page. We’ve got a launch presentation, so that will introduce students to Mission Encodable in their very first lesson.
We’ve got posters, we’ve got notebook sheets, all sorts of other useful resources, and they’re all free to download. Everything is free, Mission Encodable, just in case people didn’t know. So yeah, best way to start is have a look at our website, explore it. And and if anyone does have any questions who’s listening to this about Mission Encodable, they’re thinking, would it be right for their students?
They’re very welcome to get in touch with us just send us an email or fill out the contact form and then we’ll gladly meet with them and discuss in more depth how it can help them.
Absolutely. So you said there that it’s free. Are we talking about free levels and premium levels or is the whole thing free?
No, it’s all free. Every bit of it is free. People do like to ask so we don’t make any money out of it at all, but it’s all free to access. There’s no accounts required either, so there’s no friction. You don’t have to give us an email address, just go on there, use it as you please. We wanted to do that, I think, just because lot of things are paid, but people can’t always afford them. And initially like we thought if people want to use it, they don’t want to stop them by getting in their way of the paywall. Often schools don’t have very much money, particularly at the moment. So we’re really happy to provide it for free.
I have, I’ve been head of department. And for five years. And I remember looking for resources for teaching programming and being quoted, thousands of pounds. And I remember having this conversation with one vendor who said, and we can do the whole thing for you for 7000 pounds. And I said, you don’t know anything about school budgets, do you? No, no computing teacher listening to this has got anywhere near that kind of money, so it’s great to know that you’ve made all of this available for free. That’s brilliant. I also heard you tell Craig and Dave that you coded the whole thing yourself I would have, like Dave, put money on WordPress, but no, no, you taught yourself web design and the React framework and away you went. So that’s pretty, pretty amazing that you’ve got that under your belt now at this stage of your lives. So are you hoping that, to take that to some employer and go this is what I made when I was 15, is that your plan for the future?
I think it is a really good project to have. It, it was, it’s an amazing, I think it’s a really good thing to build and to put your skills to the test as it were. And show what you can do. It’s also got a database and it’s all set up. We did have quite a bit of help from my dad, who we now call technical support, but , most of the the HTML, the React we’ve all written we were also really lucky. The design that lots of people say, Oh, that must be WordPress. But we had some help from my mum and all that, those people to make it look the way it does. Harry did an excellent job of designing it. So yeah, it’s a really good project.
Proper, proper family business. This isn’t it. Oh, good stuff. Yeah, so it must have took you, a lot of resilience to get that coded. I think it’s important when you’re learning to program to have that resilience and just keep plugging away. Do you think that’s important?
I definitely think so. When we started making it, probably Mission Encodable was slightly above our skill level, so we had to teach ourself a lot, but in a way like that’s good because it helps you learn stuff. So I definitely recommend that to any students who are listening, perhaps, or teachers with students.
Yeah, you just dive in and start saying. If you just learn what you need to learn, it’s a really good way of learning, just experimenting with different things, and you will hit roadblocks along the way, which are quite frustrating sometimes when you get stuck for ages, as long as you’ve got someone you can ask for help, or nowadays you can ask ChatGPT if you want to.
You can, and I’ll tell you a better chatbot to use, and that is the new one from Harvard’s computing department that’s called cs50. ai. So cs50 is Harvard’s famous entry level computer science course which they make available for free online. There’s hours and hours of lectures and problems to solve, and to go alongside it they Looked into, you’ve probably heard of rubber duck debugging.
Have any of your teachers given you rubber ducks to talk to?
I’ve never had that, but in my current computer science class, we have a lot of ducks that have been stuck on the walls. I think possibly the previous upper sixth left them as a bit of a prank. So just in random places, you’ll find them dotted around.
They probably had a teacher that tried it and said, look, if you’ve got a coding problem, you talk it out to a rubber duck. You just go it should be doing this. It’s only doing that. It’s not doing that. This line has given me an error. What do you think? And the principle of rubber ducking is just the fact that you verbalize the problem you’re trying to solve actually sometimes helps you solve it. You suddenly realize where the error is because you’re talking it out with a rubber duck.
So you just go cs50. ai, it’s free, you need to sign in with a free GitHub account, annoyingly, but they’re free, and then you just ask it questions, and you can say, oh, I’ve written some code, I’m trying to do this, I’m trying to output all the rows in my table, but it’s only doing the first 10, not 11, and it will go, Oh, have you got the range function correct in your Python?
And it will not give you the answer, but tell you where to look. So it’s got a picture of a rubber duck on the website because it is supposed to be AI rubber ducking. So that’s something to try if you get stuck.
So what you said, Harry if you’ve got a project in mind, if you’ve got, a goal to reach and it’s currently beyond what you’re able to do, Then that’s a brilliant motivator for finding out the bits that you’re stuck on. There’s nothing better than having that motivating project, which is brings me back to mission encodable. You’ve got that project at the end of every level, haven’t you? Whether it’s a Madlib or a band name generator.
Yeah, we have, we call them capstone projects capping a level off and they are independently completed by the learner doing the level, and it should put all of the skills that have been learned in that level to the test, and I think it can be great.
It’s really easy to say, Oh, it shows you what you need to work on. It does, and it shows you if you need to go back and go over something and try doing it with more examples and that kind of thing. But also I think it’s nice. It shows you your strengths and it gives you maybe a confidence boost.
If you feel like, yes, I can do this. I am. Feeling quite skilled, actually, with my new Python knowledge. So I think it is a very nice thing to have at the end of a level. And also, we’ve tried to make them quite nice projects. As you were saying, you can show your friends and you can play a game. I made a our new level which Harry mentioned will be in Turtle and I was making a Turtle racing game during my free period and my friends got very into it.
They were like, oh yeah, pink, go pink, go yellow.
I love that. Turtle’s very motivating actually. Turtle graphics in Python and trying to do things like, I like doing fractal flower patterns and things like that. And I often do Turtle graphics, Christmas cards. With year seven or
eight.
I know it’s a nice little, yeah, I know. I like it. Always does encourage a bit of silliness, I think.
Yeah, yeah, nice. So why do children need to learn to program? You can go, ChatGPT, write me a program to do this and it will do it. What do you think?
I think, I do think it is really important for children to learn to program. I know we’re talking about it can build up resilience and it can be really creative and it helps you think outside the box. I think it’s a very good skill for that. And I think that if you if you don’t know what you’re doing and you just say, Oh, write me a program that does this and writes your program, but it doesn’t work, or, it does something unexpected and then you don’t know why. And I think it is. I think it is good to understand why something works the way it works or to be able to fix any problems yourself.
And also all of the, skills, like being creative and thinking about it logically and building up that resilience and confidence that can come with learning to program is really important. And you won’t get that from just
I think as teachers we call that computational thinking usually, and it’s it’s the hard bit. Really, it’s the solving the problem and you know churning it out in Python and getting the syntax right isn’t really the hard bit. And so you know, having the idea and fleshing it out, maybe drawing flowcharts or diagrams to To get your ideas out there that’s the hard bit and that still needs a bit of creativity that I don’t think AI is quite there with yet.
You might as well have just written it sometimes, or search stack overflow for the code, annoyingly, Stack Overflow has now got AI answers, so you know, in a few years it’ll just be AI talking to itself on that website, so that’ll be interesting to watch.
I didn’t know it had that, but that’s quite annoying, because Stack Overflow is great, but always use it. Yeah, don’t we all? ChatGPT and the other AI things, like the Harvard one you just mentioned, are all really great for writing bits of code, but I think, it’s a lot more valuable to be able to understand what the code’s doing, and then that way, if you have an error, then you’ll know why that is.
You can look at it yourself, because if you aren’t able to do that, You don’t have any more skills than anyone does,
really. No, I think it’s really, that’s a really important point. And one of the big problems with AI, and if you watch a film called Coded Bias you’ll hear about this.
It’s a great film about the the pitfalls of AI and how it can entrench the biases that already exist in our society. And one of the problems with AI is that. If you use a machine learning model to make decisions for you, it can’t tell you why it made that decision and. There’s no real legislation around this at the moment.
For example, women will be denied credit cards that men in exactly the same financial position will be given, and the AI can’t tell you why it’s denied that woman that credit card, because it doesn’t know why it made that decision.
Yeah, definitely. I’m doing an EPQ at the moment, which is an extended project qualification. So you write, I think it’s a 5, 000 word report, and I’m doing mine around bias in AI, which is basically what you just said. And a lot of the time, the issue that people face with it is that you don’t know how a decision has been reached.
And there’s not really any hard way that you can prove that an AI model is going against the Equality Act, but it probably is. And, there are scary cases of women being denied credit, for example, where it hasn’t even been told that they are a woman, but it’s like it’s picked up other bits of information.
Yeah, and it’s figured that out itself. You definitely need people to work on that who understand the ethical implications, I think. And that is what a good computer scientist can do.
Yeah, absolutely. Oh that’s fascinating that you’re doing that EPQ. I’d love to read that when you’ve written it. I love all this. I’m really into learning about AI at the minute. So talking of bias against women, sorry Anna, but that’s the world at the moment is it’s slightly problematic, shall we say. Okay, so what we really need. What we really need to solve that is more women in technology so how do we get more girls to learn to program or for girls to take computer science GCSE in England.
I think part of it lies in making it more interesting and more relatable. Because I think a lot of people don’t do computer science because they find it boring and Some of those people will be girls, so if we can make the projects more interesting, then more people will want to do it. The content that’s covered more interesting, more people will want to do it.
Also, I think that making the programs, I’m talking about programming here, because that’s what Harry and I do.
Yeah, absolutely.
Make the projects I think my dad has been doing some research into this and he’s talking about making it apply to the wider world, so things about how does computer science integrate with medicine or geography, like lots of different fields.
And I think he was saying that girls can find that more interesting and more relatable. But I will just say that one of the things that I personally find really irritating is when People think, oh, how can we get more girls into computer science? Let’s make the projects more girly. And then they have perfume or nail polish or pink or something. In fact, actually, as you were talking about, if you ask ChatGPT about projects that might interest girls, it comes up with stuff about nail polish and perfume and all of that. And as someone who’s not interested in that, and I think many girls will spot that immediately, and they’ll be like, oh, honestly, this is really annoying.
Stereotypical. It goes back. So what you’re saying happened in 2015. IBM, that global technology giant with hundreds of thousands of IT professionals around the world. They wanted to encourage more women into IT and they launched something that became infamous in 2015.
It was called the hack a hairdryer campaign. Hack a hairdryer and calling all women in tech join the hack a hairdryer experiment to re engineer what matters in science. And there you go. And it was on Twitter and you can see the Twitter replies and somebody says, that’s okay IBM, I’d rather build satellites instead, but good luck with that whole hack a hairdryer thing.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s a difficult one, isn’t it? Because, we do need more women in tech desperately working on AI, for example, because that is one of the ways that they can spot biases that are appearing and, prevent them from Being extrapolated, but equally it’s really odd because a lot of girls just don’t seem to have an interest in it and somehow we failed to capture that, I can’t see how that will be a biological thing, but, all the research that I’ve read about it, I’ve never, no one’s given me a solid sort of reasoning as to why less girls are doing it because it is an issue and a lot of the stuff people will say just sounds relatively sexist.
Like it will be something like, Oh yeah girls like to see, you know, things that are more humanities just because they don’t like hard maths and you think that can’t be right. Yeah. Yeah. So where it comes from, I don’t know, but I’m very interested to know if anyone has any research they’d like to share.
Yeah. So one of my other jobs is I work as a professional development lead for the NCCE, the National Centre for Computing Education, and they’re running a big program called I Belong to try to get more girls to take the subject. And yeah, I think it is true according to the research, that relevance really helps getting girls in, because I think generally speaking, boys are happy to mess about with technology for its own sake, and girls, this is generalizing greatly, girls would like to see, something important happen at the end of it, so that’s why I always, when I’m In the classroom, I’m talking about careers.
I always talk about, like you say, medical technology, bioinformatics, and so on. One of the things that fascinates me is things like VR being used for therapy, for like trauma patients, and so on.
And so I read something that, a load of boys were asked, what would you do with a VR headset? And it was like. Every single one of them said I’d write games and then girls said oh I’d make a therapy environment to help people who’ve been traumatized in war
I think it’s really important to show the relevance of technology, but I think, it will inspire more girls into it, which is great, but also it will inspire everyone into it, because if you show how it’s relevant, I think no one’s going to be opposed to that.
You might as well do that and show people, no matter what you’re interested in, if it’s climate change, if it’s space exploration, if it’s nail polish, which it might be for some girls, but probably not for all of them. Or hack a hairdryer? Yeah. I think that’s really important that we show people how computer science can be applied in all sorts of different fields and how it can help lots of different types of people.
Absolutely, I think there’s quite a lot of stuff about role models like with the I belong program. We have some of the posters up in our CS classroom, but I think That is a good idea too, and it shows you also what you could do with computer science if you do it.
Also, just, I hadn’t really thought of this before I started talking, but Harry and I have got a Computing Legends campaign going on at the moment. Every month we have a pioneering computer scientists just trying to highlight the importance of computer science and show people that it is not all I don’t know, there is lots of things you can do with it outside that field of just, engineering a CPU or that kind of thing.
Yeah but a really good, really fast CPU could solve climate change, or lots of them put together. So yeah let’s talk about what will become possible. One of the things I say to my students when I’m trying to encourage them to take GCSE computer science, and they say why should I take it? And I go because, come the robot apocalypse, we want more human soldiers on the human side. And so all my students, you know, okay. And then I occasionally have one student says, no, I’m on the side of the robots.
It’s a good argument that, if that’s not going to convince you, I don’t know what is.
It’s coming. The robot apocalypse is coming. We need soldiers. We need people who know technology. I’ve seen Terminator. I know what happens.
It’s been great to talk to you.
I think, I think we covered everything I wanted to cover. That was brilliant. I think that went well.
Just about. So thank you so much for being on,
. Well, thank you for having us. Brilliant to talk to you, thank you so much for your time, Anna.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much, that was brilliant.
Thank you to you as well.
All right. Right. Thanks, guys. Lovely to talk to you.
Thanks, Alan. Have a good evening. Bye. You too.
This has been how to teach computer science, the podcast I’m Alan Harrison. If you want to give me feedback or get involved, just go to HTTCS dot online or check the show notes. Remember. If you liked this content, please subscribe to the podcast.
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Next week’s guest is the amazing Adrienne tough or miss tough on Twitter to you. And that is an unmissable interview. Because it’s got more jokes in it. I’ll leave you with one of the jokes from next week. Why was the computer scientist late for work? Find out next week on how to teach computer science, the podcast. It’s been great to talk to you. See you then.
How to Teach Computer Science 