WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:04.580 How can we make learning Python and teaching Python more real for students, especially younger 00:00:04.580 --> 00:00:10.760 students? The BBC in the UK had a great idea. Make it more physically real with actual devices. 00:00:10.760 --> 00:00:16.000 That's where Nicholas Tolerwey got involved. He helped bring the BBC, Microbit, and Python to 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:22.500 millions of kids in the UK. Join me to hear a story on this, episode 184 of Talk Python To Me, 00:00:22.500 --> 00:00:25.240 recorded October 12, 2018. 00:00:25.240 --> 00:00:43.360 Welcome to Talk Python To Me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the 00:00:43.360 --> 00:00:47.960 ecosystem, and the personalities. This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Follow me on Twitter 00:00:47.960 --> 00:00:52.660 where I'm @mkennedy. Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm 00:00:52.660 --> 00:00:57.180 and follow the show on Twitter via at Talk Python. Nicholas, welcome to Talk Python. 00:00:57.180 --> 00:00:58.720 Thank you. Good to be here. 00:00:58.720 --> 00:01:02.520 Yeah, it's great to have you here. We've been trying for a long time. And finally, after, 00:01:02.520 --> 00:01:08.260 you know, summer vacations and all sorts of traveling, we've managed to get together here on the show. 00:01:08.260 --> 00:01:10.440 Yeah, it's going to be good. I'm looking forward to this. 00:01:10.440 --> 00:01:14.600 Yeah, so am I. It's going to be a lot of fun. Now, we're going to talk about teaching and education 00:01:14.600 --> 00:01:19.920 and IoT and Python and all sorts of cool stuff you've been involved in. But before we get into 00:01:19.920 --> 00:01:22.240 that, let's start with your story. How do you get into programming in Python? 00:01:22.240 --> 00:01:29.080 So a long time ago, perhaps not in a galaxy far, far away. When I was a child, I grew up in the 80s. 00:01:29.080 --> 00:01:35.620 And every school in the UK was given an 8-bit computer for the BBC Micro. And my dad was a 00:01:35.620 --> 00:01:43.240 head teacher, a school principal. And one school holiday, he brought this machine home to try and 00:01:43.240 --> 00:01:48.820 figure out how am I going to use this in school. And it took about half an hour for my brother and I to 00:01:48.820 --> 00:01:55.180 grasp it from his hands and take over and do the, you know, print, you are an idiot, go to line 20 type stuff. 00:01:55.660 --> 00:02:01.100 Yeah, yeah. My brother is an idiot or, you know, some other insult you can inflict on your siblings. 00:02:01.100 --> 00:02:06.120 Yeah, it's funny enough, Andrew, my brother, he's also a programmer. It can't have been that bad. 00:02:06.120 --> 00:02:20.600 But the point I'm trying to make is that as kids, we had computers around. And then when I was, I don't know, 12 or 13, I started doing music stuff and ended up being a professional musician for a while. 00:02:21.080 --> 00:02:32.800 And then a teacher. And then when my own children arrived, I decided I wanted a career change from teaching and remembered back to my days enjoying programming these 8-bit machines. 00:02:32.800 --> 00:02:39.120 So I took a year out, did a master's in computing, and that got me my first job as a software developer. 00:02:39.600 --> 00:02:53.220 And that was actually as a .NET developer. And I ended up working in an investment bank in London. And I worked with a whole bunch of quants who wanted to script the tool that I had written for them. 00:02:53.220 --> 00:02:57.180 And you're like, hey, maybe we'll just teach them all C-sharp. No, maybe not. 00:02:57.440 --> 00:03:01.340 No, exactly. Oh, man. These are very, very clever people, these quants. 00:03:01.340 --> 00:03:16.900 But it was around this time that Iron Python was coming out. And so in my naive sort of way, I typed in scripting language for the common language runtime, and Iron Python came out on top. 00:03:16.900 --> 00:03:22.360 And I ended up going to the very first PyCon UK in 2007 at that time. 00:03:23.360 --> 00:03:29.920 And I was welcomed by a rather jolly gentleman called John Pinner, who sadly passed away now. 00:03:29.920 --> 00:03:36.940 But he, I guess he was like the founding force of nature for Python in the UK when it comes to getting the community together. 00:03:36.940 --> 00:03:40.160 And it was such a wonderful place to be. 00:03:40.160 --> 00:03:48.160 And so after about another year, I decided, well, .NET's fun and everything, but Python's even more funner. 00:03:48.160 --> 00:03:49.260 I'm going to do Python. 00:03:49.260 --> 00:03:49.960 Totally agree with that statement. 00:03:49.960 --> 00:03:50.960 Yeah, exactly. 00:03:51.260 --> 00:04:03.120 And so I had saved up some money, and I took some time off, and I started to reimplement a website that I'd done in .NET, in ASP.NET, in Django. 00:04:03.920 --> 00:04:12.080 And I found that within about three weeks, I was more productive in Python and Django than I was as a sort of expert level C-sharp developer. 00:04:12.080 --> 00:04:14.800 And the rest, as they say, is history. 00:04:14.800 --> 00:04:20.600 I started again at the bottom of the program, a stack as a junior Python developer. 00:04:20.600 --> 00:04:26.760 And since then, I've been working mainly in Python as my full-time freelance job. 00:04:26.760 --> 00:04:28.500 Yeah, that's a great success story. 00:04:28.700 --> 00:04:40.400 I do want to dig into that just a little bit because I've gone through the same experience myself where I was at a hyper-expert level in one technology, not Python. 00:04:40.400 --> 00:04:42.880 And I said, but I kind of like Python more. 00:04:42.880 --> 00:04:43.840 Yeah. 00:04:43.920 --> 00:04:50.860 So you have to decide, do I want to go back to being this kind of newbie that doesn't really know things all that well? 00:04:50.860 --> 00:04:57.660 And, you know, not just in my knowledge, but in my maybe career position and things like that. 00:04:57.660 --> 00:05:03.940 Like, that is a scary place to be because once you get high in some technical ability, you're like, well, this is kind of working. 00:05:04.280 --> 00:05:09.480 I kind of don't want to wreck this, but I know over there is a better peak if I could get to it. 00:05:09.480 --> 00:05:09.780 Yeah. 00:05:09.780 --> 00:05:10.960 I got to go through the valley. 00:05:10.960 --> 00:05:12.520 Was that scary or is it okay? 00:05:12.520 --> 00:05:13.160 It was okay. 00:05:13.160 --> 00:05:13.980 And here's why. 00:05:13.980 --> 00:05:19.120 Because I was expecting until I was about 22 that I was going to be a classical musician. 00:05:19.120 --> 00:05:24.040 And in terms of jobs, that's probably the least secure job you could possibly ever have. 00:05:25.100 --> 00:05:27.180 But anything else sounds better. 00:05:27.180 --> 00:05:42.060 And I guess the outlook and the attitudes that I developed as a student musician or a freelance musician when I was starting up my music career, you are literally living for your art, as it were, rather than making an awful lot of money. 00:05:42.060 --> 00:05:43.980 Anything else feels good. 00:05:43.980 --> 00:05:47.580 And I knew that, well, what's the worst that can happen? 00:05:47.580 --> 00:05:51.900 I tried Python for a few months and it doesn't work out. 00:05:51.900 --> 00:05:57.720 I can become another C-sharp developer doing more bank-related boring stuff. 00:05:57.720 --> 00:05:58.020 Yeah. 00:05:58.020 --> 00:05:58.420 Yeah. 00:05:58.420 --> 00:06:03.580 That's a super attitude just to say, like, okay, what is the worst failure position? 00:06:03.580 --> 00:06:05.840 The failure position is I'm where I am. 00:06:05.840 --> 00:06:11.480 So if the worst case scenario is I just keep doing this, like, why don't I try for something I'd rather do, right? 00:06:11.480 --> 00:06:11.900 Yeah. 00:06:11.900 --> 00:06:12.780 So, excellent. 00:06:12.780 --> 00:06:13.020 Yeah. 00:06:13.020 --> 00:06:15.720 I'm happy to chat with that about it. 00:06:15.720 --> 00:06:16.180 That's really cool. 00:06:16.180 --> 00:06:21.080 But the point is that we're in a very privileged position as software developers. 00:06:21.080 --> 00:06:21.700 Yes. 00:06:21.700 --> 00:06:29.500 The skills that we have are relatively rare and people are prepared to pay us plenty of money to do this sort of thing. 00:06:29.500 --> 00:06:32.260 So it's definitely a developer's market. 00:06:32.260 --> 00:06:43.400 And so for anybody thinking, well, should I make that jump and go do that thing in startup land if I'm in enterprise land, if it were, totally go for it. 00:06:43.400 --> 00:06:48.660 Because, like you said, the landing position is always, well, I did that for six months. 00:06:48.660 --> 00:06:52.280 I'll just go back to doing, you know, I'll phone up my old boss to see if he still wants me. 00:06:52.280 --> 00:06:53.560 You know, that sort of thing. 00:06:53.560 --> 00:06:54.780 Chances are they do, right? 00:06:54.780 --> 00:06:55.600 Chances are they do. 00:06:55.600 --> 00:06:56.020 Exactly. 00:06:56.480 --> 00:07:06.620 You know, that's very different than saying I have a, you know, first string position at the London Symphony Harmonica and I want to try becoming a professional runner. 00:07:06.620 --> 00:07:07.080 Right? 00:07:07.080 --> 00:07:09.480 Like that would be a very different thing to quit upon, right? 00:07:09.480 --> 00:07:10.900 Yeah, exactly. 00:07:10.900 --> 00:07:12.360 So it's got to keep it in context. 00:07:12.360 --> 00:07:12.920 But yeah, awesome. 00:07:12.920 --> 00:07:17.100 I guess one more question before we get to the main topic is, you know, what do you do? 00:07:17.100 --> 00:07:18.360 You said you do consulting now. 00:07:18.360 --> 00:07:21.460 What do you do day to day just to give people a concept of where you're coming from? 00:07:21.600 --> 00:07:21.760 Okay. 00:07:21.760 --> 00:07:25.960 So I guess I feel old for maybe over a decade now. 00:07:25.960 --> 00:07:28.300 I've been a freelance Python programmer. 00:07:28.300 --> 00:07:34.540 I'm starting out as a sort of a junior freelancer and now I tend to work in senior type position. 00:07:34.540 --> 00:07:39.100 I will do a, what I call a gig for a few months for a client. 00:07:39.100 --> 00:07:45.760 And sometimes I'll save enough money up to be able to take a couple of months off and I can work on personal projects. 00:07:45.760 --> 00:07:50.180 Some of the educational stuff was as a result of that sort of working practice. 00:07:50.780 --> 00:07:54.980 So I'm a jobbing freelance Python programmer. 00:07:54.980 --> 00:07:56.180 I give training. 00:07:56.180 --> 00:08:01.040 So next week I'm giving corporate training to a client in London for a couple of weeks. 00:08:01.040 --> 00:08:04.420 I'm also working with another client on the West Coast of the U.S. 00:08:04.420 --> 00:08:07.340 Working remotely on some Python project that they have. 00:08:07.340 --> 00:08:12.660 So what I like about this job is that I have flexibility because I'm my own boss. 00:08:12.660 --> 00:08:15.980 So I don't have to ask permission if I want to go to Python, for example. 00:08:15.980 --> 00:08:16.720 I can just go. 00:08:16.720 --> 00:08:18.080 Yeah, just go. 00:08:19.960 --> 00:08:22.020 So I'm going to enjoy this. 00:08:22.020 --> 00:08:28.060 But I also get to work with a real diversity of industry as well. 00:08:28.060 --> 00:08:29.300 Everybody needs programmers. 00:08:29.300 --> 00:08:41.300 So it's rather interesting to be inside of a TV station or a newspaper or a major retailer in the UK or the government or the National Health Service or the European Union or a scrappy startup. 00:08:41.580 --> 00:08:43.120 It's good, fun work. 00:08:43.120 --> 00:08:45.300 But there's always something new. 00:08:45.300 --> 00:08:45.640 Yeah. 00:08:45.780 --> 00:08:53.500 It's really a special place to be because so many people in their jobs, they're at a company for five or ten years and they see that world, right? 00:08:53.500 --> 00:08:58.780 But as a person, as a consultant or as a trainer, I had a lot of similar experiences doing in-person training. 00:08:58.780 --> 00:08:59.460 Yeah. 00:08:59.460 --> 00:09:02.120 You, every week or every month, there's a different experience. 00:09:02.120 --> 00:09:06.660 And it really gives you, I think, a broader view of the software industry. 00:09:06.880 --> 00:09:08.180 Oh, I totally agree with you there. 00:09:08.180 --> 00:09:14.680 I think to begin with, it feels frightening, a little bit scary because you're always just a little bit out of your comfort zone. 00:09:14.680 --> 00:09:15.620 Yeah. 00:09:15.780 --> 00:09:21.600 You know, you always, you know, if you're established in the company, you kind of know, who do I need to ask about this? 00:09:21.600 --> 00:09:22.620 I'll just ask Bob. 00:09:22.620 --> 00:09:23.040 He knows. 00:09:23.040 --> 00:09:29.560 You've established your network in that company, whereas this sort of stuff, you don't know who Bob is. 00:09:29.560 --> 00:09:32.220 And you're kind of treading water a little bit. 00:09:32.220 --> 00:09:34.100 But at the same time, that's kind of exciting. 00:09:34.100 --> 00:09:35.120 And I like that. 00:09:35.120 --> 00:09:35.640 Yeah. 00:09:35.640 --> 00:09:38.240 And with the life of a musician, at least I've got a job. 00:09:38.240 --> 00:09:40.340 Exactly. 00:09:40.340 --> 00:09:41.400 That's awesome. 00:09:41.400 --> 00:09:42.420 That's what I thought in the back of my mind. 00:09:42.420 --> 00:09:44.620 I'm like, I could be starving as a musician here. 00:09:45.160 --> 00:09:46.040 I'm working. 00:09:46.040 --> 00:09:46.580 This is good. 00:09:46.580 --> 00:09:49.300 No, it sounds like you're doing awesome stuff. 00:09:49.300 --> 00:09:49.920 All right. 00:09:49.920 --> 00:09:53.500 So let's talk first a little bit about teaching Python just in general. 00:09:53.500 --> 00:09:54.100 Yeah. 00:09:54.100 --> 00:09:59.020 And then more focused on the IoT side of stuff that you've worked on. 00:09:59.020 --> 00:09:59.880 Yeah. 00:09:59.880 --> 00:10:07.180 So it sounds like with your training experience, you've done a little bit of teaching, certainly, at least on the small school. 00:10:07.180 --> 00:10:10.360 And you said you were a teacher before, so you've actually done a whole lot of it, right? 00:10:10.360 --> 00:10:11.000 Yeah. 00:10:11.000 --> 00:10:11.600 Yeah. 00:10:11.600 --> 00:10:19.360 So what are some of the keys for people to get interested in programming, to become confident, things like that? 00:10:19.360 --> 00:10:19.740 Yeah. 00:10:19.740 --> 00:10:23.400 So in terms of do people want to learn to program? 00:10:23.400 --> 00:10:25.100 I think the answer is hell yeah. 00:10:25.100 --> 00:10:25.920 Of course they do. 00:10:26.320 --> 00:10:30.000 People who are not programmers see what programmers do. 00:10:30.000 --> 00:10:32.940 They see also the stuff that we were just talking about. 00:10:32.940 --> 00:10:36.280 But it's a highly desired skill set for people. 00:10:36.280 --> 00:10:50.300 So I found that if I said, hey, I'm going to be running a course for beginner Python programming over the next eight weeks, which is something I'm doing at the moment, that course sold out in terms of places in about four hours. 00:10:50.820 --> 00:10:52.940 And that was just word of mouth is me tweeting. 00:10:52.940 --> 00:10:56.980 So getting people motivated to learn to program is not a problem. 00:10:56.980 --> 00:11:08.460 I guess one of the damaging aspects of the stereotypes that programmers, the stereotypes associated with programmers is that people tend to think that this is going to be highly mathematical. 00:11:09.140 --> 00:11:15.200 You need to be a particular sort of, how can I put it, loner type mentality. 00:11:15.200 --> 00:11:20.480 You know, like the loner genius, the kid who could totally just nail the homework, but was kind of awkward. 00:11:20.480 --> 00:11:21.580 So just stayed behind the computer. 00:11:21.580 --> 00:11:23.400 That view is not necessarily. 00:11:23.400 --> 00:11:24.720 Someone like that. 00:11:24.720 --> 00:11:25.000 Yeah. 00:11:25.600 --> 00:11:30.560 And you and I, and I guess listeners of the podcast will know that that is completely not the case. 00:11:30.560 --> 00:11:34.500 But if you're not part of the programming world, it's hard to see that. 00:11:34.500 --> 00:11:45.920 So people, and again, this resonates with this work that I was doing yesterday with beginner programmers, is getting them to realize that this could be me as a programmer. 00:11:46.160 --> 00:12:02.720 There's a place for me here, and I might not fit the Hollywood stereotype of the lone, socially awkward, genius loner who sits with a hoodie over his head in a dark corner typing furiously all day. 00:12:02.720 --> 00:12:06.080 Typically in green, on a green terminal. 00:12:06.080 --> 00:12:06.960 Exactly. 00:12:06.960 --> 00:12:07.680 Exactly. 00:12:07.680 --> 00:12:11.700 And things like, you know, I've bypassed the firewall to the mainframe. 00:12:11.700 --> 00:12:13.640 Oh, it's a joke. 00:12:13.640 --> 00:12:14.420 It really is. 00:12:14.420 --> 00:12:19.780 But if that's all you know about programming, then it can be a very intimidating place to come to. 00:12:19.780 --> 00:12:29.060 So a large part of what I try to do at the beginning is help people understand that it's rather like fun problem solving. 00:12:29.060 --> 00:12:32.800 You know, if you enjoy Sudoku, for example, you might enjoy programming. 00:12:32.800 --> 00:12:34.880 It's also about being expressive. 00:12:34.880 --> 00:12:39.900 You know, we talk about having beautiful code, especially in the Python community, the Zen of Python and things. 00:12:40.020 --> 00:12:47.380 And so there are lots more ways than just the Hollywood hacker stereotype to get into programming. 00:12:47.380 --> 00:12:48.940 You can be a different sort of programmer. 00:12:48.940 --> 00:12:49.680 That's okay. 00:12:49.680 --> 00:12:50.640 Absolutely. 00:12:50.640 --> 00:12:52.400 And I think that's a really important thing. 00:12:52.400 --> 00:12:58.240 And it sounds like from your microbit stuff that actually that was one of the big takeaways. 00:12:58.240 --> 00:12:59.340 I thought that was really interesting. 00:12:59.340 --> 00:13:00.760 And we'll get to that in a moment. 00:13:00.900 --> 00:13:05.800 But did you actually teach Python in school or when you were a teacher, what were you teaching? 00:13:05.800 --> 00:13:06.780 Okay. 00:13:06.780 --> 00:13:13.640 So I did what many musicians who are out of work do, and that is they go and teach music. 00:13:13.640 --> 00:13:14.120 Okay. 00:13:14.120 --> 00:13:19.700 I went through in the UK, you have to go through additional training to be allowed to be. 00:13:19.700 --> 00:13:26.600 I'm sure it's the same in the US because you need to prove that, you know, you're both competent and not a danger to children for a start. 00:13:26.900 --> 00:13:32.240 So we have a thing called a PGCE, Postgraduate Statistical Education, which makes you a qualified teacher. 00:13:32.240 --> 00:13:41.000 And when you have done a year's worth of teaching and been assessed as being good, so basically you've got two years. 00:13:41.000 --> 00:13:45.940 You've got the training itself and then what's called the NQT years, a newly qualified teacher year. 00:13:46.200 --> 00:13:52.500 When you've gone through that training and they're a useful teacher, then you can become a proper teacher in the UK. 00:13:52.500 --> 00:13:53.800 So I went through all of that training. 00:13:53.800 --> 00:13:59.080 And my first job was as a secondary head of a music department. 00:13:59.080 --> 00:14:06.580 So I was teaching at what I guess in the US you would call the upper years of junior high and senior high. 00:14:06.580 --> 00:14:12.220 In the UK, we only have primary and secondary, and they change over when kids turn 11 years old. 00:14:12.220 --> 00:14:14.560 So I was teaching 11 to 18-year-old music. 00:14:14.940 --> 00:14:19.800 I enjoyed that an awful lot, although it's probably the most challenging job I've ever had to do. 00:14:19.800 --> 00:14:28.920 Because not only were the kids sometimes a challenge, because I was generally teaching it in inner city schools at the wrong end of town, if you see what I mean. 00:14:28.920 --> 00:14:34.240 But, you know, there's all the marking and the bureaucracy and all the other stuff that goes with teaching. 00:14:34.240 --> 00:14:36.360 So I've done a lot of classroom teaching. 00:14:36.360 --> 00:14:39.460 I've done adult education in terms of music as well. 00:14:39.460 --> 00:14:43.840 And I've also done some sort of music therapy, I guess you would call it. 00:14:43.840 --> 00:14:51.380 I was working with little kids, so five, six, seven-year-olds in primary school, helping them to learn how to compose at their level. 00:14:51.380 --> 00:14:55.300 I mean, you know, they weren't churning out Mozart or something like that. 00:14:55.300 --> 00:14:57.160 But it's something fun for them to do. 00:14:57.160 --> 00:15:02.180 So in terms of music education, I did a lot of that all the way through my 20s, really. 00:15:02.440 --> 00:15:05.960 And then the switch came over when my children arrived. 00:15:05.960 --> 00:15:11.900 This portion of Talk Python To Me was brought to you by Datadog. 00:15:11.900 --> 00:15:17.600 Get insights into your Python applications and infrastructures with Datadog's fully integrated platform. 00:15:17.600 --> 00:15:23.980 Debug and optimize your code by tracing requests across web servers, databases, and services in your environment. 00:15:23.980 --> 00:15:31.840 Then correlate and pivot between distributed request traces, metrics, and logs to troubleshoot issues without switching tools or contexts. 00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:36.400 Get started today with a 14-day trial, and Datadog will send you a free T-shirt. 00:15:36.400 --> 00:15:40.100 Visit talkpython.fm/Datadog for more details. 00:15:42.600 --> 00:15:51.200 What's the similarities and difference from, like, sort of traditional teaching to, say, teaching a programming class like this eight-week one you talked about? 00:15:51.200 --> 00:15:51.960 Okay. 00:15:51.960 --> 00:15:52.740 Say it different. 00:15:52.740 --> 00:15:54.120 Ah, okay. 00:15:54.120 --> 00:15:55.960 So here's – this is a really interesting thing. 00:15:55.960 --> 00:16:03.620 Whenever I've been on the receiving end of programming education, or I've been on coding courses or sent on a course by an employer, 00:16:04.260 --> 00:16:08.520 it's always been very traditional chalk and talk type stuff. 00:16:08.520 --> 00:16:10.120 Somebody stands at the front. 00:16:10.120 --> 00:16:13.380 They have their deck of slides. 00:16:13.380 --> 00:16:17.120 And the very worst are basically PowerPoint karaoke. 00:16:17.120 --> 00:16:20.420 And some of the good ones are I'm going to talk a bit. 00:16:20.420 --> 00:16:21.780 You might be able to ask questions. 00:16:21.780 --> 00:16:24.780 Then we'll do a practical session and rinse and repeat. 00:16:25.320 --> 00:16:31.640 Now, in music education, we've been doing music education for 500 years in the kind of Western classical tradition. 00:16:31.640 --> 00:16:39.000 And that's enough time for there to be a reformation and a counter-reformation and a revolution. 00:16:39.000 --> 00:16:43.400 And then, you know, some guy called Suzuki in Japan says, this is all wrong. 00:16:43.400 --> 00:16:44.420 We've got to do it this way. 00:16:44.420 --> 00:16:52.120 But we've got so many schools of thought about how to do music education that have been around for literally hundreds of years. 00:16:52.220 --> 00:16:55.420 One of my textbooks when I was at music college was 300 years old. 00:16:55.420 --> 00:16:57.640 I had to write counterpoint. 00:16:57.640 --> 00:17:01.280 So we still, these techniques have been established. 00:17:01.280 --> 00:17:04.360 We're still using, we've been programming, what, 50 years? 00:17:04.360 --> 00:17:05.200 Yeah. 00:17:05.200 --> 00:17:09.020 Let alone, we're only just starting to think about, well, how do we teach programming? 00:17:09.780 --> 00:17:25.480 So what I've been doing very recently, and it's been a rich vein of creativity for me in terms of my practice as an educator, is I think to myself, well, first of all, I thought to myself, what if we taught music like we teach programming? 00:17:25.480 --> 00:17:31.280 That was such a terrible thought, but I quickly switched the question around. 00:17:31.280 --> 00:17:36.940 I said, well, what happens if we teach programming using some of the techniques that we use for music education? 00:17:37.120 --> 00:17:43.360 Now, there are some similarities because music, you're reading and manipulating symbols all the time. 00:17:43.360 --> 00:17:51.260 You're also practicing a skill that takes a long time to actually develop enough so that you actually sound any good. 00:17:51.260 --> 00:17:53.860 And the same with programming. 00:17:53.860 --> 00:17:55.400 That's similar, yeah, similar to programming, right? 00:17:55.400 --> 00:18:05.740 Like, you might get Hello World working, but if you can, you know, put together a well-tuned web app, that's a very different, that's a long way down the path, right? 00:18:05.740 --> 00:18:06.180 Exactly. 00:18:06.180 --> 00:18:11.740 And so, hey, do you know the how to draw an owl means? 00:18:11.740 --> 00:18:14.120 So it's how to draw an owl. 00:18:14.120 --> 00:18:18.660 First, start with two circles, and then the second box is draw the rest of the down owl. 00:18:18.660 --> 00:18:21.200 And that's how programming education is. 00:18:21.200 --> 00:18:25.000 You've got huge numbers of resources that are draw two circles. 00:18:25.460 --> 00:18:32.680 And then you have Stack Overflow and all the places where you and I as professional developers might go to learn about a new API or try and fix the bug. 00:18:32.680 --> 00:18:35.240 And that's a professional level, and there's nothing in between. 00:18:35.240 --> 00:18:39.900 Whereas what the music world has managed to do over this sort of 500 years is bridge that gap. 00:18:40.900 --> 00:18:50.840 And so, like I said, this is a rich theme of inspiration for me to think, well, what techniques can we transplant from the world of music into programming education? 00:18:50.840 --> 00:18:56.660 But we'll probably come on to that later on, actually, when we talk about code grades, because that's very much to do with that. 00:18:56.900 --> 00:18:58.820 Yeah, that's a very interesting concept. 00:18:58.820 --> 00:19:01.400 You're right that it's so new. 00:19:01.400 --> 00:19:04.500 I mean, 50 years is really not that long, right? 00:19:04.500 --> 00:19:09.760 So compared to the history of music or mathematics or philosophy or whatever. 00:19:09.760 --> 00:19:12.580 Yeah, we're at the cuneiform play tablet stage. 00:19:12.580 --> 00:19:15.700 You know, I'd love to see what a program is. 00:19:15.700 --> 00:19:16.720 We're etching in stone. 00:19:16.720 --> 00:19:18.300 Yeah, exactly. 00:19:18.300 --> 00:19:24.040 I mean, but can you imagine from that, we have Shakespeare, you know, but it's a long term thing. 00:19:24.120 --> 00:19:27.980 And it's easy for us to forget how short a time we've been doing this. 00:19:27.980 --> 00:19:33.700 We've not had the equivalent of a revolution in programming where they've just thrown away everything. 00:19:33.700 --> 00:19:35.140 Or do you know what I mean? 00:19:35.140 --> 00:19:37.080 It's just we're doing it long enough. 00:19:37.080 --> 00:19:37.700 For sure. 00:19:37.700 --> 00:19:44.860 So one of the things I think can make programming hard is it's relatively abstract. 00:19:44.860 --> 00:19:45.520 Yeah. 00:19:45.520 --> 00:19:50.180 I say relative because compared to, say, like a math proof, like programming is super concrete. 00:19:50.180 --> 00:19:56.400 But compared to, you know, other disciplines, it can be pretty abstract. 00:19:56.400 --> 00:20:09.520 And I feel like having some kind of hardware to visualize or interact with as part of that programming for at least a certain group of people, I'm thinking especially for younger kids, is super helpful for them. 00:20:09.520 --> 00:20:13.600 So I guess that brings us to the BBC micro bit. 00:20:13.600 --> 00:20:14.620 You want to tell us about that? 00:20:15.360 --> 00:20:15.720 Yeah. 00:20:15.720 --> 00:20:18.920 So I mentioned the BBC micro when I was a kid. 00:20:18.920 --> 00:20:20.660 And it holds. 00:20:20.660 --> 00:20:21.720 That was a computer, right? 00:20:21.720 --> 00:20:25.240 That was a big beige box that bleeped at you. 00:20:25.640 --> 00:20:29.260 And it cost like, well, the equivalent of thousands of pounds in today's money. 00:20:29.260 --> 00:20:33.520 And that holds a special place in lots of British geeks' hearts. 00:20:33.520 --> 00:20:49.000 And the BBC could see that with the change in the computing curriculum in the UK, with things like Raspberry Pi and computing at school and all the other things that were going on in the UK, that this is an opportunity for them to make another contribution. 00:20:49.600 --> 00:20:53.340 But they wanted to make a contribution that was relevant for today. 00:20:53.340 --> 00:21:01.080 And so the micro bit being a small Internet of Things type device with some, which has a couple of buttons. 00:21:01.080 --> 00:21:03.200 It has a five by five LED display. 00:21:03.200 --> 00:21:04.240 It's got a little radio. 00:21:04.240 --> 00:21:11.040 It's got an accelerometer and a compass like a mobile phone and GPIO pins so you can plug things into it as well. 00:21:11.040 --> 00:21:25.220 So they came up with this crazy idea that if we made a device that was cheap enough, instead of giving one to every school, we could give one to every 11 and 12 year old in the UK, which is about a million kids, really. 00:21:26.860 --> 00:21:36.280 Towards the end of 2015, the BBC announced that they were going to be doing some sort of computing project, computing and education. 00:21:36.280 --> 00:21:39.920 And it mentioned Python in the blurb that they sent out. 00:21:39.920 --> 00:21:41.700 And they were looking like, what is this? 00:21:41.700 --> 00:21:44.420 Yeah, they're looking for partners. 00:21:44.420 --> 00:21:46.120 Now, I'm a PSS fellow. 00:21:46.760 --> 00:21:57.900 And at that time, because I've been doing a lot of work in Python and education in the education track in Python UK, lots of people got in touch with me and said, what's this Python thing? 00:21:57.900 --> 00:21:59.120 Have you anything to do with this? 00:21:59.120 --> 00:22:00.600 And I wasn't. 00:22:00.600 --> 00:22:02.840 But I knew somebody at the BBC who was. 00:22:02.840 --> 00:22:08.300 So tapping some back channels, as it were, he wouldn't reveal to me what was going on. 00:22:08.300 --> 00:22:09.820 But he said, you should totally get involved. 00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:22.480 And so with the blessing of the PSS board, I applied for the Python Software Foundation to be a partner in this project. 00:22:22.480 --> 00:22:24.900 And fools, they said yes. 00:22:24.900 --> 00:22:31.320 So this is how the Python community, especially in the UK, got involved. 00:22:32.040 --> 00:22:44.820 And initially, what we were tasked to do was provide Python learning resources, which, for me, I was thinking, well, I know plenty of teachers who teach Python. 00:22:44.820 --> 00:22:47.860 I know plenty of Python people who also teach. 00:22:47.860 --> 00:22:52.100 This is going to be a jolly weekend sometime where we can all sit down. 00:22:52.100 --> 00:22:53.460 We'll knock this out by next week. 00:22:53.460 --> 00:22:53.840 It's all good. 00:22:53.840 --> 00:22:54.520 Yeah, yeah, exactly. 00:22:54.520 --> 00:22:57.820 This is classic how hard can it be type thought that it's dangerous. 00:22:59.280 --> 00:23:02.980 And so the BBC were set up for us to do this. 00:23:02.980 --> 00:23:09.120 And we were all involved with the meetings so that we could see as an educational partner what was coming. 00:23:09.120 --> 00:23:16.040 And then in the May of 2016, I was called into a meeting at the BBC. 00:23:16.040 --> 00:23:22.560 And they said the organization that was going to provide Python on the micro bit has dropped out. 00:23:22.560 --> 00:23:25.820 We must have Python on the micro bit. 00:23:25.820 --> 00:23:27.480 And we want you to do it. 00:23:28.040 --> 00:23:29.820 This has gone up a level of difficulty. 00:23:29.820 --> 00:23:30.540 Yeah, yeah. 00:23:30.540 --> 00:23:33.600 And I was like, well, you realize that we're all volunteers for a start. 00:23:33.600 --> 00:23:35.320 Python is a volunteer-led community. 00:23:35.320 --> 00:23:39.100 And so they said, well, could you try it? 00:23:39.100 --> 00:23:40.760 I said, well, let me have a look. 00:23:40.760 --> 00:23:52.520 And their idea was for us to build a version of Python on top of a Microsoft technology called PXT, which Microsoft were still building at the time. 00:23:52.660 --> 00:24:02.660 And essentially, the way it would work was we would emit a JSON-based abstract syntax tree that we would post somewhere. 00:24:02.660 --> 00:24:04.440 This would get compiled. 00:24:04.940 --> 00:24:07.780 And then a hex file would be returned back to the user. 00:24:07.780 --> 00:24:11.240 And they would drop that onto their micro bit and see their code run. 00:24:12.000 --> 00:24:20.380 And I remember a weekend, there was about five of us looked at this code and decided that we didn't have the time. 00:24:20.380 --> 00:24:23.560 We didn't have the expertise because it was all written in TypeScript. 00:24:23.560 --> 00:24:27.920 And Microsoft, it was still a moving target because Microsoft was still building this. 00:24:28.780 --> 00:24:36.260 However, by a stroke of luck, that very same week, I met a gentleman called Johnny from ARM. 00:24:36.260 --> 00:24:37.980 That's how he introduced himself. 00:24:37.980 --> 00:24:42.260 And he was the person who was leading the development of the hardware of the device. 00:24:42.260 --> 00:24:45.360 And I was explaining to him what I've just told you. 00:24:45.360 --> 00:24:46.620 And he was like, what? 00:24:46.620 --> 00:24:49.560 Why don't you just use MicroPython? 00:24:49.560 --> 00:24:51.760 And I said, oh, you know about MicroPython? 00:24:51.760 --> 00:24:54.160 He said, yes, I live next door to Damien George. 00:24:54.160 --> 00:24:54.840 Oh, wow. 00:24:54.840 --> 00:24:56.200 Small world. 00:24:56.660 --> 00:24:57.260 Yeah, exactly. 00:24:57.260 --> 00:25:01.680 Damien was living in the UK, in Cambridge at the time. 00:25:01.680 --> 00:25:08.260 And so I had a little bit of a kerfuffle with the BBC where I basically said, look, you should use MicroPython. 00:25:08.260 --> 00:25:10.360 And they were like, no, we want to use the Microsoft stuff. 00:25:10.360 --> 00:25:13.140 And I said, well, no, MicroPython will let you do this stuff. 00:25:13.140 --> 00:25:17.960 And eventually they let Damien sign the NDA that was needed. 00:25:17.960 --> 00:25:21.840 And Johnny posted the development board through Damien's letterbox. 00:25:21.840 --> 00:25:24.800 And a week later, Damien had it running. 00:25:24.800 --> 00:25:26.020 He had a REPL. 00:25:26.560 --> 00:25:28.440 And you could make LEDs blink. 00:25:28.440 --> 00:25:30.640 And it would detect button presses. 00:25:30.640 --> 00:25:34.900 And at that moment, I have to admit, I did a kind of little happy dance because I knew. 00:25:34.900 --> 00:25:36.980 This is going to work. 00:25:36.980 --> 00:25:37.900 This is going to work. 00:25:37.900 --> 00:25:38.740 We had Hello World. 00:25:38.740 --> 00:25:40.760 So the rest is just polishing. 00:25:40.760 --> 00:25:42.200 Well, the rest. 00:25:42.200 --> 00:25:43.780 You know, we've done the first 90%. 00:25:43.780 --> 00:25:45.260 Damien had done the first 90%. 00:25:45.260 --> 00:25:47.460 We just had the next 90%. 00:25:47.460 --> 00:25:49.220 Get done. 00:25:49.680 --> 00:25:50.440 That's really amazing. 00:25:50.440 --> 00:25:53.160 So this was a project by the BBC. 00:25:53.160 --> 00:25:53.980 Yeah. 00:25:53.980 --> 00:25:55.700 Why does the BBC... 00:25:55.700 --> 00:25:58.260 The second B is for broadcasting, right? 00:25:58.260 --> 00:26:00.640 Like, why are they trying to make these social contributions? 00:26:00.640 --> 00:26:01.880 It's good that they are. 00:26:01.880 --> 00:26:02.600 Yeah. 00:26:02.980 --> 00:26:04.740 But where does that fit in? 00:26:04.740 --> 00:26:06.040 Oh, man, you're going to love this. 00:26:06.040 --> 00:26:07.260 It's going to be all very Game of Thrones. 00:26:07.260 --> 00:26:08.640 It's because we have a queen. 00:26:08.640 --> 00:26:10.380 And she issues royal charters. 00:26:10.380 --> 00:26:16.380 And the royal charter for the British Broadcasting Corporation, which comes up every seven or eight 00:26:16.380 --> 00:26:23.560 year, part of the charter, it says that the BBC is supposed to inform, educate, and entertain. 00:26:23.560 --> 00:26:27.260 And this fits in educate. 00:26:27.260 --> 00:26:27.760 Right. 00:26:27.760 --> 00:26:28.020 Okay. 00:26:28.020 --> 00:26:31.440 So, however, the BBC has to be very careful. 00:26:31.440 --> 00:26:38.320 And they have been on the receiving end of various legal challenges where if the BBC turn up and say, 00:26:38.460 --> 00:26:43.640 if we're going to do educational resources, computing, then everybody who... 00:26:43.640 --> 00:26:48.380 Every private company in the UK who does computing resources is going to be... 00:26:48.380 --> 00:26:48.400 Yeah. 00:26:48.400 --> 00:26:48.820 Yeah. 00:26:48.820 --> 00:26:50.500 You're undercutting us, all right? 00:26:50.500 --> 00:26:50.740 Yeah. 00:26:50.740 --> 00:26:52.020 You're killing our business, right? 00:26:52.020 --> 00:26:52.260 Yeah. 00:26:52.260 --> 00:26:52.460 Yeah. 00:26:52.460 --> 00:26:57.240 So this is why the BBC acted as the umbrella organization. 00:26:57.240 --> 00:27:01.780 And it was the partners, actually, who delivered the microbit itself. 00:27:01.780 --> 00:27:06.020 So this is why it was Johnny from Arm and not Johnny from the BBC. 00:27:06.020 --> 00:27:06.580 I see. 00:27:06.740 --> 00:27:13.680 Why Microsoft were doing their PXD stuff and why they asked us to do microbit and Damien did that work. 00:27:13.680 --> 00:27:17.180 And I did a whole bunch of other work as well with Damien to do his microbit. 00:27:17.180 --> 00:27:17.880 So... 00:27:17.880 --> 00:27:18.020 Yeah. 00:27:18.020 --> 00:27:18.440 That's cool. 00:27:18.440 --> 00:27:18.840 Yeah. 00:27:18.840 --> 00:27:20.780 It's kings and queens and royal charters. 00:27:20.780 --> 00:27:24.580 And if we dig deep enough, it's by the grace of God, her majesty, that sort of stuff. 00:27:24.580 --> 00:27:25.340 Yeah. 00:27:25.340 --> 00:27:25.600 Yeah. 00:27:25.600 --> 00:27:25.880 Wonderful. 00:27:25.880 --> 00:27:26.920 So... 00:27:26.920 --> 00:27:28.000 Okay. 00:27:28.000 --> 00:27:32.380 So this thing was handed out to millions of kids in the UK. 00:27:32.380 --> 00:27:34.720 And there's actually some really cool research that came from it. 00:27:35.020 --> 00:27:45.500 But people who are listening, if they're a teacher or if they're a student or somehow interacting with, you know, even a university, school district, whatever, you can go get these. 00:27:45.500 --> 00:27:46.040 Right? 00:27:46.040 --> 00:27:54.320 I could go to newegg.com or somewhere like that and buy them for, you know, 25 pounds, 20 pounds, something like that. 00:27:54.320 --> 00:27:54.600 Yeah. 00:27:54.600 --> 00:27:56.020 Yeah, exactly. 00:27:56.020 --> 00:27:56.920 So, I don't know. 00:27:56.920 --> 00:28:00.300 Visit somewhere like Adafruit and they'll sell you a kit. 00:28:00.300 --> 00:28:03.180 You can also get them in classroom bundles as well. 00:28:03.420 --> 00:28:08.320 So, if you teach, you can get a group of 30 or you could just buy hundreds of them all at once. 00:28:08.320 --> 00:28:13.580 And the microbit website has a browser-based Python editor. 00:28:13.580 --> 00:28:18.800 It also has a kind of a blocks-based thing, which is what Microsoft PXT turned into. 00:28:19.580 --> 00:28:22.920 And so, they make it very easy for kids to sit down. 00:28:22.920 --> 00:28:28.920 You plug the thing via a USB cable into your laptop or school computer. 00:28:28.920 --> 00:28:31.540 You use the browser-based editor. 00:28:31.540 --> 00:28:33.880 You get what's called a hex file. 00:28:33.880 --> 00:28:36.100 You drag that onto the device. 00:28:36.100 --> 00:28:41.340 It flashes the device, what we call when we sort of put the software on the device, and then it runs. 00:28:41.340 --> 00:28:42.720 It's very simple. 00:28:42.960 --> 00:28:43.480 Yeah, that's cool. 00:28:43.480 --> 00:28:47.280 And some of the programming can even be, like you said, like that blocky type stuff. 00:28:47.280 --> 00:28:50.240 You don't have to be able to type or barely read, right? 00:28:50.240 --> 00:28:51.480 I need to say, okay, move. 00:28:51.480 --> 00:28:56.140 I'm going to put a 10 here and then like loop and then say put a 3 in the little loop block. 00:28:56.140 --> 00:28:57.080 And I think that's great. 00:28:57.080 --> 00:28:58.180 So, that makes it super accessible. 00:28:58.180 --> 00:29:01.100 I did an hour of code project at my daughter's school. 00:29:01.100 --> 00:29:01.740 Yeah. 00:29:01.740 --> 00:29:04.820 And she was in, gosh, I'm trying to remember what grade. 00:29:04.820 --> 00:29:05.940 She was quite young. 00:29:05.940 --> 00:29:07.760 First or second grade. 00:29:07.760 --> 00:29:08.380 Yeah. 00:29:08.380 --> 00:29:08.900 Something like this. 00:29:09.380 --> 00:29:20.300 And almost every kid in first or second grade was able to just completely build something meaningful for them within an hour in that little environment, which I thought was amazing. 00:29:20.300 --> 00:29:23.020 So, what she probably used was something called Scratch? 00:29:23.020 --> 00:29:23.280 Yes. 00:29:23.280 --> 00:29:28.300 I think it was maybe it was on the Grok learning platform. 00:29:28.300 --> 00:29:29.640 I think the hour of code thing. 00:29:29.640 --> 00:29:32.160 So, it may have been Scratch. 00:29:32.160 --> 00:29:34.760 I think it was Scratch-like, but I don't think it was actually Scratch. 00:29:34.760 --> 00:29:35.940 I don't remember what it's called. 00:29:35.940 --> 00:29:36.560 Yeah. 00:29:36.720 --> 00:29:42.760 So, I know the folks at Grok and they use the same block-based library that Scratch uses. 00:29:42.760 --> 00:29:45.440 So, drag and drop blocks is just a JavaScript library. 00:29:45.440 --> 00:29:47.260 But they emit Python code. 00:29:47.260 --> 00:29:53.680 And then that Python code is running, I think, in the browser in Grok's case. 00:29:53.680 --> 00:29:55.020 So, you have Brython or something. 00:29:55.020 --> 00:29:55.240 Yeah. 00:29:55.240 --> 00:29:55.660 Yeah. 00:29:55.660 --> 00:29:55.800 Yeah. 00:29:55.800 --> 00:29:55.940 Yeah. 00:29:55.940 --> 00:29:56.100 Yeah. 00:29:56.100 --> 00:29:56.500 Exactly. 00:29:56.500 --> 00:29:59.520 And you have your little turtle or something like that. 00:29:59.520 --> 00:30:00.820 But, yeah. 00:30:00.820 --> 00:30:08.420 So, you might be asking yourself, well, where do I, how do I get a block-based editor for Python on a microbit? 00:30:08.820 --> 00:30:10.660 Well, here's a cute story. 00:30:10.660 --> 00:30:18.740 There's a 13-year-old kid in the north of England, in a place called Preston, which is just north of Manchester, called Josh. 00:30:19.540 --> 00:30:29.860 And he has created a coding environment for kids because he's a kid and the stuff that he was being given at school wasn't meeting his expectations. 00:30:29.860 --> 00:30:31.620 And he figured it out himself. 00:30:31.620 --> 00:30:37.600 And so, he's taken this JavaScript library and it emits Python and he's done all this work. 00:30:38.100 --> 00:30:40.360 And so, he created this project called EduBlocks. 00:30:40.360 --> 00:30:40.600 Yeah. 00:30:40.600 --> 00:30:47.900 He presented at the PyCon U.S. Education Summit, which is, I think, the day before regular PyCon. 00:30:47.900 --> 00:30:48.200 Yeah. 00:30:48.200 --> 00:30:48.840 Yeah. 00:30:48.840 --> 00:30:49.560 Yeah. 00:30:49.560 --> 00:30:51.080 So, and this is the other thing. 00:30:51.080 --> 00:30:52.880 Josh is a great presenter as well. 00:30:52.880 --> 00:31:00.200 So, it was a kind of a vindication of the efforts of investment that's happening in the U.K. 00:31:00.480 --> 00:31:13.340 that even only this few number of years after we started concentrating on getting computing properly on the curriculum, you've got kids stepping up and autonomously building solutions for the next generation of kids who are following them. 00:31:13.340 --> 00:31:14.440 This is pretty good. 00:31:14.440 --> 00:31:22.080 I mean, he's following exactly in the tradition as so many people who became programmers are like, the stuff around me is crummy. 00:31:22.080 --> 00:31:24.000 I know I can make it better. 00:31:24.000 --> 00:31:25.840 I'm just going to improve the world. 00:31:25.840 --> 00:31:27.040 Give me a week. 00:31:27.040 --> 00:31:27.660 I'll be back. 00:31:27.660 --> 00:31:28.020 Right? 00:31:28.020 --> 00:31:28.240 Yeah. 00:31:28.240 --> 00:31:30.920 And then, oh, look, I've made something better than we had before. 00:31:30.920 --> 00:31:31.120 Right? 00:31:31.120 --> 00:31:35.620 Like, so many people actually become more skilled so that they can just fix these types of problems. 00:31:35.620 --> 00:31:35.860 Right? 00:31:35.860 --> 00:31:36.440 Exactly. 00:31:36.440 --> 00:31:36.960 Exactly. 00:31:36.960 --> 00:31:39.420 And Josh has the wind in his sails. 00:31:39.420 --> 00:31:46.900 And it's wonderful to see this community that he's building as well around EduBlocks sort of flourish and grow. 00:31:46.900 --> 00:31:55.820 So, whenever I see Josh, I just smile both inside and outside because it's just so wonderful to see this young person really flourish. 00:31:56.100 --> 00:31:57.980 He's a credit to himself and his family. 00:31:57.980 --> 00:31:58.880 He really supports him. 00:31:58.880 --> 00:31:58.980 Yeah. 00:31:58.980 --> 00:32:05.120 But I go and visit schools sometimes or, you know, coding events in the UK for kids. 00:32:05.120 --> 00:32:08.320 And inevitably, there's an EduBlocks happening somewhere or other. 00:32:08.320 --> 00:32:13.360 And I smile and think, oh, if Josh could see these kids having such good fun with the code that you've written. 00:32:13.360 --> 00:32:14.420 Yeah. 00:32:14.420 --> 00:32:16.200 That's awesome. 00:32:16.580 --> 00:32:20.120 So, kind of in the same vein, you know, let's talk a little bit about the impact. 00:32:20.120 --> 00:32:27.800 So, on the micro bit website, there's some nice research findings summarized and whatnot. 00:32:27.800 --> 00:32:32.840 And one of the major impacts was that this is cross-curricular. 00:32:33.360 --> 00:32:37.220 And that means coding is not just contained into the computing class. 00:32:37.220 --> 00:32:41.660 You don't go to computer class, do computing, and then go back to pen and pencil or whatever, right? 00:32:41.660 --> 00:32:43.700 I feel very strongly about this, actually. 00:32:44.460 --> 00:32:50.100 I think most of coding and most of programming skills are to amplify other things. 00:32:50.100 --> 00:32:51.900 My biology research is better. 00:32:51.900 --> 00:32:53.300 My music is better. 00:32:53.300 --> 00:32:55.180 My whatever is better because of this, right? 00:32:55.180 --> 00:32:56.760 And this is kind of related to that, huh? 00:32:56.760 --> 00:32:56.960 Yeah. 00:32:56.960 --> 00:32:58.500 This, I, oh, man. 00:32:58.500 --> 00:33:01.660 If we were in the same room, I'd be giving you a big hug and high five. 00:33:01.660 --> 00:33:04.080 I can't agree more with you there. 00:33:04.080 --> 00:33:06.420 I totally see where you are there with that. 00:33:06.420 --> 00:33:07.200 Couldn't agree more. 00:33:07.200 --> 00:33:07.620 That's awesome. 00:33:07.760 --> 00:33:09.700 So, yeah, it seemed like this helped there. 00:33:09.700 --> 00:33:15.140 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by us. 00:33:15.140 --> 00:33:19.380 Have you heard that Python is not good for concurrent programming problems? 00:33:19.380 --> 00:33:24.980 Whoever told you that is living in the past because it's prime time for Python's asynchronous features. 00:33:24.980 --> 00:33:29.540 With the widespread adoption of async methods and the async and await keywords, 00:33:29.540 --> 00:33:34.660 Python's ecosystem has a ton of new and exciting frameworks based on async and await. 00:33:35.000 --> 00:33:39.800 That's why we created a course for anyone who wants to learn all of Python's async capabilities, 00:33:39.800 --> 00:33:42.220 async techniques and examples in Python. 00:33:42.220 --> 00:33:48.100 Just visit talkpython.fm/async and watch the intro video to see if this course is for you. 00:33:48.100 --> 00:33:50.580 It's only $49 and you own it forever. 00:33:50.580 --> 00:33:51.620 No subscriptions. 00:33:51.620 --> 00:33:54.360 And there are discounts for teams as well. 00:33:54.360 --> 00:33:58.240 This is not just a UK thing, right? 00:33:58.240 --> 00:33:59.840 The BBC started it. 00:33:59.840 --> 00:34:04.040 A lot of the folks there, like you mentioned yourself and Damian George and so on. 00:34:04.240 --> 00:34:06.640 But this is now a global thing. 00:34:06.640 --> 00:34:10.560 Like I was reading about it being used in Arkansas, for example, 00:34:10.560 --> 00:34:13.540 with a bunch of 900 schools or something cool like this. 00:34:13.540 --> 00:34:14.040 Yeah. 00:34:14.040 --> 00:34:15.220 And Canada as well. 00:34:15.220 --> 00:34:15.440 Yeah. 00:34:15.440 --> 00:34:17.620 If you remember back to PyCon, 00:34:17.620 --> 00:34:21.100 Kamisha gave her outstanding keynote. 00:34:21.640 --> 00:34:27.900 She's using micro bits in her Detroit library to get these kids into programming. 00:34:27.900 --> 00:34:30.280 And it's such a wonderful thing to see. 00:34:30.280 --> 00:34:32.060 You just don't know where these things lead, really. 00:34:32.060 --> 00:34:32.820 Yeah, yeah. 00:34:32.820 --> 00:34:34.760 When they take off, they take off, I guess. 00:34:34.760 --> 00:34:35.140 Yeah. 00:34:35.200 --> 00:34:39.080 So let me maybe summarize some of the research findings really quick. 00:34:39.080 --> 00:34:41.380 Just highlight them and then you could comment on them. 00:34:41.380 --> 00:34:45.400 So there was some follow-up research and there's actually a research paper on this, 00:34:45.400 --> 00:34:47.620 at least within the UK, around them. 00:34:47.620 --> 00:34:49.100 This is millions of kids. 00:34:49.100 --> 00:34:51.720 So this is a great sample size, not three or something. 00:34:51.720 --> 00:34:52.360 Yeah. 00:34:52.440 --> 00:34:57.940 And it said 90% of the students felt that micro bits showed them that anyone can code. 00:34:57.940 --> 00:35:00.480 This is not like the genius hacker like we talked about, right? 00:35:00.480 --> 00:35:01.260 Yeah, exactly. 00:35:01.260 --> 00:35:06.640 Some other one that really resonated deeply with me is that 70% more girls said they would 00:35:06.640 --> 00:35:11.480 choose computing, computer science as a potential subject after using this. 00:35:11.480 --> 00:35:16.020 And as the father of three daughters, like that is really awesome. 00:35:16.020 --> 00:35:16.780 Yeah. 00:35:16.780 --> 00:35:18.620 So there's some other ones as well. 00:35:18.620 --> 00:35:20.720 A bunch of the teachers enjoyed it and so on. 00:35:20.740 --> 00:35:22.560 But those two definitely resonated with me. 00:35:22.560 --> 00:35:22.980 Yeah. 00:35:22.980 --> 00:35:29.640 If nothing else, if the technology is a dead end, the device disappears without trace because 00:35:29.640 --> 00:35:31.600 funky new thing comes out next year. 00:35:31.600 --> 00:35:36.840 If nothing else, just those two things that you've mentioned, that coding is for everybody 00:35:36.840 --> 00:35:43.700 and especially for girls for whom I guess since the 1980s, programming especially has been 00:35:43.700 --> 00:35:49.420 stereotyped as a boy thing, then stereotypes stop you from doing stuff. 00:35:49.420 --> 00:35:54.220 And if this can counteract that stereotype, then it's a good thing. 00:35:54.220 --> 00:36:00.620 But I guess because the micro bit makes it so incredibly easy to make something funky and it's 00:36:00.620 --> 00:36:01.880 something you can hold in your hand. 00:36:01.880 --> 00:36:08.520 And that might be, I'm thinking of a friend of mine, David Whale, who did a project with a 00:36:08.520 --> 00:36:10.520 little girl, one of his neighbors, I believe. 00:36:11.320 --> 00:36:14.080 And the micro bit would do dance instructions. 00:36:14.080 --> 00:36:22.580 It would flash an image on the screen and you had to be on a YMCA or big fish, little fish or, you know, Macarena or something like that. 00:36:22.880 --> 00:36:25.660 But it would show you what the moves were you had to do. 00:36:25.660 --> 00:36:31.500 The important thing is that the micro bit gives you ownership over your digital world. 00:36:31.500 --> 00:36:34.080 You're not just sitting there consuming a YouTube video. 00:36:34.080 --> 00:36:38.260 You're making a dance machine that you can share with your friends when they come around. 00:36:38.260 --> 00:36:39.620 And they can go, oh, that's cool. 00:36:39.620 --> 00:36:43.180 Let's invent a new move and have a new icon or something like that. 00:36:43.520 --> 00:36:59.960 You know, so it's giving the young people or anybody else for that matter who who's coming into programming the mechanism for just taking control as soon as possible of programming rather than having to. 00:36:59.960 --> 00:37:04.160 OK, today we're going to learn about loops and then tomorrow we're going to learn about functions. 00:37:04.160 --> 00:37:10.320 And then maybe in about three weeks time, you'll be able to do something that's vaguely useful because technology is hard. 00:37:10.860 --> 00:37:12.520 This is within five minutes. 00:37:12.520 --> 00:37:16.200 You can, you know, it's literally a line of Python to make it stroll. 00:37:16.200 --> 00:37:20.520 Hello, my name is Nicholas on the on the on the display. 00:37:20.520 --> 00:37:22.580 You know, it's play a tune. 00:37:22.580 --> 00:37:31.280 It's got a speech synthesizer built into micro Python, which is hilarious because, of course, as soon as kids realize there's a speech synthesizer and speech. 00:37:31.280 --> 00:37:33.320 Say, but then a string. 00:37:33.320 --> 00:37:35.740 Obviously, the teacher uses a polite example. 00:37:35.740 --> 00:37:40.700 But within seconds, you know, the kids are being rude to each other by the medium of squeaky dialect voice. 00:37:40.840 --> 00:37:42.180 But they like it. 00:37:42.180 --> 00:37:46.180 And of course, the first kid I saw this a couple of days ago when I was visiting the school. 00:37:46.180 --> 00:37:49.940 The first kid who figures out that thing, it's like a gold rush. 00:37:49.940 --> 00:37:53.220 All of a sudden, it's like, you've seen what Susanna's done. 00:37:53.220 --> 00:37:54.680 No, listen, listen, listen, listen. 00:37:54.680 --> 00:37:56.900 What's that? 00:37:56.900 --> 00:37:57.680 She's talking. 00:37:57.680 --> 00:37:59.000 How do you do that? 00:37:59.000 --> 00:38:00.820 She's going to do this thing. 00:38:00.820 --> 00:38:03.840 And then so she's told her it's like pebbles with the water. 00:38:03.840 --> 00:38:05.900 You know, they sort of echo out. 00:38:06.200 --> 00:38:10.900 And then the kids, because another kid's done the school thing, but they all want to do it. 00:38:10.900 --> 00:38:17.120 And it's just capturing moments of those enthusiasm, of that enthusiasm and building on that. 00:38:17.120 --> 00:38:20.080 So you go, well, do you know how the speech synthesizer really works? 00:38:20.080 --> 00:38:22.380 Or what else could you do with the speech synthesizer? 00:38:22.380 --> 00:38:23.320 You could make it think. 00:38:23.320 --> 00:38:25.460 You know, OK, so how do you do that? 00:38:25.540 --> 00:38:28.440 Well, you pass another argument in, which is the pitch of the voice. 00:38:28.440 --> 00:38:29.220 Well, what's an argument? 00:38:29.220 --> 00:38:30.360 And what actually are we doing? 00:38:30.360 --> 00:38:32.000 Well, we're calling a function here. 00:38:32.000 --> 00:38:32.800 Yeah. 00:38:32.800 --> 00:38:36.180 And so you see between the brackets, you've got a string, which is what you're going to say. 00:38:36.180 --> 00:38:39.560 And then the next one is a number, which tells you what the pitch is going to be. 00:38:39.560 --> 00:38:41.640 So that's two arguments. 00:38:41.640 --> 00:38:50.560 So they now have the notion of what an argument is, because that's the important, essential piece of information that's going to let them get the microbit to sing some goofy song. 00:38:50.560 --> 00:38:58.140 What you're touching on here is one of these fundamental things that we've been doing wrong teaching programming for the last 50 years. 00:38:58.140 --> 00:39:04.000 And by that, I mean, what we do is we say, OK, well, what do they need to know how to write a whole program? 00:39:04.000 --> 00:39:05.220 Well, they need to know functions. 00:39:05.220 --> 00:39:07.220 They need to know loops and they need to know variables. 00:39:07.220 --> 00:39:09.400 We want to teach variables, loops, functions, classes. 00:39:09.400 --> 00:39:14.360 And then eventually, like three weeks later, like you say, they're going to be able to do a thing. 00:39:14.360 --> 00:39:18.300 And I think things should be taught from the outside in like an onion. 00:39:18.300 --> 00:39:18.560 Right. 00:39:18.560 --> 00:39:20.000 You see how amazing it is on the outside. 00:39:20.100 --> 00:39:20.900 You peel back the onion. 00:39:20.900 --> 00:39:22.720 You learn one part of why it works. 00:39:22.720 --> 00:39:24.940 And that just connects so much better. 00:39:24.940 --> 00:39:25.820 Yeah. 00:39:25.820 --> 00:39:31.540 But this chimes so much with music education, because, of course, you get handed your violin. 00:39:31.540 --> 00:39:32.660 Now, can you imagine that? 00:39:32.660 --> 00:39:35.980 My wife is a string teacher, so she's a fifth day in, day out. 00:39:35.980 --> 00:39:37.600 And she's amazing at it as well. 00:39:37.600 --> 00:39:47.440 And watching how she works is another thing that inspires me, because her early access violin stuff that she does sounds like hell. 00:39:47.440 --> 00:39:51.700 Because it's like 36-year-old, all armed with a violin. 00:39:51.700 --> 00:39:54.240 Now, that's not going to sound nice. 00:39:54.240 --> 00:39:57.540 Like you're killing a goose or something, right? 00:39:57.540 --> 00:39:57.880 Yeah. 00:39:57.880 --> 00:39:58.060 Yeah. 00:39:58.060 --> 00:40:01.740 It's like strangling cats for a very long time. 00:40:02.120 --> 00:40:11.220 But what Mary does is introduces gradually and in an outside-in sort of a way, various violin playing techniques. 00:40:11.220 --> 00:40:18.840 And so she might be playing something really funky on her cello, a kind of a 12-bar blues walking bass, which the kids really like. 00:40:18.920 --> 00:40:24.540 And she says, well, if you go, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee, gee. 00:40:24.540 --> 00:40:26.460 It'll fit with what I'm doing. 00:40:26.460 --> 00:40:29.640 And so they all go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 00:40:29.640 --> 00:40:29.740 Yeah. 00:40:29.740 --> 00:40:31.320 You know, but it kind of sounds okay. 00:40:31.320 --> 00:40:36.100 And they can, and what they're focusing on is the fact that Mary's doing, she has a beat on with a drum machine. 00:40:36.100 --> 00:40:37.860 She's playing a 12-bar blues bass line. 00:40:38.080 --> 00:40:39.420 And they feel they're part of it. 00:40:39.420 --> 00:40:41.600 And so in their eyes, they're making performance. 00:40:41.600 --> 00:40:48.160 And it gives them the momentum, just as we were just talking about with kids learning how to code. 00:40:48.160 --> 00:40:52.840 And so starting from, do I see a need for learning this? 00:40:52.840 --> 00:40:56.360 I have a reason for wanting to learn this thing. 00:40:56.760 --> 00:41:11.820 Is perhaps the primary way that music teachers especially, but perhaps people who teach code, should go about inspiring those beginners for whom, you know, they're not, how can I put it, already inclined for programming. 00:41:11.820 --> 00:41:12.540 You see what I mean? 00:41:12.540 --> 00:41:15.540 Some people have a crystal clear laser focus. 00:41:15.540 --> 00:41:16.860 I want to build this thing. 00:41:16.860 --> 00:41:20.220 And they just know, I'm just going to plow through the technical steps until I get to that thing. 00:41:20.220 --> 00:41:22.160 But a lot of people just have a general interest. 00:41:22.160 --> 00:41:26.140 And then it's harder to plow through when you don't have a target. 00:41:26.700 --> 00:41:26.860 Yeah. 00:41:26.860 --> 00:41:27.360 Yeah. 00:41:27.360 --> 00:41:38.660 And so providing a little gizmo or a project or something like that that allows somebody to go, well, yeah, I really do want to have a cat watering flap or something. 00:41:38.660 --> 00:41:39.280 I don't know. 00:41:39.280 --> 00:41:40.100 I'm making this up. 00:41:40.100 --> 00:41:40.440 Yeah. 00:41:40.440 --> 00:41:42.380 I know exactly what you mean. 00:41:42.380 --> 00:41:42.900 Yeah. 00:41:42.900 --> 00:41:43.080 Yeah. 00:41:43.080 --> 00:41:44.160 There's a switch. 00:41:44.160 --> 00:41:45.100 It detects the thing. 00:41:45.100 --> 00:41:47.680 The thing works and the cat is wet. 00:41:47.680 --> 00:41:49.000 That's an awesome thing. 00:41:49.000 --> 00:41:50.300 I'm certainly going to build that. 00:41:50.300 --> 00:41:54.180 And in that moment, that's when you've got them. 00:41:54.180 --> 00:41:56.220 Now they're willing to learn. 00:41:56.640 --> 00:41:59.160 The stupid syntax of a loop or something. 00:41:59.160 --> 00:41:59.460 Yeah. 00:41:59.460 --> 00:42:02.040 Because that's their steps. 00:42:02.040 --> 00:42:04.120 Their staircase towards their goal. 00:42:04.120 --> 00:42:04.320 Yeah. 00:42:04.320 --> 00:42:04.780 Yeah. 00:42:04.780 --> 00:42:05.260 Exactly. 00:42:05.260 --> 00:42:05.840 Exactly. 00:42:05.840 --> 00:42:06.380 Exactly. 00:42:06.380 --> 00:42:06.760 Cool. 00:42:06.760 --> 00:42:07.920 So you're speaking of projects. 00:42:07.920 --> 00:42:12.540 Actually, on the microbit.org site, there's a whole bunch of ideas or projects. 00:42:12.540 --> 00:42:14.800 Maybe I'll throw some out and we can just comment on them. 00:42:14.800 --> 00:42:17.140 So one was a combination lock. 00:42:17.140 --> 00:42:17.980 Yeah. 00:42:17.980 --> 00:42:18.480 Yeah. 00:42:18.480 --> 00:42:19.780 What was the idea of that? 00:42:19.780 --> 00:42:21.200 Do you remember? 00:42:21.200 --> 00:42:25.360 Just so you know, I wasn't involved in many of these projects. 00:42:25.360 --> 00:42:26.120 All right. 00:42:26.120 --> 00:42:30.640 Well, let me just throw them out there so people have an idea of what people. 00:42:30.640 --> 00:42:32.820 So you can go to microbit.org slash ideas. 00:42:32.820 --> 00:42:33.500 Yeah. 00:42:33.540 --> 00:42:35.220 And they've got many, many projects. 00:42:35.220 --> 00:42:35.940 I just grabbed a few. 00:42:35.940 --> 00:42:36.640 I thought were interesting. 00:42:36.640 --> 00:42:39.240 So you can build a digital combination lock with your microbit. 00:42:39.240 --> 00:42:42.600 A Morse code phone if you have two microbits. 00:42:42.600 --> 00:42:43.120 Yeah. 00:42:43.120 --> 00:42:43.420 Okay. 00:42:43.500 --> 00:42:45.700 So I can tell you about that because it was my kids who did that. 00:42:45.700 --> 00:42:45.960 Really? 00:42:45.960 --> 00:42:46.240 Okay. 00:42:46.240 --> 00:42:47.040 You got to tell us about that one. 00:42:47.040 --> 00:42:47.320 Yeah. 00:42:47.320 --> 00:42:47.700 Okay. 00:42:47.700 --> 00:42:53.560 So at Python UK, there was an education track that I used to be involved in. 00:42:53.560 --> 00:42:56.280 And we had a kid's day where kids would turn up. 00:42:56.280 --> 00:43:00.020 And the way the kid's day would work is there would be like lessons in the morning where kids 00:43:00.020 --> 00:43:01.040 would try different projects. 00:43:01.040 --> 00:43:04.260 And in the afternoon, it was like, you are now let loose. 00:43:04.260 --> 00:43:08.400 Think of the thing you found most interesting in the morning and go do more of that. 00:43:08.400 --> 00:43:13.080 And at five o'clock, we're going to present to the whole of the conference just before 00:43:13.080 --> 00:43:15.300 lightning talk, the stuff that we've been doing. 00:43:15.300 --> 00:43:23.120 And so two of my kids and one of their buddies came up with my daughter had actually been teaching 00:43:23.120 --> 00:43:24.060 herself Morse code. 00:43:24.060 --> 00:43:28.560 And so the A button was a dot and the B button was a dash. 00:43:28.560 --> 00:43:30.960 And there's a radio on the microbit. 00:43:30.960 --> 00:43:34.680 And so she said to the audience, she was, I don't know, 15 at the time. 00:43:34.680 --> 00:43:38.000 She said, so give me a message saying, like, hello world. 00:43:38.140 --> 00:43:38.860 So she went, yeah. 00:43:38.860 --> 00:43:39.380 Okay. 00:43:39.380 --> 00:43:41.480 Well, that's obviously now I don't know Morse code. 00:43:41.480 --> 00:43:42.180 Blah, blah, blah. 00:43:42.180 --> 00:43:42.900 Deep, dee, dee, dee. 00:43:42.900 --> 00:43:45.180 Deep, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. 00:43:45.180 --> 00:43:48.420 And you could see the sort of hall going, how does she know Morse code? 00:43:48.420 --> 00:43:50.640 But that was kind of her thing. 00:43:50.640 --> 00:43:51.600 Yeah, cool. 00:43:51.600 --> 00:43:54.280 It was just transmitting the dots and the dashes. 00:43:54.380 --> 00:43:58.380 And then that buddy held up his mic a bit and it scrolled across hello world. 00:43:58.380 --> 00:43:58.860 Nice. 00:43:58.860 --> 00:44:01.000 It's such a fun thing to do. 00:44:01.000 --> 00:44:01.940 Fun thing to do. 00:44:01.940 --> 00:44:03.680 Yeah, that's another really cool one. 00:44:03.680 --> 00:44:10.160 One that was interesting was live data logging with Python and Mew, the editor, which drew like graphs and stuff. 00:44:10.160 --> 00:44:10.300 Yeah. 00:44:10.380 --> 00:44:12.140 of the, like whatever's receiving. 00:44:12.140 --> 00:44:21.720 So you could do cool, like, hey, I want to graph the weather throughout the summer or, you know, how tall my plant is or anything you can hook some kind of measure to, right? 00:44:21.720 --> 00:44:23.860 My dog activity or something. 00:44:23.860 --> 00:44:24.980 Yeah, exactly. 00:44:24.980 --> 00:44:28.080 How many times did my frog jump if I can stick a sensor to my frog? 00:44:28.080 --> 00:44:28.680 Yeah. 00:44:28.680 --> 00:44:31.440 So you can control a little traffic light to the micro bit. 00:44:31.440 --> 00:44:31.600 Yeah. 00:44:31.600 --> 00:44:39.160 One that was cool that talks about this blocky type of programming was the hour code has a build a micro bit virtual pet. 00:44:39.160 --> 00:44:39.980 Yeah. 00:44:39.980 --> 00:44:41.280 Which is pretty cool. 00:44:41.280 --> 00:44:44.040 And you can drag and drop the little boxes on there and stuff. 00:44:44.040 --> 00:44:44.260 Yeah. 00:44:44.260 --> 00:44:47.560 It's kind of like a Tamagotchi from, I don't know, the mid-90s. 00:44:47.560 --> 00:44:48.060 You remember that? 00:44:48.060 --> 00:44:48.360 Yes. 00:44:48.360 --> 00:44:49.040 Oh, my gosh. 00:44:49.040 --> 00:44:51.760 I got a 10 to my Tamagotchi. 00:44:51.760 --> 00:44:53.220 No, no, you don't have to. 00:44:53.220 --> 00:44:54.540 It's really not necessary. 00:44:54.540 --> 00:45:01.620 And then one that I would like to, was not on there, but I would love to do with my daughter is I want to get her into model rockets. 00:45:01.620 --> 00:45:06.640 You know, you put the little disposable engine, they go up like 500 feet and then they shoot off. 00:45:06.640 --> 00:45:07.220 Yeah, exactly. 00:45:07.220 --> 00:45:07.920 Etsy, exactly. 00:45:08.320 --> 00:45:14.120 It would be so cool to put one of these in there and do like, well, this rocket went, you know, this fast, this high, whatever. 00:45:14.120 --> 00:45:15.240 And it'd be fun. 00:45:15.240 --> 00:45:15.860 Yeah. 00:45:15.960 --> 00:45:18.740 So the accelerometer, that is gravity, obviously. 00:45:18.740 --> 00:45:19.220 Yeah. 00:45:19.220 --> 00:45:33.680 And so what you should see if you're logging, you know, take a reading every whatever, millisecond, microseconds, whatever, and take the reading, store it on the local file system, get the log back, stick it to a graphing program. 00:45:33.680 --> 00:45:34.920 And you'll see takeoff. 00:45:34.920 --> 00:45:36.140 It will be this big spike. 00:45:36.140 --> 00:45:41.100 And then you'll see freefall as well, which would be a big spike on another, you know, axis as well. 00:45:41.100 --> 00:45:41.880 Right. 00:45:41.880 --> 00:45:42.500 That's awesome. 00:45:42.500 --> 00:45:48.700 And then you probably can do a little calculus to, you know, actually figure out altitude and top speed and things like that. 00:45:48.780 --> 00:45:53.560 Obviously, my, you know, 10 year old daughter is not going to do the calculus, but she could be part of the project. 00:45:53.560 --> 00:45:57.800 And I go, well, you feed that number here and it tells you how fast it's going or something. 00:45:57.800 --> 00:45:58.040 Right. 00:45:58.040 --> 00:45:58.280 Yeah. 00:45:58.420 --> 00:46:03.200 The important thing, though, is that you might be using Python for doing this on a micro bit. 00:46:03.200 --> 00:46:08.220 But if you talk to some of the folks at NASA, they use Python. 00:46:08.220 --> 00:46:08.800 Yeah. 00:46:08.800 --> 00:46:14.580 So there's this, you know, obviously they don't use Python for space bound payload, although there's a story in there. 00:46:14.580 --> 00:46:15.800 Ask me about that in a second. 00:46:15.800 --> 00:46:18.700 They do use Python for all sorts of other things. 00:46:18.700 --> 00:46:32.460 So there is this sense of continuity from me as a 10 year old girl through to some person that my dad knows at PyCon, who is at the Space Museum and using Jupyter notebooks to analyze this thing. 00:46:32.460 --> 00:46:35.900 And you're like, well, hell, man, I'm just like a space scientist, you know, rocket. 00:46:35.900 --> 00:46:36.820 Yeah, that's so awesome. 00:46:36.820 --> 00:46:37.200 Right. 00:46:37.200 --> 00:46:45.840 Like the person I met at JPL or SpaceX or whatever is like, they actually write the same code as I do, not just I'm simulating programming and they do it for real. 00:46:45.840 --> 00:46:46.100 Right. 00:46:46.300 --> 00:46:50.660 That's actually what's one of the things that's super awesome about Python, isn't it? 00:46:50.660 --> 00:47:01.980 That it can be used by these kids and then it can scale up to be used at that level for, you know, Nobel Prize, like multiple Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work done with Python now. 00:47:01.980 --> 00:47:02.180 Yeah. 00:47:02.180 --> 00:47:03.280 Yeah, exactly. 00:47:03.280 --> 00:47:06.060 I'm still on the same page as you with that. 00:47:06.060 --> 00:47:15.960 The Evan Upton, who founded Raspberry Pi, you know, the reason it was called Raspberry Pi is because they wanted the Pi to be P-Y. 00:47:15.960 --> 00:47:18.240 And it was originally going to sort of run Python. 00:47:18.240 --> 00:47:18.900 Oh, wow. 00:47:18.900 --> 00:47:19.220 Okay. 00:47:19.220 --> 00:47:19.620 Yeah. 00:47:19.620 --> 00:47:20.140 I didn't know that. 00:47:20.140 --> 00:47:20.680 Yeah. 00:47:20.680 --> 00:47:26.120 But he told me that the reason they chose Python was because of this continuity. 00:47:26.120 --> 00:47:28.460 You could start with print hello world. 00:47:28.460 --> 00:47:32.960 And it was as simple as, you know, 8-bit basic back in the day. 00:47:32.960 --> 00:47:34.700 Or you could write YouTube. 00:47:36.200 --> 00:47:36.600 Exactly. 00:47:36.600 --> 00:47:36.920 Yeah. 00:47:36.920 --> 00:47:37.360 Exactly. 00:47:37.360 --> 00:47:38.760 Or Instagram or whatever. 00:47:38.760 --> 00:47:39.160 Yeah. 00:47:39.160 --> 00:47:39.740 Yeah, exactly. 00:47:39.740 --> 00:47:49.300 But the skills that you are learning as an 8-year-old in primary school, you know, ultimately would be useful in the industry 10, 15 years later when you're out there. 00:47:49.300 --> 00:47:49.620 Right. 00:47:49.700 --> 00:47:59.160 Imagine telling engineers that for the first 12 years they're going to study, you know, this type of calculation and math and numbers. 00:47:59.160 --> 00:48:00.860 And then, well, those numbers don't work anymore. 00:48:00.860 --> 00:48:02.120 You have a new set of numbers. 00:48:02.120 --> 00:48:02.780 Yeah. 00:48:02.780 --> 00:48:05.380 And new way of doing arithmetic and math. 00:48:05.380 --> 00:48:05.660 Yeah. 00:48:05.660 --> 00:48:07.660 And you're like, why am I doing this, right? 00:48:07.660 --> 00:48:08.480 Like, why would I switch? 00:48:09.040 --> 00:48:10.780 So that's a really great point. 00:48:10.780 --> 00:48:26.040 And there's something that Alan Kay, who's the, for people who don't know, the creator of Small Talk, and he was also part of the Xerox PARC team that came up with the original Windows, Windows, I can imagine, pointer type stuff that Steve Jobs saw. 00:48:26.040 --> 00:48:30.960 And he's sort of, you know, one of these elders of the internet type people that you hear. 00:48:30.960 --> 00:48:37.500 But he has a great quote where he talks about the thing that you need to do is let kids do the real thing. 00:48:38.320 --> 00:48:40.680 And they do this in sports and they do this in music. 00:48:40.680 --> 00:48:43.200 Kids are always doing the real thing. 00:48:43.200 --> 00:48:47.860 It might be a simplified thing, but it's still the real thing at their level of development. 00:48:47.860 --> 00:48:57.040 And I think there's a danger with programming because people make ABC very basic programming environments that aren't the real thing. 00:48:57.040 --> 00:49:03.140 And so, like you said, kids get six months in, they invest all this time, and then they get on to their next academic year. 00:49:03.140 --> 00:49:07.600 And the teacher who they had last year goes, so that stuff that we did with Scratch, that was all fun. 00:49:07.820 --> 00:49:10.080 You know, the cat was great, but now we're going to learn Python. 00:49:10.080 --> 00:49:15.980 And all that knowledge about how Scratch works is just gone. 00:49:15.980 --> 00:49:16.420 Yeah. 00:49:16.420 --> 00:49:19.140 And so this is the advantage Python has. 00:49:19.140 --> 00:49:26.440 You can start with kids who are very young because Python is such a beautifully simple and easy to learn language. 00:49:26.640 --> 00:49:40.400 And a lot of the credit for that has to go to Guido because, you know, in the late 90s, you know, he was, I can't remember what he called the project, but he had funding for an educational project, Python for everybody or programming is for everyone. 00:49:40.800 --> 00:49:45.280 And things like idle came out of that and the turtle module and stuff like that. 00:49:45.480 --> 00:49:58.160 But also the fact that Python is based in part on ABC, the kind of goofy language that he was originally working on that made him think, just like we were talking, oh, man, just give me a week and I'll have an improved version of this. 00:49:58.160 --> 00:50:00.820 Which is kind of what happened over Christmas in... 00:50:00.820 --> 00:50:01.420 1991? 00:50:01.420 --> 00:50:03.420 1989 or something like that. 00:50:03.420 --> 00:50:03.980 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:50:03.980 --> 00:50:10.580 1999, you know, so the legend says, you know, Guido was like, you know, oh, man, can't be that hard. 00:50:10.580 --> 00:50:12.860 You know, I'm going to do ABC, but a bit better. 00:50:12.860 --> 00:50:14.580 It's a white space based language. 00:50:14.580 --> 00:50:21.980 I want it to be easy to learn because ABC was a teaching language for students learning, coming to programming for the first time. 00:50:21.980 --> 00:50:30.580 And so the fact that Python has all these attributes and this sort of Venn diagram of great stuff for teaching people, it's firmly in the middle. 00:50:30.580 --> 00:50:36.220 And the fact that it's so popular and widely used in the industry means that there is this continuity for learners. 00:50:36.220 --> 00:50:39.100 And that is a real great strength that we have. 00:50:39.100 --> 00:50:41.660 Yeah, I think it's a real positive. 00:50:41.660 --> 00:50:49.640 So one thing I did want to give you a chance to talk about, because it's really related to this whole conversation, are your two books. 00:50:49.640 --> 00:50:55.640 And to be honest, I, you know, one of them, the first one, Python Education, sounds super interesting to me. 00:50:55.640 --> 00:50:56.440 I hadn't even heard of it. 00:50:56.440 --> 00:50:58.280 Tell everyone about your O'Reilly books. 00:50:58.280 --> 00:50:58.580 Okay. 00:50:58.800 --> 00:51:07.280 So I've written four books for O'Reilly, but two of them are now sort of lost in the midst of time because technology moves on and things. 00:51:07.280 --> 00:51:13.260 But a couple of years ago, if you go to PyCon, O'Reilly has little reports that they hand out to people for free. 00:51:13.260 --> 00:51:16.020 And I did one of those about Python Education. 00:51:16.020 --> 00:51:18.700 It's about 30 or 40 pages long. 00:51:19.000 --> 00:51:27.120 It's essentially like a little manifesto about Python in education and why you'd want to use it, where you should go to learn more about it and things like that. 00:51:27.540 --> 00:51:36.280 And also for programmers who might be interested in learning how they might help support educators, colleagues who are teachers and things like that. 00:51:36.700 --> 00:51:38.240 So I did that book. 00:51:38.240 --> 00:51:40.400 And it's free to download from the O'Reilly website. 00:51:40.400 --> 00:51:44.120 So if you just Google Python in education, then it's a free download. 00:51:44.120 --> 00:51:47.520 It takes, I don't know, half an hour to read. 00:51:47.700 --> 00:51:53.840 And the other one, which I wrote most recently, published about a year ago, is programming with MicroPython. 00:51:53.840 --> 00:52:04.880 And that was an awful lot of fun to write because whilst I'm a Python programmer, I'm not an embedded expert, as it were, until I met Damien, of course. 00:52:04.880 --> 00:52:05.120 Yeah. 00:52:05.120 --> 00:52:06.680 His enthusiasm is sort of infectious. 00:52:06.680 --> 00:52:14.900 And you get these devices and you suddenly realize how remarkable the achievement Damien has managed to do is. 00:52:14.900 --> 00:52:22.340 You know, he shrunk Python 3 right the way down to, you know, something that could work in 16K of RAM. 00:52:22.340 --> 00:52:23.740 Right, on a $5 chip. 00:52:23.740 --> 00:52:24.680 Yeah, yeah, exactly. 00:52:24.680 --> 00:52:25.420 Exactly. 00:52:25.420 --> 00:52:32.160 And the fact that it's also fun to work with various different protocols, hardware-level protocols. 00:52:32.260 --> 00:52:33.920 And what are you doing with bit flipping? 00:52:33.920 --> 00:52:41.980 Or you're using very low-level protocols to make a buzzer sound or to draw a picture on a very simple screen. 00:52:41.980 --> 00:52:49.300 And so it reminds me an awful lot of the programming that I did as a kid when the 8-bit machines were, you know, the memory address. 00:52:49.300 --> 00:52:53.000 You could poke into that and turn the pixel the right color. 00:52:53.000 --> 00:52:53.900 Do you know what I mean? 00:52:53.900 --> 00:52:54.820 Right, right, right. 00:52:54.820 --> 00:52:56.020 There was no protected memory. 00:52:56.020 --> 00:52:56.640 You just get it. 00:52:56.640 --> 00:52:57.820 Yeah, exactly. 00:52:57.820 --> 00:53:10.160 You know, we are so far away in terms of layers of abstraction when we're working in Python normally that you don't even get to think about what the computer really is doing. 00:53:10.160 --> 00:53:18.580 Whereas with MicroPython, you know, you're saying, you know, switch the voltage on this GPIO pin and the LED works. 00:53:18.580 --> 00:53:28.960 And then if you switch the voltage on and off, you know, so you're using something called pulse width modulation where you're switching the LED on and off for only half the time, but very, very quickly. 00:53:28.960 --> 00:53:37.780 So it dims to 50% and then dims to 25% and you can make it glow and throb and all the, you know, I'm geeking out here. 00:53:37.780 --> 00:53:39.180 But it sounds fun. 00:53:39.600 --> 00:53:40.700 It's really good fun. 00:53:40.700 --> 00:53:41.720 It really is good fun. 00:53:41.720 --> 00:53:44.060 Just to feel that you're that close to the hardware. 00:53:44.060 --> 00:53:45.540 Yeah, that's wonderful. 00:53:45.540 --> 00:53:45.980 All right. 00:53:45.980 --> 00:53:47.460 So we only have a few minutes left. 00:53:47.460 --> 00:53:47.860 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:53:47.860 --> 00:53:49.920 And I have a whole bunch of stuff that I want to talk to you about. 00:53:49.920 --> 00:53:54.700 We don't have time to cover it, but I do want to let you just quickly, briefly touch on two things. 00:53:54.700 --> 00:53:59.320 One, the Mu code editor, which is a sort of an IDE. 00:53:59.320 --> 00:54:02.400 Maybe that's a bit of a strong word, but like a code editor for beginners. 00:54:02.400 --> 00:54:03.040 Yeah. 00:54:03.040 --> 00:54:05.740 Do you want to tell people quickly what that is and how it's related here? 00:54:05.740 --> 00:54:06.460 Yeah. 00:54:06.460 --> 00:54:09.180 So third time this has been mentioned, you know, how hard can it be? 00:54:09.180 --> 00:54:09.900 Give me a week. 00:54:09.900 --> 00:54:11.220 I'll come back with something better. 00:54:11.220 --> 00:54:15.840 So I did pretty much all the tooling for Python for the BBC micro:bit. 00:54:15.840 --> 00:54:21.020 So the browser-based editor is the thing that I wrote along with a whole bunch of other stuff. 00:54:21.020 --> 00:54:26.400 And as any good software developer would do, they test it with their target audience. 00:54:26.400 --> 00:54:34.040 And so I traveled to the UK working with teachers and programmers and observing them using early versions of this browser-based editor. 00:54:34.040 --> 00:54:35.500 And it didn't really work. 00:54:35.640 --> 00:54:45.020 And whilst they appreciated the fact that it was on a browser and it was easy, it was also a pain in the backside because it was on a browser and browsers had limited sort of connectivity with the device. 00:54:45.020 --> 00:54:48.020 And you couldn't bring up the Python REPL on the board and things. 00:54:48.020 --> 00:54:53.080 And so I kind of got a list of requirements that teachers and developers really wanted. 00:54:53.080 --> 00:54:54.920 And Sunday afternoon it was raining. 00:54:54.920 --> 00:54:59.920 I remember thinking, "How hard can it be to use PyCute or something like that to do it? 00:54:59.920 --> 00:55:00.420 Yeah, yeah. 00:55:00.420 --> 00:55:02.460 It was simple as that as that." 00:55:02.460 --> 00:55:05.460 And so that happened and people enjoyed it. 00:55:05.460 --> 00:55:16.840 And then the Raspberry Pi Foundation very graciously said, "Well, if we give you some money to support your work, could you take some time to turn it from a micro bit-only editor to being a generic Python editor?" 00:55:16.840 --> 00:55:17.840 So I did that. 00:55:17.840 --> 00:55:20.840 And it now has a simple debugger, graphical debugger. 00:55:20.840 --> 00:55:25.220 It has a Jupyter Notebook built in as its REPL, an IPython type thing. 00:55:25.220 --> 00:55:29.600 It works with Adafruit's amazing line of circuit Python-based boards. 00:55:29.600 --> 00:55:34.600 There's a PyGame0 mode, so it makes it very easy to write games, but it's aimed at beginners. 00:55:34.600 --> 00:55:35.600 Nice. 00:55:35.600 --> 00:55:41.600 It's been rather wonderful over the last few months to see the community sort of coalesce around this editor. 00:55:41.600 --> 00:55:43.600 Educators realize that there's this thing that they can use. 00:55:43.600 --> 00:55:44.600 It's free to download. 00:55:44.600 --> 00:55:47.600 We've got lots of people providing translations. 00:55:47.600 --> 00:55:55.480 So, for example, I met some French teachers who said, "The fact that Python has keywords in English isn't a problem. 00:55:55.480 --> 00:55:57.480 The problem is that idle is in English." 00:55:57.480 --> 00:55:59.480 Or whatever code is in English. 00:55:59.480 --> 00:56:02.480 The user interface itself, the menus and whatnot are, yeah? 00:56:02.480 --> 00:56:03.480 Yeah, exactly. 00:56:03.480 --> 00:56:08.980 And so we'd love an editor that was simple enough that there weren't that many menus, but also that it was in French. 00:56:08.980 --> 00:56:14.720 Well, I think there's about 150 strings to translate to get you into a different language. 00:56:14.720 --> 00:56:17.600 And so I said, "Somebody did it over the weekend." 00:56:17.600 --> 00:56:20.600 And hey, presto, "Le NU" is born. 00:56:20.600 --> 00:56:26.600 "Le NU" is for Germany, and "El NU" for Spain, and so on. 00:56:26.600 --> 00:56:34.600 You know, I heard today from a friend in France that they'd run a Girls Can Code course, and they were all using NU in French, and it was nice and easy. 00:56:34.600 --> 00:56:44.600 And so NU is, I guess, the outcome of a whole bunch of people getting enthusiastic about building an editor for beginner programmers. 00:56:44.600 --> 00:56:47.480 Because if you ask a programmer, "What do you think should be in an editor?" 00:56:47.480 --> 00:56:50.480 You will get a programmer's editor rather than a beginner's editor. 00:56:50.480 --> 00:56:50.480 Yeah. 00:56:50.480 --> 00:56:56.480 And so one of the important aspects of how we made NU is that we put the beginner as the focus. 00:56:56.480 --> 00:57:00.480 Now, the interesting side effect of that is that we tend to get bug reports. 00:57:00.480 --> 00:57:07.480 And in fact, I can see in my alert, somebody saying, "I think we should have this feature in our chat channel." 00:57:07.480 --> 00:57:13.360 That's not going to happen because if you know enough about programming to ask for a feature to do with NU, then you are beyond NU. 00:57:13.360 --> 00:57:17.360 You should go use Atom or Visual Studio Code or whatever it is. 00:57:17.360 --> 00:57:18.360 Yeah. 00:57:18.360 --> 00:57:20.360 You have graduated beyond NU. 00:57:20.360 --> 00:57:23.360 So NU is just the stage where you're toddling. 00:57:23.360 --> 00:57:24.240 Yeah. 00:57:24.240 --> 00:57:26.240 It's the springboard into the real editor, right? 00:57:26.240 --> 00:57:27.240 Yeah. 00:57:27.240 --> 00:57:27.240 Yeah. 00:57:27.240 --> 00:57:28.240 Interesting. 00:57:28.240 --> 00:57:28.240 Okay. 00:57:28.240 --> 00:57:30.240 That's a super cool story. 00:57:30.240 --> 00:57:34.240 The other thing that you had mentioned previously was Code Grades. 00:57:34.240 --> 00:57:35.240 Yeah. 00:57:35.240 --> 00:57:42.120 As an analogy to musical past or even like Taekwondo or something like that, right? 00:57:42.120 --> 00:57:43.120 Yeah. 00:57:43.120 --> 00:57:44.120 Tell us about that. 00:57:44.120 --> 00:57:45.120 And that has its own site, doesn't it? 00:57:45.120 --> 00:57:46.120 Yes, that's right. 00:57:46.120 --> 00:57:48.120 So Code Grades is an experiment. 00:57:48.120 --> 00:57:50.120 I want to see if this works, really. 00:57:50.120 --> 00:57:55.120 In the UK and outside in the world, I'm not sure in the US, but you'll see what I mean. 00:57:55.120 --> 00:57:57.120 We have these things called Music Grades. 00:57:57.120 --> 00:58:02.120 If you remember back to the how to draw an owl, you get draw two circles and then draw the rest of the owl. 00:58:02.120 --> 00:58:09.440 Well, music grades are the steps in between that take you from the very simplest to the most complicated. 00:58:09.440 --> 00:58:14.160 And in music, this is you prepare a little concert. 00:58:14.160 --> 00:58:16.840 You go along and play this to an examiner. 00:58:16.840 --> 00:58:27.200 They give you helpful feedback and say, yes, you have played the piece to the level that's required for grade four, trumpet or grade seven flute or something. 00:58:27.200 --> 00:58:30.240 And the higher up the grades you get, the more difficult it becomes. 00:58:30.240 --> 00:58:33.480 And so my idea is to apply that to programming. 00:58:33.480 --> 00:58:39.840 So at the moment this week, we started grade one Python with a class of 15. 00:58:39.840 --> 00:58:49.200 And in eight weeks time, they are going to sit down with a friend of mine called Tim, who's a Python core developer, but is also an enthusiast about Python education. 00:58:49.560 --> 00:58:52.800 And they are going to present a project that they have built. 00:58:52.800 --> 00:58:58.800 So if it matches, if it meets certain requirements for grade one Python, they get to pass. 00:58:58.800 --> 00:59:09.440 And then they can do grade two Python, which will have slightly more difficult or involved requirements up to grade eight Python, where, you know, we want to see code. 00:59:09.440 --> 00:59:11.440 We want to see documentation on read the docs. 00:59:11.440 --> 00:59:14.300 We want to see a setup dot py that works with PyPI. 00:59:14.540 --> 00:59:19.980 You know, all these things that we might expect as standard for a Python project. 00:59:19.980 --> 00:59:22.560 These steps will get you to that. 00:59:22.560 --> 00:59:26.400 And so code grades is this experiment to see if it works. 00:59:26.540 --> 00:59:30.820 And we'll find out in, well, hopefully eight weeks when these folks take their grade one. 00:59:30.820 --> 00:59:35.300 And if that works, then, well, I need to make a decision and see what I do with the idea. 00:59:35.300 --> 00:59:43.400 It might be a great way of funding people who contribute to open source software, because, of course, we need people to examine these beginner graders. 00:59:43.400 --> 00:59:45.820 And these people need to be experts. 00:59:45.940 --> 01:00:01.500 So if you can pay examiners to do this, then that's a source of income for some of the people that I'm thinking of off the top of my head who would rather be working on their open source code than having to get a job, you know, writing, just pounding out code for. 01:00:01.500 --> 01:00:02.560 Right. 01:00:02.560 --> 01:00:07.820 To optimize interest rates for stock trades or some weird thing, right? 01:00:07.820 --> 01:00:08.840 Some weird angle there. 01:00:08.840 --> 01:00:10.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly. 01:00:10.000 --> 01:00:11.780 So we'll see what happens. 01:00:11.780 --> 01:00:13.340 It's early days, very early days. 01:00:13.340 --> 01:00:22.480 But so far, the feedback that I've had from coders who might act as code mentors who would be examiners has been good. 01:00:22.480 --> 01:00:25.440 The feedback from teachers has been really great. 01:00:25.440 --> 01:00:30.960 I was at a teacher's meeting a couple of weeks ago where I introduced the concepts and they were like, well, where do I download the curriculum? 01:00:30.960 --> 01:00:34.980 You know, how do I enter my students for this? 01:00:34.980 --> 01:00:36.480 Well, you know, hold on. 01:00:36.480 --> 01:00:36.760 Hang on. 01:00:36.760 --> 01:00:38.920 We're not here yet. 01:00:38.920 --> 01:00:40.200 Yeah, exactly. 01:00:40.200 --> 01:00:45.660 And the first class on Tuesday evening this week, at the end, this has never happened to me before. 01:00:45.660 --> 01:00:46.500 I'm really quite proud of it. 01:00:46.500 --> 01:00:49.020 They gave me a round of applause when I said that's it. 01:00:49.020 --> 01:00:49.320 Oh, wow. 01:00:49.320 --> 01:00:54.000 And what I had tried to do was use techniques from music education. 01:00:54.000 --> 01:00:57.820 So it wasn't a case of today we're going to do loops. 01:00:57.820 --> 01:00:59.280 Next week is going to be function. 01:00:59.280 --> 01:01:07.920 We were working on projects and letting the requirements of learning what a loop or a function is fall out of interacting with these projects. 01:01:08.280 --> 01:01:19.980 And so these folks were really, you know, they'd never programmed before, but they managed to get a kind of a pink alien to scroll across their screen using Pygame Zero and, you know, like 10 lines of Python. 01:01:19.980 --> 01:01:25.680 And I set them a challenge, which was, well, can you change the way the alien moves? 01:01:25.680 --> 01:01:28.900 Or can you change the sound effect that happens when you click him or something like that? 01:01:28.900 --> 01:01:38.340 And so they've got an existing solution, the onion analogy that you used, and they're peeling back the layers and changing it and discovering the things that they need to know through that. 01:01:38.340 --> 01:01:42.320 So that's what CodeGrowth is about, to be confirmed as to whether it works or not. 01:01:42.320 --> 01:01:44.260 But I'll certainly let you know if it does. 01:01:44.260 --> 01:01:46.120 Yeah, it sounds really interesting. 01:01:46.120 --> 01:01:49.540 I'll definitely link to it in the show notes so people can check it out. 01:01:49.540 --> 01:01:50.500 Cool. 01:01:50.500 --> 01:01:51.100 All right. 01:01:51.160 --> 01:01:54.520 I think we should probably leave it here for this topic, but it's been great to talk about, Nicholas. 01:01:54.520 --> 01:01:57.720 Now, before I let you go, two quick questions for you. 01:01:57.720 --> 01:01:58.320 Okay. 01:01:58.320 --> 01:02:00.760 If you're going to write some Python code, what editor do you use? 01:02:00.760 --> 01:02:03.600 I use VI for historical reasons. 01:02:03.600 --> 01:02:04.840 Yeah, awesome. 01:02:04.840 --> 01:02:05.980 Right on. 01:02:06.480 --> 01:02:13.900 And then a notable PyPI package, not necessarily the most popular, but one you've come across, people should know about whatever. 01:02:13.900 --> 01:02:16.100 That's hard. 01:02:16.100 --> 01:02:18.360 That's really hard. 01:02:18.360 --> 01:02:19.480 I'll tell you what. 01:02:19.480 --> 01:02:21.360 It's a popular package and it's requests. 01:02:21.360 --> 01:02:21.780 Okay. 01:02:21.780 --> 01:02:33.920 And the reason I'm saying that is because I know some of the core maintainers, I'm thinking of Corey here, and they do amazing work on a module that has an API that is just so beautifully simple. 01:02:34.400 --> 01:02:35.420 And it works. 01:02:35.420 --> 01:02:43.820 And I know from talking with Corey that HTTP is a real gnarly type protocol to have to work with. 01:02:43.820 --> 01:02:44.240 Yeah. 01:02:44.240 --> 01:02:44.940 Oh, yeah. 01:02:44.940 --> 01:02:50.160 It's been misapplied so many times by so many web servers that you have no idea what's going to come down the line at you. 01:02:50.160 --> 01:03:00.060 And yet the code that he's written using Hyper, the project that sort of sits underneath the request that does the actual HTTP stuff, is incredible, really. 01:03:00.060 --> 01:03:05.240 And it's a great way of, again, focusing on the user where the user is the programmer. 01:03:05.240 --> 01:03:07.780 I just want to get this web page. 01:03:07.780 --> 01:03:08.340 Okay. 01:03:08.340 --> 01:03:10.280 Or this JSON at this endpoint. 01:03:10.280 --> 01:03:11.360 It just works. 01:03:11.360 --> 01:03:11.960 I love that. 01:03:11.960 --> 01:03:13.480 And the documentation is great. 01:03:13.480 --> 01:03:15.680 And the community around it is good, too. 01:03:15.680 --> 01:03:16.100 Yeah. 01:03:16.100 --> 01:03:18.180 It's definitely one of the special ones out there. 01:03:18.180 --> 01:03:18.480 Yeah. 01:03:18.480 --> 01:03:21.840 So I see your requests and I respond with a responder. 01:03:21.840 --> 01:03:22.800 Have you heard of this? 01:03:22.800 --> 01:03:23.300 Responder? 01:03:23.300 --> 01:03:23.780 No. 01:03:23.780 --> 01:03:24.140 No. 01:03:24.340 --> 01:03:30.080 So Kenneth Wright just came out with a brand new web framework called Responder. 01:03:30.080 --> 01:03:32.020 You know, the opposite end of requests. 01:03:32.020 --> 01:03:34.260 It literally came out on October 8th. 01:03:34.260 --> 01:03:41.420 So it's going to be interesting to see his take on the micro framework, like Flask-esque, but not Flask. 01:03:41.460 --> 01:03:52.600 So this is good because, and I'll tell you, so one of the things that I'm thinking of including in Mew, the next version of Mew, is a way for beginners to very quickly write a web application. 01:03:52.600 --> 01:03:53.400 Right, right. 01:03:53.400 --> 01:03:55.900 Like the easiest path forward on the web app, yeah? 01:03:55.900 --> 01:03:56.380 Yeah, exactly. 01:03:56.380 --> 01:03:56.880 Exactly. 01:03:56.880 --> 01:03:59.540 Because Mew has this notion of modes. 01:04:00.400 --> 01:04:07.860 And if there's a website mode, and I was thinking of maybe using something like Bottle, you create a function for your endpoints. 01:04:07.860 --> 01:04:09.920 There's a directory with your template. 01:04:09.920 --> 01:04:11.240 Go do some stuff. 01:04:11.240 --> 01:04:15.040 But if Responder is there, I hadn't heard that. 01:04:15.040 --> 01:04:15.780 Oh, man. 01:04:15.780 --> 01:04:16.920 It's only a few days old. 01:04:16.920 --> 01:04:18.400 So, yeah, you have to check it out. 01:04:18.400 --> 01:04:18.800 I don't know. 01:04:18.800 --> 01:04:20.740 I'm going to definitely, you know what I'm going to do? 01:04:20.740 --> 01:04:22.560 I'm going to check this out. 01:04:22.560 --> 01:04:25.180 Python-Responder.org. 01:04:25.180 --> 01:04:26.840 So, yeah, pretty cool. 01:04:26.840 --> 01:04:27.820 Okay, cool. 01:04:27.820 --> 01:04:29.540 Oh, thanks for letting me know about that. 01:04:29.960 --> 01:04:31.020 Right on. 01:04:31.020 --> 01:04:32.300 All right. 01:04:32.300 --> 01:04:36.620 So, people have heard about the BBC Microbit, all this education stuff. 01:04:36.620 --> 01:04:37.920 You've heard about Code Grades. 01:04:37.920 --> 01:04:39.060 Final call to action. 01:04:39.060 --> 01:04:42.660 What should they do to get involved or to make this part of their world? 01:04:42.660 --> 01:04:43.100 Okay. 01:04:43.100 --> 01:04:49.340 So, if you need any motivation about should I be doing this, just think of it this way. 01:04:49.340 --> 01:04:52.620 You're talking with your future colleagues here. 01:04:52.620 --> 01:04:58.580 And how your future colleagues turn out depends on who turns up to do the education with them, 01:04:58.900 --> 01:05:04.740 who turns up to teach them, who turns up to show them the way to code. 01:05:05.360 --> 01:05:06.380 And I don't know about you. 01:05:06.380 --> 01:05:08.700 I'd like to be going to Python in 20 years' time. 01:05:08.700 --> 01:05:15.360 So, it's kind of incumbent on us to make sure that we help foster the community of tomorrow. 01:05:15.820 --> 01:05:18.000 And the way you do that is through education. 01:05:18.000 --> 01:05:19.840 The other motivation is this. 01:05:19.840 --> 01:05:23.280 If you really want to become an expert at something, teach it. 01:05:23.380 --> 01:05:25.780 Because you have to introspect them. 01:05:25.780 --> 01:05:28.960 And you have to think, why do I do it like this? 01:05:29.500 --> 01:05:37.080 And I need to be able to explain it in a simple enough way that I demonstrate my own clarity of thought about this thing. 01:05:37.560 --> 01:05:43.480 And that is not only a great skill for you to have to help your colleagues. 01:05:43.480 --> 01:05:45.880 You know, you need to explain this API that you've created. 01:05:45.880 --> 01:05:50.420 But it's also good for you because you have to sit back and think about what you're doing. 01:05:50.420 --> 01:05:58.920 So, teaching and educating might not necessarily be the first things that come to mind when people think of career progression or helping their company out. 01:05:59.020 --> 01:06:04.600 But in the long term, they are totally at the core of what you should be doing. 01:06:04.600 --> 01:06:07.360 So, then my speech. 01:06:07.360 --> 01:06:10.660 It's a great speech and I definitely agree with it. 01:06:10.660 --> 01:06:11.680 So, it's awesome. 01:06:11.680 --> 01:06:13.340 Thanks for saying it. 01:06:13.340 --> 01:06:14.340 All right, Nicholas. 01:06:14.340 --> 01:06:15.280 Thank you for being on the show. 01:06:15.280 --> 01:06:17.900 It's been great to have this chat and share ideas with you. 01:06:17.900 --> 01:06:18.120 Yeah. 01:06:18.120 --> 01:06:18.780 Thank you very much. 01:06:18.780 --> 01:06:19.480 It's been great to be here. 01:06:19.480 --> 01:06:19.840 You bet. 01:06:19.840 --> 01:06:20.040 Bye. 01:06:20.040 --> 01:06:20.420 Bye-bye. 01:06:20.420 --> 01:06:24.420 This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. 01:06:24.420 --> 01:06:27.200 Our guest on this episode was Nicholas Tolerwey. 01:06:27.520 --> 01:06:30.760 And it's been brought to you by Datadog and Talk Python Training. 01:06:30.760 --> 01:06:34.700 Datadog gives you visibility into the whole system running your code. 01:06:34.700 --> 01:06:39.040 Visit talkpython.fm/datadog and see what you've been missing. 01:06:39.040 --> 01:06:41.240 Don't even throw in a free t-shirt for doing the tutorial. 01:06:41.240 --> 01:06:42.720 Want to level up your Python? 01:06:42.720 --> 01:06:49.780 If you're just getting started, try my Python jumpstart by building 10 apps or our brand new 100 days of code in Python. 01:06:49.780 --> 01:06:53.580 And if you're interested in more than one course, be sure to check out the Everything Bundle. 01:06:53.580 --> 01:06:55.820 It's like a subscription that never expires. 01:06:56.220 --> 01:06:58.020 Be sure to subscribe to the show. 01:06:58.020 --> 01:07:00.220 Open your favorite podcatcher and search for Python. 01:07:00.220 --> 01:07:01.460 We should be right at the top. 01:07:01.460 --> 01:07:10.780 You can also find the iTunes feed at /itunes, Google Play feed at /play, and direct RSS feed at /rss on talkpython.fm. 01:07:10.780 --> 01:07:12.660 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 01:07:12.660 --> 01:07:14.020 Thanks so much for listening. 01:07:14.020 --> 01:07:15.080 I really appreciate it. 01:07:15.400 --> 01:07:17.020 Now get out there and write some Python code. 01:07:17.020 --> 01:07:17.400 Thank you. 01:07:17.400 --> 01:07:36.960 Thank you. 01:07:36.960 --> 01:07:37.660 Thank you.