Interactive Python and Teaching Python: Beyond Text Books

00:00 What if your computer science textbooks could run their Python code samples,

00:03 and that code ran directly in your browser?

00:06 Kind of like JavaScript, but better because Python.

00:09 It is possible, and Brad Miller is making it happen.

00:13 This is Talk Python to Me, episode number 20, recorded Tuesday, July 7th, 2015.

00:20 Welcome to Talk Python to Me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the ecosystem, and the personalities.

00:52 This is your host, Michael Kennedy.

00:54 Follow me on Twitter, where I'm @mkennedy, and keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpythontome.com,

01:01 and follow the show on Twitter via at Talk Python.

01:04 This episode will be talking to Dr. Brad Miller about interactive Python,

01:10 Python in higher education, and Sculpt, the Python that you run in your browser.

01:16 I'm happy to tell you that this episode is brought to you by Hired and Codeship.

01:20 Thank them for supporting the show on Twitter via at Hired underscore HQ and at Codeship.

01:26 Now let's get right to the show.

01:28 Brad Miller is an associate professor of computer science at Luther College.

01:32 He's the founder of RuneStone Interactive.

01:35 He loves to travel, hack, bike, and cook, but not necessarily in that order.

01:39 Brad, welcome to the show.

01:42 Thanks. It's a great pleasure to be here.

01:44 Yeah. You guys are doing some really awesome stuff over at RuneStone, and online platforms for people learning and teaching Python,

01:52 and that's what we're going to talk about today.

01:54 But before we get to online Python and Python in the browser and a bunch of other cool stuff,

01:59 what's your story? How did you get here?

02:00 So, well, we can go all the way back to 1979, when I first got into programming, I suppose.

02:07 That was when our high school got the first Apple IIs installed, and I discovered AppleSoft Basic,

02:15 and I discovered that I could win a lot more often if I hacked the lemonade stand game

02:21 and made it rain on Player 2 a higher percentage of the time than Player 1.

02:25 So that was kind of my introduction to programming, was digging into Basic code.

02:33 That's really awesome.

02:34 I mean, that's what a lot of programming is, is you're like, I don't want to just use this tool.

02:38 I want to make a better tool or change it or whatever, right?

02:41 And that's really cool.

02:42 It doesn't say much about my ethics in those days, but...

02:46 That was lemonade.

02:47 It was, yeah.

02:48 Better than Oregon Trail, which was the other popular game back in those days.

02:55 Yeah, indeed.

02:56 So, yeah.

02:57 So that's how you got started and sort of interested in computers.

03:01 How did you get into programming?

03:02 So I started out as a computer science major at Luther when I went to undergrad

03:10 and learned, you know, that was back in the days when people learned Pascal.

03:16 And then I started my career at a, you know, big iron mainframe manufacturer called Control Data

03:23 and worked on energy management systems for Control Data.

03:28 Yeah.

03:28 Wow.

03:29 What kind of language?

03:29 Yeah.

03:31 Fortran.

03:31 So...

03:32 Oh, yeah.

03:33 I was told when I was in college and starting out that Fortran was the most important language

03:38 I was ever going to learn in my career.

03:40 Yeah.

03:40 And I pleaded to take C++.

03:41 I said, after Fortran.

03:42 All right, fine.

03:43 I just missed the punch card days.

03:45 So I guess Fortran is as bad as I get.

03:49 Yeah.

03:50 Cool.

03:50 Yeah.

03:51 And I had a great internship with Amoco Research where I got to work in their AI lab.

03:57 So that got me interested in Lisp and interpreted languages.

04:00 And, yeah.

04:03 Then in grad school, I started hacking in Perl a lot.

04:06 And then C++ and Java.

04:10 And then I made a career change in 2003 where I became a college professor.

04:15 Oh, wow.

04:16 I left a successful startup company and came back to teach at my alma mater.

04:21 And I taught Java in the introductory CS class for a year.

04:27 And I realized that it was just the worst possible language for teaching people that had never

04:32 programmed before how to program.

04:34 And so we looked around and there was this language called Python, which was still, you

04:39 know, I know it's not new, but it was really very, very new in the educational field back

04:44 in 2003.

04:45 In fact, there was only one textbook available.

04:48 But we decided that we were going to go ahead and adopt Python as our introductory language for

04:53 teaching in computer science, which immediately led to myself and my colleague, David Random,

05:00 writing a data structures textbook because we wanted to be able to teach Python in both CS1 and CS2.

05:06 Yeah.

05:06 Of course, if the book isn't there, maybe you have to go back to Java and you don't want to do that.

05:11 No.

05:11 Yeah.

05:12 So that was definitely, you know, okay, we can use this one textbook that's there, but we're

05:15 going to write the other one.

05:17 And so that worked out really well.

05:19 Yeah, that is really cool.

05:20 You know, one of the things I think is really a success story for Python is it's become the

05:26 most popular sort of introductory computer science language, at least at U.S. universities.

05:31 But I think that's pretty global.

05:32 Yeah.

05:33 Yeah.

05:34 Can you compare what it's like to teach Java, what it's like to teach Python, the way the

05:39 students received it, whether like better grades, more excitement, less dropout, those kinds

05:44 of things?

05:45 I mean, certainly less dropout with Python.

05:48 And I think it's much, much quicker for them to kind of get up and running and be able to

05:56 do interesting stuff.

05:57 You know, when you teach Java, I like to say there's like 12 things that you have to lie

06:02 to them about on day one.

06:04 Starting with, you know, public static void main, string, args, you know, there's like

06:11 none of that.

06:12 Do you want to try to talk about to introductory students on the first day of Java class?

06:18 So whereas with Python, you can, I guess, say print hello world, and at least you get something.

06:23 But it's also just as easy to say import turtle, make a turtle and make the turtle go forward

06:29 by a hundred.

06:30 And that gives them that kind of, there's that immediate gratification of being able to see

06:35 something visual on the screen and, you know, be able to control this stuff just by typing.

06:42 So, so that, that was a huge, huge change, just sort of in student mentality to be able

06:47 to kind of get into something where they could get that immediate gratification.

06:51 Yeah, that's really cool.

06:52 The show I just released this week with Lynn Root, she talks about how she was studying

06:57 C++ to make a switch, basically to get some foundation to move on to like a PhD program

07:04 in finance.

07:04 And they had to do programming.

07:06 So she took a C++ class and it just about crushed her will to do anything with programming.

07:11 And she came in and learned Python and it just like, she lit up and that's, that's still

07:15 what she's doing today.

07:15 It's great.

07:16 Oh yeah.

07:17 I mean, and there's so many great, you know, packages out there for Python that you can really

07:22 get students, you know, working with interesting stuff right away.

07:25 Yeah, that's for sure.

07:26 I just found today a project, a GitHub project repository, I guess you would call it, called

07:33 Awesome Python.

07:34 So I think it's, if you just search for Awesome-Python GitHub, and it's a, like a curated list of all

07:41 the amazing packages that people like really love.

07:43 So.

07:43 Oh, that's really cool.

07:44 I'll have to go look at, look at that.

07:46 Absolutely.

07:47 So, so that's really cool.

07:49 So you're doing, are you still teaching at the university?

07:51 I am.

07:52 Yes.

07:52 Uh huh.

07:53 And you're doing this thing with RuneStone Interactive.

07:55 Why don't you tell everyone what that is?

07:56 Yeah.

07:57 So RuneStone Interactive is, is kind of three, three components, I'll say.

08:03 First of all, it's a set of tools for authors that want to create interactive course materials.

08:09 So anything from lecture notes to a lab to a full-blown book, like what we've doing.

08:14 so that, that includes, I like to, I like to say that kind of the big, hairy, audacious

08:23 goal is that we would like to be the LaTeX of interactive writing.

08:28 so we've got all these tools that we're trying to build to make it easy for, for instructors

08:33 and other people to write interactive, interactive materials.

08:37 So things like interactive code, visualizing code, including video, including little

08:43 assessments like fill in the blanks or multiple choice or short answer.

08:46 you know, things so you can hide things and show things.

08:50 And, so those kind of, all those kinds of things that you'd want to have in an interactive

08:54 textbook, whether it's, whether it's for computer science.

08:57 Or, or some other topic.

08:59 In fact.

08:59 Yeah, absolutely.

09:00 So it's kind of like taking the traditional textbook, but making it something that is more

09:07 native to the real world.

09:09 Right.

09:09 If I'm learning about computer science, I should be able to run the code.

09:12 I should be able to see visualizations.

09:13 I should be able to listen and all that kind of stuff is part of what you guys have there.

09:17 Right.

09:18 Yeah, exactly.

09:18 I mean, so this sort of started out on my sabbatical in 2011, where I was supposed to

09:24 be working on, new additions for the two textbooks that I've, that I've written that

09:29 are paper-based textbooks.

09:30 But as I was trying to write these updates to the paper textbooks, I kept thinking, God,

09:36 this would be so much cooler if, if it was actually doing something interactive on the screen.

09:41 And so I stopped working on the, on the, on the stuff for the paper books.

09:47 And I started, and I started experimenting with how we could make all this stuff interactive.

09:51 and then I realized nobody in their right mind would ever write a textbook where you had

09:57 to go in and, and use JavaScript to hard code every code example you wanted.

10:01 So then I, then I started to think, okay, how could I, how could I write some macros that

10:06 would make this, make this easy?

10:07 And so that kind of led to that first part of the, of the authoring tools.

10:11 So that's sort of part one.

10:15 Part two is that then there's this sort of set of backend services that you have to run.

10:21 Things like when students run code, or write code, you want to be able to save what

10:26 they've written so that the next time they come to the website, they don't have to start

10:29 over and, and reenter all their code again.

10:32 and if you're going to use it for a class, you'd like to have it, let's say, save the answers

10:37 to the multiple choice questions or give the instructor a grading interface so that they

10:41 can go in and grade and keep track of how the students did.

10:44 so that's sort of the set of interactive, interactive services that support the book on

10:50 the front end.

10:51 That's really cool.

10:52 Do you guys, sorry, do you actually use the interactivity bit for like assessments and tests

10:57 and things in your classes?

10:59 Yeah.

11:00 Yep.

11:00 Yep.

11:01 Yep.

11:01 Not like for, it's great for daily assignments, for example, what I can do is say, all right,

11:06 I want you to read this section.

11:07 And at the end of the section, there might be a little coding thing, or there might be three

11:11 or four multiple choice or fill in the blank kind of questions.

11:14 And then every day before class, I can go in and go to the instructor's dashboard.

11:18 I can look at the responses to all those questions and get a sense for, all right, what were the

11:24 things that they understood about this section?

11:25 What were the things that they'd struggled with?

11:28 what were some of the common mistakes that they made?

11:30 And then, you know, that pretty much informs what I'm going to talk about at least, you know,

11:35 at the start of every class is to, to think about.

11:39 That's really powerful.

11:40 You don't really typically get that experience with a textbook.

11:43 No.

11:44 Because you never know, right?

11:46 I mean, all of us suspect that our students don't really read the assignments that we give

11:51 them.

11:51 But now we, now we actually know.

11:53 Yeah.

11:54 Because we can, because we can track them online.

11:56 So.

11:57 That's really excellent.

11:58 All right.

11:59 So what's part three?

12:00 Part three then became this hosting service.

12:02 So in the beginning, what, what I thought was all great.

12:05 We'll make all this open source.

12:07 And if somebody else wants to use this, for their class, they can just go to GitHub.

12:11 They can clone this.

12:12 They can set up a server.

12:14 They can build the books.

12:15 They can run it on their own server.

12:16 And then what I learned is that most people really don't want to do that.

12:20 Um.

12:20 So most people just have enough problems, you know, teaching their own class.

12:26 so, so we created this hosting service where you can go in and you can say, all right,

12:32 yeah, I want to use textbook a textbook, B textbook, C.

12:35 And what it does is it just makes a kind of a custom copy of that textbook and sets up an

12:40 instructor dashboard for that custom copy so that an instructor can have their students

12:45 registered for their course.

12:46 And all of their stuff is separate from all the other people in the world.

12:50 And the instructor can then just look at the dashboard for their own course.

12:54 and they don't have to do anything except go in and click a few buttons to build, to build

12:58 their book.

12:59 That's really cool.

13:00 Do you mind talking about the business model just a little bit?

13:02 Like, is this totally free?

13:03 Is there like a fee?

13:04 Do you sell the books to the students or what's the story around that?

13:07 Yeah.

13:08 I, so we, we really right now are just based on donations, which doesn't work all that

13:15 well.

13:15 Is there a chance of like NSF, National Science Foundation support or like STEM research support

13:21 or any of those?

13:22 I think so.

13:23 I mean, right now I do have, I do have an NSF grant for the next three summers.

13:27 So I've got two, I've got two undergrad students that I'm, that I'm working with this summer

13:32 on making a bunch of enhancements to, to, to the way that we're, the way that we're

13:37 doing these extensions or these kind of macros that I talked about before.

13:41 Right.

13:42 That's really cool.

13:42 So, yeah.

13:43 So, but yeah, I don't get any support from them for, you know, paying for hosting fees

13:48 or anything like that.

13:49 Sure.

13:49 So people who want to use it out there, keep that in mind, maybe a donation.

13:52 You know, one of the universities that uses it is Duke University and they, they're really

13:59 good.

13:59 Every, you know, they've got 400 students in their introductory course.

14:02 And so I know the instructors there, you know, we've, we've known each other for a while

14:06 through conferences and whatnot.

14:08 And I know they always go the first couple of days and say, look, we're using this textbook.

14:12 It's free instead of the $145 you'd probably pay at the bookstore.

14:16 The least you can do is go make a $5 donation.

14:19 And, you know, we get about 20 out of 400 that feel moved to make a, there's a, there's

14:25 a five, 5% appreciation ratio.

14:29 Very cool.

14:32 So, but anyway, yeah, yeah, no, that's good.

14:34 So, yeah, keep going with that.

14:37 So you want to talk a little bit about some of the underlying tools that you're using, the

14:41 underlying packages and technology.

14:43 It's mostly Fortran on the backend.

14:45 Is that correct?

14:46 no, it's mostly Python.

14:47 Oh, just teasing.

14:48 Yeah.

14:49 Cool.

14:50 So tell us what you're doing there.

14:51 Maybe before we do this, actually.

14:52 So I went and I watched your video on interactive Python dot, is it org or com?

14:57 Dot org.

14:58 Dot org.

14:59 Interactive Python dot org.

15:00 Thank you.

15:01 And you've got a nice video that shows you a lot of, a lot of the really cool stuff you

15:06 can do.

15:06 Maybe you could just hit some of the high points so people know what we're talking about.

15:09 Yeah.

15:10 So I think the, the, the real aha moment for me was, was when I found this project called

15:18 sculpt.

15:20 This episode is brought to you by hired hired is a two sided curated marketplace that connects

15:35 the world's knowledge workers to the best opportunities.

15:38 Each offer you receive has salary and equity presented right up front and you can view the

15:44 offers to accept or reject them before you even talk to the company.

15:47 Typically candidates receive five or more offers in just the first week.

15:52 And there are no obligations ever.

15:54 Sounds pretty awesome.

15:55 Doesn't it?

15:56 Well, did I mention there's a signing bonus?

15:58 Everyone who accepts a job from hired gets a $2,000 signing bonus.

16:02 And as talk Python listeners, it gets way sweeter.

16:07 Use the link hired.com slash talk Python to me and hired will double the signing bonus

16:13 to $4,000 opportunities, knocking visit hired.com slash talk Python to me and answer the call.

16:19 And so sculpt was started by Scott Graham, who now works for Google.

16:35 And it was an implementation of CPython in JavaScript.

16:39 So this was back in 2010, 2011 that he had worked on that.

16:44 And I thought, oh my gosh, this is so cool.

16:46 You know, we can run Python right in the browser.

16:49 There's none of this.

16:50 Let's submit it, run it back somewhere on a server and then have the result come back to

16:55 the browser.

16:55 With all the security issues.

16:57 Yeah, exactly.

16:58 That come with that.

16:59 Yeah.

16:59 Right.

16:59 So this is running right in the browser.

17:02 And not only that, but because it was written to run right in the browser.

17:06 When I saw that, I got really excited about it.

17:08 The first thing that I did was I figured out how to add the turtle graphics module to it.

17:13 So now you can, you know, you can write your Python program and you can, you can do turtle

17:17 graphics right in the browser.

17:19 So you get that kind of instantaneous gratification of seeing something.

17:22 Yeah, that's awesome.

17:24 And it pops up right in a, like a little section or div or something of, of the HTML page.

17:29 And it's just, you know, animated, just like the regular real turtle.

17:32 Yep.

17:33 Exactly.

17:33 Is that using that HTML5 canvas?

17:35 It is.

17:36 Yep.

17:37 So this is all totally HTML5 based.

17:40 Yeah.

17:40 Excellent.

17:41 Okay.

17:41 Yep.

17:42 And then, so that's, so that's one thing.

17:45 And then the second thing is, is this, what we call code lens in the textbook, but

17:49 is really based on, on the work by Philip Guo on, online Python tutor.

17:54 And, you know, if you've, if you've ever taught Python or if you've ever really thought about

17:59 Python very deeply in terms of things like, well, variables, for example, is a big thing,

18:05 right?

18:05 Variables are just names for things in Python, right?

18:09 So we're always drawing these pictures on the board of, of here's a name.

18:13 And what does that name reference, you know, is it referencing a list or a dictionary or

18:17 some object that you've created?

18:18 Right.

18:19 And, and there's, there's all these reference diagrams that just clutter up the whiteboard.

18:23 Yeah.

18:24 I envision something on the stack with an arrow drawn to something on the heap with a pointer

18:27 over to somewhere and something like that.

18:29 Right.

18:29 Yeah, exactly.

18:30 Yep.

18:30 Cause you're trying to help students get a mental model for how the state of the program changes

18:36 as you step from line to line and just to really understand kind of what goes on inside,

18:41 inside the Python interpreter.

18:43 And so what Philip had done is he, he'd automated that with this online Python tutor.

18:48 And so we worked with Philip and took that and made it so that we could have these canned

18:52 examples and, and, and embed them right in the textbook.

18:56 So another way of thinking about it, if you've never seen it is it's kind of like having

19:01 a debugger, that where you can, you know, go into step mode in the debugger, only this

19:06 is even better because not only can you go forward, but you can go backward.

19:09 Yes.

19:10 And that was really impressive to me from a learning perspective.

19:13 You know, if you, obviously it's helpful when you're new to step through the debugger

19:19 and actually see how the program is working.

19:22 Right.

19:22 We, we get used to the fact that it's just innate to us how text becomes execution.

19:27 But when you're new, you know, my kids have looked at what I'm doing and they're like,

19:31 those words, is that really what that website is?

19:33 Yeah.

19:34 I mean, like how is, how does this become a game or whatever?

19:37 Right.

19:37 Yes.

19:38 And so just seeing that happen, I think it's really cool.

19:40 And the fact that you can go forwards and backwards is great.

19:43 Yeah.

19:44 And then, and then we enhance that even beyond what Philip has on the site in that, for

19:50 some of the examples, what we can do is we can step through and you get to an if statement

19:53 and we'll break into the execution and pop up a dialogue box and say, all right, after we

19:59 evaluate the condition on this if statement, what's the next line that's going to execute.

20:03 And so it'll, it'll make the student really think about, okay, how does this if statement work and what's, you know, if it's true, what's going to happen?

20:12 If it's false, what's going to happen?

20:13 Right.

20:13 So that's a, like a better interactive visual version of what does this code print out?

20:21 You know, that, that kind of assessment or test you might have in a computer science program,

20:26 of course.

20:27 Yep.

20:27 Exactly.

20:28 Yeah.

20:29 And so kind of along those same lines, one of the, one of the things that one of my students

20:33 is working on this summer, we're calling it the clickable area question.

20:38 And so this is one of my favorite kinds of questions to put on, on introductory exams is

20:43 to give them some code.

20:44 And then I say, all right, circle, circle, all the variables that are integers in this

20:49 example, or circle all the assignment statements in this example.

20:54 And so now we can automate that.

20:56 We can give them an example and say, click on all of the, click on all of the, assignment

21:00 statements or click on all the floating, you know, click on all the things that are of type

21:04 float in this code snippet.

21:06 Yeah.

21:06 That's cool.

21:06 Does the program discover the right answer or do you have to teach it?

21:10 No, as the, as the instructor, you tell it what the right answer, or, you know, as the

21:14 author, I should say, you tell them.

21:15 It's not like you understand the abstract, abstract syntax tree and like, oh yeah, here's the three

21:20 branches that I could have to create.

21:21 Cool.

21:23 That would be even cooler.

21:24 Because then I would save you the work, but still, that's very awesome.

21:27 Yeah.

21:27 Very awesome.

21:28 Yeah.

21:29 So I've, I've mentioned Philip Guau on the show before, cause he has a really cool C

21:33 Python, deep dive course from the university.

21:38 Are you guys at the same universities or are you just are kind of on the same projects?

21:41 Yeah, we've just, I forget exactly how we met, but yeah, we've just been working.

21:45 He's at, University of Rochester in New York and I'm here in Iowa.

21:49 And yeah, we just, we see each other at conferences and we Skype and email and write papers together.

21:55 Yeah, that's cool.

21:55 I'm a fan of what he's doing.

21:57 So that's really nice.

21:57 I had no idea of this connection until we started talking.

22:00 That's great.

22:02 So one of the things that you said you guys are up to and you're actively doing it right

22:05 now, maybe one of your, your summer, students is doing this is upgrading and moving

22:11 from web to PI over to flask for your web platform.

22:14 Yeah.

22:15 Yeah.

22:15 So we've been running with web to PI, since 2011 when we first kind of went online with

22:21 this.

22:22 And, I mean, one of the cool things about the research that I do is I always, I always

22:27 have to try to tie it somehow into my teaching or into a class that I'm working on.

22:31 And so I teach this, I teach this, internet programming course and I really like,

22:38 I really like web to PI as a kind of as a teaching platform.

22:42 You know, it really does a great job of, of enforcing that kind of model view controller,

22:47 paradigm into, into building web apps with just kind of by the naming structures that

22:54 it uses and, and so on.

22:55 but as we've grown and as we've, as we've started to, you know, as started to have to

23:02 scale this system to support all of the schools that are starting to use it and all the people

23:07 around the world.

23:07 and just, you know, like any system, right.

23:11 especially a research system like this, it's, it's become an organically grown mess.

23:16 And so, so in order to kind of take the next step, you know, I really took a step back

23:23 over the last six months and really kind of thought about all the parts of the system and

23:27 how we should re-architect it.

23:29 And, and it became very clear to me that, that it was time to kind of move from web

23:33 to PI, to a different framework.

23:36 And so I looked around and, and it seems to me that Flask is the right now, at least for

23:41 what I want to do, the kind of the best choice.

23:42 so, so that's what we're doing.

23:45 We're moving to much more of a microservices model, for the backend services and Flask works

23:50 really well for that.

23:51 Yeah.

23:52 It does seem like Flask is, is really what people are choosing for those types of apps.

23:56 And because you're running Python on the client, it seems like you have a lot of fairly static

24:02 HTML and you just need some backend services.

24:05 And it seems like Flask is a real good fit for that.

24:07 Yeah.

24:08 I mean, I sort of in, in modern speak, I sort of, you know, think of each page of the textbook

24:13 or each section of the textbook as a, as a single page application with these microservices

24:19 running in the background.

24:20 Yeah.

24:20 That's great.

24:21 Yeah.

24:22 Another thing you're using is Sphinx and restructured text.

24:25 Yep.

24:25 So that's what I use to generate all the static, you know, static, web pages.

24:30 So instead of coding like a formatted HTML or exporting from word or something terrible

24:35 like that, you just do restructured.

24:37 Yeah.

24:37 Yeah.

24:38 Everything is written in restructured text.

24:40 Yeah.

24:41 So, and then, and then what I really love about restructured text, you know, over something

24:46 like Markdown is that it is very extensible.

24:49 So you can go in and you can add your, in, in, in restructured text speak, you can add your

24:54 own directives.

24:55 Right.

24:56 So the coding, so the runnable code examples, what we call active code, there's an active

25:01 code directive that you write in Sphinx.

25:04 and instead of having to do a whole bunch of JavaScript, you just say dot, dot space,

25:08 active code, and then indent underneath that, put your raw Python code.

25:13 And then when you run it through the Sphinx in, the Sphinx generator, it goes out

25:19 and generates all the gobbledygook JavaScript that you need in order to make it look on the

25:24 page, like this beautiful example with the run button underneath and the, and the canvas

25:28 and all that other cool stuff.

25:29 Yeah.

25:30 So that's, that's really cool.

25:32 It makes it really easy to write.

25:34 Yeah, indeed.

25:35 Where are you guys going with runestone?

25:38 So, yeah, so I think we've started on a couple of really cool things, over the last,

25:44 last summer and, and not as much this summer as I was hoping, but, we've gathered so

25:50 much data over the last three years, that there's just this, I have this huge, huge interest

25:56 in, in understanding how I can, I can apply some machine learning techniques to maybe doing

26:02 some automated tutoring as a part of the, as a part of the platform.

26:07 Okay.

26:07 So right now it's, it's kind of very much in the, the university structured class, you

26:14 know, CS 101 or something like that.

26:17 But if, if you could get it to be more self-supporting, maybe it could be just online training or something

26:23 like that, right?

26:24 Yeah.

26:25 Yeah.

26:25 I mean, right now our audience is really divided in two, into two pieces.

26:29 We have, we have a huge number of colleges and high schools that are using the book for,

26:33 for their sort of traditional classroom style classes.

26:37 But we also have the book just open and we get about half of our traffic just from people who

26:43 have heard about this site from various sources and just want to come and teach themselves how to

26:47 program in Python.

26:48 Yeah, that's cool.

26:49 So how do they get started doing that?

26:51 Do they go, do they go to the book links and they pick a book?

26:54 Yep.

26:54 And we just have kind of one giant open book that, that anybody can go and read just the,

26:59 how to think like a computer scientist book.

27:01 and anybody can come up to that and they can create an account if they want.

27:06 there's nobody there that's going to grade their homework for them.

27:09 but you know, they can read, they can, they can experiment as they're reading.

27:13 They can do the multiple choice questions.

27:15 And, yeah, we get a surprising number of people who come in and do that and, and go a long

27:21 ways in the textbook.

27:22 That's really cool.

27:23 It says that you can join more than 850,000 other readers learning to think like a computer

27:28 scientist in Python.

27:29 Yeah.

27:30 That's cool.

27:30 You guys have to have some champagne or some good beer or something when that crosses over

27:34 a million.

27:34 Yeah.

27:35 I think we're actually probably already there that I had to actually hard code that 850,000

27:41 number, a while ago because it turned out that calculating that was slowing down the whole

27:47 website every time somebody brought up one of the pages.

27:49 It's just not worth it.

27:50 So it just was, yeah, one of those things that I threw in there thinking it would be fun.

27:54 And then one day I realized that the whole site crashed because all of my, all of my threads

27:59 were busy counting.

28:00 Yeah.

28:02 That's awesome.

28:04 So you, you've, you've taught a lot of students Python over the last three years.

28:09 What are some of the takeaways or key things you learned from that experience?

28:14 Yeah.

28:15 So, I mean, one of the funny things that we've learned is, is something that we've always

28:19 suspected and that is that nobody studies on Saturday.

28:22 So we, we, we, of course we track all the clicks that the students make from all over the

28:29 world.

28:29 And it's, it's so consistent every week.

28:32 There's this giant dip on Saturday.

28:33 So don't even try it.

28:38 Let's just work with the way the world is.

28:39 So let's just, we'll forget about that.

28:41 Back Sunday.

28:42 Yep.

28:42 I think there were the, the two more real results that I think are interesting.

28:47 One of them, one of the first things that we learned in, and we worked with Mark Guzdial

28:54 and, and his wife, Barb Erickson down at, at Georgia tech for a year with this.

29:00 And they put together a bunch of different metrics and a bunch of different tests.

29:04 And so we could try to understand what things were having an impact on students.

29:09 And in that, in that preliminary year that we did all this study, what we found was that

29:15 there, there actually was a correlation between the students that used code lens a lot.

29:21 And the students that ended up doing very well in the class.

29:24 So we think that there's a, there's something going on there with, you know, code lens and

29:29 how it helps you develop that internal model of what's going on in the interpreter and ultimately

29:35 how well you do in the, in the class.

29:38 So I think that's if nothing else, that's solid proof that yeah, using code lens is, is a good

29:44 thing.

29:44 Yeah.

29:44 That's really cool.

29:45 Are you writing any papers or anything on that?

29:47 Yeah.

29:47 We've Phillip and I have collaborated on, on I think two papers now and he just got one of

29:53 them accepted.

29:54 So, so that'll be coming out soon.

29:56 Excellent.

29:57 And then, and then Mark and his group got another one accepted at the ICER conference.

30:01 This episode is brought to you by CodeShip.

30:18 CodeShip has launched organizations, create teams, set permissions for specific team members

30:24 and improve collaboration in your continuous delivery workflow.

30:27 Maintain centralized control of your organization's projects and teams with CodeShip's

30:31 new organization's plan.

30:33 And as Talk Python listeners, you can save 20% off any premium plan for the next three

30:38 months.

30:38 Just use the code Talk Python, all caps, no spaces.

30:42 Check them out at CodeShip.com and tell them thanks for supporting the show on Twitter where

30:46 they're at CodeShip.

30:47 Cool.

30:53 So it's yielding some results.

30:54 That's great.

30:55 Yeah.

30:55 Yeah.

30:56 And then the second thing that we did, which is kind of a really cool part of the, of, you

31:00 know, having control of the Python interpreter itself and how you display everything in the

31:05 book was between the first year that we used the book and the second year that we used the

31:12 book, we spent some time in the summer changing and enhancing how we displayed error messages

31:17 to students.

31:18 So the first year that we ran that we used the book, we just had a, we actually just had a,

31:23 a JavaScript pop-up dialogue box that would come up with the standard Python error message.

31:30 If you ran into a syntax error, you know, or whatever.

31:32 Right.

31:34 And, you know, they really aren't that informative.

31:36 So the second year, instead of the pop-up dialogue box, we changed the whole thing and we gave a,

31:43 we gave a, an error, we gave the error message.

31:46 And then we had a, an error description, a much more like almost a paragraph describing,

31:51 this is the error.

31:52 These are the kind of conditions that might make this error appear.

31:55 Here's a couple examples, maybe even of the kind of things that, that are going to give you an

31:59 error like this.

32:00 And then we also added a paragraph of here's some ways to try to track this down and how you

32:05 should fix this error.

32:06 And what we saw was a huge, huge improvement in terms of how efficient students were in completing

32:14 homework assignments and doing programming exercises.

32:17 Cause we, every time a student runs a programming exercise in the book, we save their code.

32:23 And, and we kind of, you know, so we can keep track of how many runs did it take from ground

32:28 zero to the point where the student either gave up or, or, you know, completed the, completed

32:33 the assignment.

32:33 And so we saw this huge decrease in the number of runs after we, after we made that change to

32:39 how we presented all this error message information to the students.

32:43 That's really, that's really cool.

32:44 Those error messages are so frustrating when you're new.

32:48 Oh, I know.

32:49 You get used to them, but they're, they're not as helpful as, as we looking from an experience

32:54 perspective think they are.

32:55 Yeah, exactly.

32:56 Cool.

32:57 So that's, that's a really neat result.

32:58 Yeah.

32:59 We're taking that same, that same set of, of data that every run data.

33:04 And now we've added this thing called code coach.

33:07 And we really haven't had the ability to go back and do much assessment of it yet.

33:11 But code coach, what it does is actually in the background, it runs pilot over, over each,

33:18 each submission.

33:19 And then if the student clicks on it, you can actually click through and you can look

33:23 at the differences from run to run to run to run.

33:26 So you can see kind of after the fact, what did I, what did I change about this code?

33:31 And then it'll also then give you any, any hints from, from running pilot on, on, you know,

33:38 things that obviously don't generate error messages, but there's some really valuable stuff

33:43 in pilot, especially, you know, for beginners.

33:45 Yeah.

33:45 That'll definitely give them a jumpstart in writing what looks more like professional

33:49 code.

33:50 Yeah.

33:50 You know, like just a quick example of a, of a thing that really catches beginners is forgetting

33:55 their parentheses on a function call.

33:58 Sure.

33:58 Especially a function call that has no parameters, right?

34:01 They're always forgetting to put their parentheses in.

34:03 Well, that doesn't generate any kind of error message in Python because that's a valid statement.

34:08 It's just, it's just useless, right?

34:11 It just comes back and tells you that it's a function.

34:13 Well, fine.

34:14 From a beginner's point of view, there's no value to that when they don't, especially

34:18 when they don't see that when they are just running a program.

34:20 But if you run it through pilot, it'll tell you, Hey, line 12, that's a useless statement.

34:24 And they'll look at it and they'll think, well, wait a minute.

34:26 I was trying to make a turtle there.

34:28 So, but it's telling me there's something wrong with that line.

34:31 So.

34:31 Yeah, that's really helpful.

34:33 The conversation about parentheses made me think, are you guys doing a Python two or

34:38 Python three?

34:39 Huh?

34:40 So we're doing, we're doing sort of a hybrid and without starting any religious wars.

34:48 I just, I think that from a beginner's point of view, the differences in Python two and Python

34:54 three are so slight, that it's not really worth worrying about.

34:58 Yeah, I agree.

34:59 I agree.

35:00 So we, we support either parentheses or no parentheses after your print statements.

35:05 And, and we, and we support, we have a flag that you can set if you want to make sure

35:10 that you're getting the Python three division semantics.

35:13 Right.

35:13 Okay.

35:14 Yeah.

35:14 Very cool.

35:15 At the heart of all that, of course, is sculpt.

35:17 And somewhere along the way you became the maintainer of sculpt.

35:21 And by the way, for those listening, it's S K U L P T, right?

35:24 Correct.

35:25 Yep.

35:26 Yep.

35:26 Yeah.

35:29 So that was one of those, you know, I found this, I thought it was, I thought it was really

35:33 the most awesome code that I'd run into that enabled this Python in the browser.

35:38 And unfortunately the time that I was getting super excited about, it was about the same time

35:42 that Scott was making a career change and it was sort of more or less losing interest

35:47 in the project.

35:48 so he was very gracious and we've sort of transitioned that over to where I'm the

35:53 maintainer of, of it.

35:55 And I moved it over to GitHub and, yeah, now we have this, we have this great, I think

35:59 very thriving community of people who are contributing, to sculpt right now.

36:04 Yeah.

36:04 And just continuing to improve it.

36:06 Yeah.

36:07 The short story or the tagline for your GitHub project is sculpt.

36:10 It's a JavaScript implementation of the Python programming language.

36:14 So basically download some JavaScript, which is the Python interpreter, if you will.

36:18 And then you write some more Python and just run it in the browser, right?

36:22 Yeah, exactly.

36:23 Yep.

36:24 Yeah.

36:24 Very cool.

36:25 Yeah.

36:25 You guys have almost a thousand stars.

36:26 That's pretty excellent.

36:27 Yeah.

36:28 It's been, it's been a fun project.

36:30 It's, it's, it's one of those great things, you know, I get up in the morning and, and there's

36:34 people in Germany and there's people in France and there's people all over the world that

36:38 are, you know, working on this and submitting pull requests and whatever.

36:41 And so it's a, it's a very international effort.

36:44 Yeah.

36:45 Yeah.

36:45 That's great.

36:46 One, one thing, that came to mind when I was thinking about this is just this morning,

36:52 I was emailing with Ryan Kelly who did pypy.js.

36:56 Yeah.

36:57 Can you compare those two projects or sort of say like, what's, what's the story?

37:03 I mean, these are both kinds of JavaScript implementations in the browser.

37:06 Yeah.

37:07 So I think there's, there's actually three separate projects right now going on for Python in the

37:12 browser.

37:12 There's sculpt.

37:14 There's a project called Brython.

37:15 And then there's this, and then there's a pypy.js.

37:19 So pypy.js is really awesome because it's using the, oh shoot.

37:25 I'm just going to space out the name.

37:27 It's using this extension to LLVM compiler, right?

37:31 Where you can compile to a different target.

37:33 Instead of compiling it to machine language, you can have it compiled to JavaScript.

37:37 Exactly.

37:38 So they're actually taking the C source code for pypy, running it through the compiler and

37:43 having the compiler generate all the JavaScript form.

37:45 So the advantage for pypy.js is that you kind of get, you know, absolutely the CPython implementation.

37:52 no question about it.

37:55 What, what's lacking there at the moment.

37:59 And I know they're working on this is to be able to bridge things like, like the turtle

38:05 graphics module or like the processing graphics module so that you can, you know, you can do

38:09 the kind of cool interactive graphics kind of things in the browser that you might want to

38:13 do.

38:13 Yeah.

38:14 That's cool.

38:14 The other thing, the other difference is that, sculpt is just a tiny fraction of the

38:18 size of pypy.js at the moment.

38:20 So what's the size of the JavaScript files for sculpt?

38:25 they're like 143 K.

38:28 Okay.

38:29 That's, that's pretty, that's pretty decent.

38:31 Does that include the standard library?

38:33 Well, it includes the parts of the standard library that we've implemented.

38:37 Right.

38:37 Of course.

38:38 Yeah.

38:39 Which is a fraction of the standard library.

38:42 I guess, you know, if you're missing a piece and it's pure Python, maybe you could try to

38:46 just run it and try to straight up import it.

38:50 That's cool.

38:50 Yep.

38:51 So I don't know.

38:53 There may be a day when we, when, when all this stuff kind of comes together in the great

38:57 singularity of Python in the browser.

38:59 Yeah.

38:59 And we'll get all the best of all the worlds.

39:01 It's really exciting to see that happening.

39:05 so yeah, I think both those projects are, are super cool.

39:09 Did you ever watch, or maybe I should just recommend to the listeners, Gary Bernhardt's

39:14 The Birth and Death of JavaScript?

39:15 No, I haven't.

39:17 Oh my gosh.

39:18 It's this fictional, you know, he's hilarious, of course.

39:21 And I believe this is presented at PyCon 2014.

39:25 I'm not sure when it was, but it's on the video.

39:27 And basically he takes us through this fictional history of going from 2005 into 2035 and how

39:34 JavaScript has changed.

39:35 But there's this sort of real technical underpinning of asm.js and compiling C down into JavaScript

39:42 for the, the running in the browser.

39:45 And it's definitely worth a look.

39:46 I'll put it in the show notes.

39:47 Yeah.

39:48 It's, it's both hilarious and instructive.

39:51 Okay.

39:53 So we're kind of coming up on the end of the show.

39:55 I have a few questions I always ask on the way out, but before we get there, do you want

40:00 to just talk briefly about the books that you have available and, you know, what ones you've

40:04 maybe wanted to call people's attention to?

40:06 There's, there's a lot of educators listening and also students I know.

40:10 So maybe both ends, they would appreciate hearing about what you guys have in this format at RuneScape.

40:16 Yeah.

40:17 Thanks.

40:18 So we have how to think like a computer scientist interactive edition.

40:23 And that's based on, I think the very, you know, very well known how to think like a computer

40:28 scientist book by Allen Downey and Jeff Elkinger and a couple of other people.

40:34 But I think Alan and Jeff were kind of the main authors on that.

40:38 And so that, that, that's been an open source textbook for, for quite a few years now.

40:43 And I'll just be forever indebted to them for, for doing that because it saved me from yet

40:50 again, having to write an introductory chapter about lists when I didn't want to do that ever

40:55 again.

40:55 So, so we took that, we took their open source textbook and made it interactive and added the

41:04 questions.

41:05 And, you know, over the years we've, we've added some of our own things to it and added

41:08 a couple of new chapters.

41:09 But so that, so that book has just has a great pedigree and has, and has proven itself over

41:18 the years as a, as a really solid textbook, not only for the college level, but also for

41:22 the high school level.

41:23 So we have that out there.

41:26 And then we have a data structures textbook, problem solving with algorithms and data structures

41:32 by Brad Miller and David Ranum.

41:34 that that's published by Franklin Beadle, a publisher right out in, in, Oregon in

41:40 your neighborhood.

41:41 Oh yeah.

41:41 and so, our publisher there was, was gracious enough when we approached him about

41:49 saying, Hey, we have this great idea to change the world.

41:52 We want to make textbooks interactive.

41:54 And we showed him kind of a proof of concept using the how to think book.

41:58 And he, he, immediately, Jim Lisey, our publisher immediately said, wow, that's

42:04 great.

42:04 Let's yeah.

42:05 You have my permission to, to take your book and put it online like that.

42:08 Oh, that's excellent.

42:09 Yeah.

42:11 So that's, and, and, you know, funnily enough, it's one of those great stories where we put

42:16 it online and the year after we put it online, we had our best year in, in royalties ever

42:20 from, from the paper book sales.

42:22 So that's the real, the real irony of open source sometimes, isn't it?

42:26 I mean, I work really close with MongoDB and the guys there and you know, that's a billion,

42:32 multi-billion dollar company and you can go to GitHub and get their product and just download

42:36 it for free.

42:36 I mean, it's amazing.

42:37 And you know, Red Hat and OpenStack and all sorts of stuff is, is, is really sort of paradoxical

42:44 or in, in the sense you would think giving it away would be a problem, but in fact, it's

42:48 actually the thing that makes it catch fire.

42:52 And then I have a little book called Java for Python programmers, which is just a short

42:56 little book on making the transition from, from Python to Java.

42:59 And then we've got, we've got a couple of other, several other books actually.

43:04 One of them written by, by my friend, Paul Resnick at the university of Michigan called

43:09 programming programs, information, and people.

43:12 We call it the pip book.

43:13 And that's part of their information science program at the university of Michigan.

43:18 That's written using the runestone tools and is now freely, freely available.

43:22 Mark Guzdial at Georgia tech has written a book for, for high school computer science

43:29 instructors as part of the APs, as part of the new AP programming class called, what

43:37 is it?

43:37 Computer.

43:38 look it up.

43:42 So it's, it's, it's not Java based.

43:46 It's Lang.

43:46 What it, what the cool thing about it is it's kind of language agnostic.

43:50 So it's a CS principles, sorry.

43:52 CS principles is the name of the course.

43:54 Excellent.

43:55 It's the new course by the, by the AP.

43:57 And so Mark has written a textbook just for instructors about how to teach that course.

44:01 And then this fall, he'll also be coming out with the student book for that.

44:05 The, the, and both of those are based on the runestone tools.

44:08 Yeah.

44:08 So it sounds like you guys are really building quite a platform for the teaching going forward.

44:14 Yeah.

44:15 That's what, that's what we hope.

44:16 And you know, the more people that do this, it's always one of those crazy, exciting things

44:22 when you find somebody on the other side of the world or in someplace else that's suddenly

44:26 translated your textbook into Russian or Czech or some other language and is, and is using

44:31 your tools to write a book that you never thought of.

44:34 Yeah.

44:34 That's amazing.

44:35 It's, it's really gratifying.

44:36 I'm sure.

44:36 Yeah.

44:37 Brad, I think that's, that might be a good place to wrap it up.

44:41 Final thoughts, favorite editor.

44:44 favorite editor, right?

44:46 PyCharm.

44:47 Pie charm.

44:48 Oh, right on.

44:49 Do you use that in your class?

44:50 I do.

44:51 Yep.

44:51 Yeah.

44:52 We, we, we stay in the browser for about half the class and then we transition to PyCharm.

44:57 So that's cool.

44:58 Have you tried their PyCharm education edition?

45:01 I have messed around with it a little bit.

45:04 Yeah.

45:04 Yeah.

45:04 I looked at it.

45:05 It's interesting because it kind of guides you through like it's sort of handholding a little

45:08 bit in a sense, but I haven't done anything with it either.

45:10 Yeah.

45:11 All right.

45:12 Awesome.

45:12 Yeah.

45:12 That's the one I use as well.

45:13 I love pie.

45:14 Charm.

45:14 favorite PI package.

45:17 Oh, I Python.

45:19 Yeah.

45:20 I Python is so good.

45:21 Yeah.

45:22 I use it in all my upper level classes now.

45:25 It's so, it's such a great teaching tool that way.

45:27 Oh, I bet it is.

45:28 I hadn't even really considered sort of the, here's the thing I can give the student component

45:33 of it.

45:33 Yeah.

45:34 I mean, for making class notes, it's, it's really, it's really awesome.

45:37 And now with this, you know, with this new, Jupyter integration, you know, I'm, that's

45:44 one of my little projects is to get a Jupyter server running on, on one of our servers on

45:47 campus here.

45:48 Yeah.

45:49 So that people can just access it.

45:50 So the whole I Python thing will break out of being just Python.

45:53 Not that that's terrible, but it'll let it grow significantly.

45:56 Right?

45:56 Yeah.

45:57 Yeah.

45:58 Yep.

45:58 Awesome.

45:58 All right.

45:59 Anything you want to, we didn't talk about, you want to let people know some links you want

46:03 to give people, things like that.

46:05 Yeah.

46:05 I would just say if anybody wants to give, if anybody wants to give Sculpt a try or experience

46:10 Python in the browser, there's another group of guys that I worked together with very

46:14 closely at trinket.io.

46:16 and they have this, they're actually a little startup out on the East coast and, yeah,

46:22 trinket.io, you could write Python programs right in your browser, save them, share them,

46:28 email them to your friends.

46:30 so it's, it's also a great way for doing Python in the browser.

46:33 So I just wanted to give a, give a shout out to the, to the guys at trinket because they've

46:38 been very super helpful in, in keeping the Sculpt project.

46:41 Oh, cool.

46:42 Yeah.

46:42 It's a little bit like, JS Fiddle, but for Python.

46:45 Yeah.

46:46 I think.

46:46 Yeah.

46:46 That's cool.

46:47 Very nice.

46:47 Anything else?

46:49 I think we've hit it.

46:51 Yeah.

46:51 All right, Brad, this has been super interesting.

46:53 I really love to sort of see how Python is making its way into education and.

46:58 Yeah.

46:59 It's really gratifying.

47:00 What you're doing over.

47:01 Yeah.

47:01 Runestone is very cool.

47:02 So people should check it out at interactivepython.org.

47:05 Yep.

47:06 Definitely.

47:07 All right.

47:07 Thanks for being on the show.

47:08 Thanks for having me.

47:09 This was a lot of fun.

47:10 Yeah, it sure was.

47:12 See you later.

47:13 This has been another episode of Talk Python to Me.

47:16 Today's guest was Brad Miller.

47:18 And this episode has been sponsored by Hired and CodeShip.

47:21 Thank you guys for supporting the show.

47:23 Thank you.

47:24 Thank you.

47:24 Thank you.

47:24 Hired wants to be here.

47:27 Visit Hired.com slash talkpython to me to get five or more offers with salary and equity presented right up front and a special listener signing bonus of $4,000.

47:36 CodeShip wants you to always keep shipping.

47:40 Check them out at codeship.com and thank them on Twitter via at CodeShip.

47:44 Don't forget the discount code for listeners.

47:46 It's easy.

47:47 Talk Python, all caps, no spaces.

47:49 You can find the links from the show at talkpythontome.com slash episodes slash show slash 20.

47:57 And while you're there, be sure to subscribe to the show.

48:00 Open your favorite podcatcher and search for Python.

48:02 We should be the number one hit right at the top.

48:05 You can also find the iTunes and direct RSS feeds in the footer of the website.

48:10 Our theme music is Developers, Developers, Developers by Corey Smith, who goes by Smix.

48:15 You can hear his entire song on our website.

48:18 This is your host, Michael Kennedy.

48:20 Thanks for listening.

48:21 Smix takes us out of here.

48:23 Staying with my voice.

48:25 There's no norm that I can feel within.

48:27 Haven't been sleeping.

48:28 I've been using lots of rest.

48:30 I'll pass the mic back to who rocked it best.

48:32 Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers.

48:40 Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers.

48:45 .

48:45 Thank you.