PETER WADE: Hi, everyone.
It's good to see everyone again.
So yesterday, I had my what I called my hand-holding session, where
I stepped everyone through here's what you do,
here's how you set up your classroom, here's
how you integrate it with your LMS.
This is not about that.
This is designed more for people who are teaching their second class.
That is, you've successfully completed your first year of teaching,
you taught CS50, and you had a really good time doing it.
And now for one reason or another, you're
looking to expand upon what you're doing.
So the first thing, once again, we're going
to do the good old fashioned pre-check survey.
So if you can do that for me real quick--
and I left my notes on my table, because what else would I do?
Year One.
And this is just so in the same way--
this is a different server from yesterday,
I promise-- but this is about where are you teaching
and what are you looking to expand into, right?
What grades are you working with, right?
Everyone starts their first year and I always
liken it to the first crash to my first teaching year
where I was given a book and some pencils and a classroom
and they gave me some chalk and they gave me a little slap on the butt
and said, there you go, have fun in there.
You said you know what you're doing, so have fun in that classroom.
And I can't imagine that that's too uncommon of an experience for teachers.
But really, it's your second year.
So your first year, you're just trying to get through everything, you know?
You've got the lessons, and then you've got the technology problems.
And then the dev environment won't start or the internet goes out
and you can't do anything for a day and you
lose this, that, and the other thing.
This is not that session.
This is the session for how do I expand--
and I've also expanded it since I was earlier talking about it--
into discussions about differentiation and something
I think is really important in computer science, which
is improving the number of women who take computer science.
And there's some really fascinating research
that I've included in the slide show.
So I'm going to move ahead, and actually, I'm
going to take a quick look at the responses right now.
Have a good idea on making my course better, be more knowledgeable,
use CS50P, deploy a course using CS50 tool.
Those are all good ones.
I'm going to zoom this in a little bit.
Seeing a lot of middle school and high school teachers.
Be better.
That's the best one.
That is a great one, because everyone-- does anyone in this classroom
or online not want to be a better teacher?
Is anyone just like, I'm the best, and that's it, right?
Just remember, we work hard and we do everything we can, right?
All right, so we've got a good cross section here.
So I'm going to go back to my slide show.
So again, my name is Peter Wade.
I worked at the Colorado Springs School from 2020 to 2023.
I am on a sabbatical for a few years because I need a little bit more
flexible job, but I intend to go back.
Some of my experiences--
I taught computer science grades 4 through 12.
So I've worked with-- and then I also oversaw the program from K to 3.
So I have seen a lot at our school--
taught seven classes in two divisions.
And it all fell on me, which I'm sure is not the unusual statement here.
And my AP class got the Female Diversity Award--
very proud of that class, too.
This year, unfortunately, it was-- this year was not quite as diverse.
But I still had a fantastic AP class this year.
And what we'll do-- so we're going to go through.
I'm not going to read the slides, because I assume everyone can read.
But I think that the most important aspect about teaching computer science
is that you're probably alone, right?
How many of you in this room or online are the only computer science teacher
at your school.
Genuinely curious-- raise your hand up high
or put up a little thing in the chat because I
can see it in the back of the room.
But probably a lot of you are either one or maybe one
and another person who's also a math teacher, right?
Maybe you are the math teacher, and your boss came in one day
and said, hey, what if you taught a Python class, right?
And I always liken it to you're working alone.
You're working in a field where you can't really collaborate with anyone.
And I go back to Arrested Development where there are dozens of us.
Literally, in this room, there are two dozen, I think, two dozen people.
And there are some benefits, OK?
First one is that no one knows what you're talking about, right?
So you can tell your boss-- all you have to do is start talking to your boss
about how arrays work and how to filter arrays.
And your boss, probably an English major, your director
will just be like, I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm just going to assume that you know what you're doing.
But at the same time, when you journey into a genuine problem,
there's no community at your school, right?
It's not like the English department where
they can talk about The Great Gatsby together and discuss
their favorite sections.
You're all alone.
But you're not.
And so one of the top tools to prevent burnout
is to understand that there is a community out there.
There are a lot of communities out there.
So the first one is the CS50 community.
If you are teaching CS50, absolutely click that link.
Join up.
Get your email on that list because there's
a lot of great discussions in there.
And if you just want to chat with someone, you're running into problems,
you can put it in the chat, and people will say, oh, yeah, that.
And obviously, the administrators are watching it as well.
The Computer Science Teachers Association is a fantastic group.
They have a conference.
I believe their virtual conference is coming up.
Some of the research about women in computer science--
actually, all of the research about women in computer science--
comes from my time at the CSTA conference in Chicago last year.
They have a virtual conference coming up soon.
I highly recommend that.
You've got other online forums like CSEducation.
I think that CS50 also has a Reddit page somewhere.
And then another fun one is-- this is, again,
for AP teachers in the United States-- is you can become a reader,
where they get a bunch of people, all of whom are computer science teachers,
they put them in a room, and they make them grade thousands upon thousands
upon thousands of AP tests.
Now, I don't know how much everyone enjoys grading.
I certainly don't.
But doing it with a bunch of other people
would be a fun time to collaborate.
And that's a key point.
Just remember, you're not doing this alone.
It will feel like it, but you're not.
There's a big community around.
And there's a fun one, too.
If you're in K-12, you probably have a local community college or university.
And my absolute favorite thing about the education community
is that you can email professors and say, I'm really interested in this.
Do you have any research?
You can build a community yourself.
Most likely, your local college has some sort of computer science program,
and you can contact other teachers who know what you're talking about.
And I always liken this to my former--
so you're sitting around.
You've just finished your first computer science class, your first CS50 class.
And all of a sudden, your dean of curriculum and learning walks in,
and he goes, you know, Pete, you had a great class last year.
We had great reviews.
What if you offered another class?
What if you just did another class for me?
And you go, but, Ron, I'm a math teacher.
I don't know what--
I don't know what you want me to do.
So it begs the question of how do you expand
your program using the same modules.
If you implemented the AP curriculum, you
can say, OK well, I've got the AP curriculum.
Well, what else is there?
And the answer is quite a bit, right?
But it's also OK to say no.
There's a global shortage for labor at the moment.
So it's not like they can really do anything if you say no.
If you don't know, if you can't do it, you can't do it.
Don't stress yourself out and say, I have to do this, because you don't.
Maybe learn how to do it.
But it's OK to tell your administrator, I can't.
I don't know how to.
That was something that took me a long time.
Some other suggestions about preventing burnout-- first of all, planning
is everything.
I'm a notoriously short-term planner.
So definitely plan stuff out.
When you're in class, it can be very stressful
because something will go wrong.
The core aspect of computer science is that at some point,
something's going to fail.
And when it fails, just laugh it off, which is easier said than done.
I've also been there.
I promise.
But you keep trying and trying and trying, and maybe you can move on.
Maybe you can get suggestions from the audience.
But it's OK, when you're in class, to have a failure because you're
going to have one at some point.
It might be your fault. It might be the internet's fault.
But there's something that can happen.
Flipping classes is something I really strongly believe in.
That's a URL that will take you to something
about flipping your classes, some strategies and ideas.
It requires more planning.
But it makes it much easier for when kids hit a wall,
and instead of answering a question at night
or 2:00 in the morning or something, you're just right there.
They call you over.
They say, Mr. Wade, I can't understand this error.
And you just go over, look at the error, and say, oh, it's
because you got a semicolon on line 20.
The computer has no idea what it's supposed to do there.
As I did yesterday, laugh about technology breaking, OK?
It's going to happen.
It's the core aspect.
I always say that computers only do exactly what we
tell them to do unless they want to do something else, which has yet to be
proven wrong for me in most cases.
And, again, it's OK to make a mistake.
Everyone makes mistakes when you're teaching.
So to those of you who are new or even returning,
I think it's always important to say it's OK to make a mistake while you're
teaching computer science.
It's how we learn, how our kids learn and how we learn.
So I'm going to really briefly pause and ask
if there's any questions from the audience about this or suggestions
from the audience, ideas that they've had in preventing burnout or getting--
or keeping going when they're exhausted.
I don't see any in here.
Any from online?
No?
Give it another second.
OK.
So I'm going to move on and now move on to the--
well, now, how do we expand our program?
And the key point to remember is that CS50
has a bunch of available modules, which I call the expansion packs.
But it's yours.
You don't have to use every single one.
You don't have to complete-- you can use bits and pieces of the Python module
and build something that actually works for you.
So, for example, so if you look here, these
are an example of some of the expansion packs.
And I guess that there's a new mobile development one coming out
and a cybersecurity one coming out.
But the core ones-- you've got this CS50 AP, which is what I used,
and then X, which is very similar to it.
You've got web development, which is great for kids who are more advanced.
You've got Python and Scratch, which are alternative starting points for kids
who are--
if you're looking for an intro class.
Scratch was particularly good.
I had very good results with that down to fifth and sixth grade.
The fourth-graders were a little bit young
to understand what was going on in some of it.
Artificial intelligence-- this was an example of--
I had an incredibly advanced eighth-grader ready for the AP test
today.
And I gave him the AI class, and he loved it.
He spent the entire semester working on it
while he was in my middle-school technology class.
But, again, if you look at it, this is the system
that I put together for the Colorado Springs School
where you have two introductions classes where you have Intro
to Computer Science and Technology.
And then you have different pathways where
you have intermediate courses, data science and robotics,
and then you also had AP Computer Science
Principles, which is a yearlong course.
And then you had advanced courses so that students
could start here, take this, and then move on
to advanced if they felt they were ready for it,
or they could go off to the side.
And it depended on how comfortable and how interested they were.
It gave them options.
At our school, we use--
which I don't think is that-- which I think
is fairly common in the United States.
Computer science classes can count for either a math or a science credit--
so a good way to expand it so kids who-- maybe they're really scared
of physics or chemistry or something.
Well, I think chemistry is core, I think.
In any case, it gives them an option, if they
don't want to go through the math curriculum or the science curriculum,
to expand to other topics.
And that's how you should think of your program
is, how is it helpful to students, and how does it build--
how do they build something with it?
I feel like I'm jumping through everything, but that's OK.
And another point that I always bring up is
that when you're teaching a class about computer science,
you have to keep in mind that the computer science field is enormous.
The most visual point is programming.
It's the thing that most people know because they watch things
like Silicon Valley or they watch--
what's the Zuckerberg movie?
AUDIENCE: Social Network.
PETER WADE: That's it.
Thank you.
They watch The Social Network and they watch programmers
and they watch all this chaos.
But when you think about computer science,
there really aren't that many programmers.
It's a huge field.
There's cybersecurity engineers.
There's IT experts.
There's graphic designers.
It's an enormous field.
And so focusing so narrowly on programming in a computer science class
doesn't really help.
It's not that it doesn't really help, but it narrows the field.
And it discourages kids who might be interested in doing something
like network engineering.
I had a kid who loved radios--
fascinated with radios, took my class, didn't really
connect with the programming part, but he loved the network engineering part
because he was just fascinated with the concept of radio waves
interfering with one another.
And I keep going--
and so there's a real point of design.
What can you build?
What can you, as a student in a class, design?
And for this, I bring up one of my students from this year's project.
This is a song generator.
This kid was very musical.
And this song is fully--
this software that he wrote is fully capable of designing a beat
and pushing it out.
If you can hear it--
I think that the audio is coming in and goofy.
But it regenerates it each time you run it.
So it'll create a new song every time it's run.
And it goes into the whole--
my-- what I saw as the whole-- whoopsie--
what I saw is the whole idea of capturing their imagination.
Computer science is about what can you build.
What can you do?
You look at the enormous number of computer science projects
or websites out there.
And so when you're designing programs, you just
need to think, what can I build?
And that's what you should be encouraging your kids to--
your students to think along the lines of.
What can I build through knowing this, right?
What can I create?
And I go back to this old SpongeBob meme, which is, he goes, "Imagination."
And I really would-- and I want that to be--
or I felt like that was a very core part of what our computer science
program was, of building, of designing, and of making it useful.
When you think about a computer, computer science
is about building programs that are useful for something.
It's not just this abstract topic where you go once a week
and learn how to do some programming, and maybe you
build a Fibonacci sequence.
And the kids go, oh, look.
It should be-- and that's one of the things
I really loved about the CS50 assignments is that they really
focus on designing projects that, for the most part,
are very rarely math-based.
They can be, but they're really about visual design.
I think of the filter project, which is where
you build a filter using C to create grayscale and sepia tone
filters on a picture.
And so, again, this is all my personal opinion.
Everyone has their own ideas.
But these are just some ideas that I want to throw at you.
For those of you who are going to have your administrator walking
in and saying, hey, what if you expanded your classes,
or you're looking at the existing classes, and you say, well,
I want to offer something more interesting,
you can go back to web development.
Web development, for a long time, at a lot of schools,
web development has been just HTML, CSS, and maybe a little JavaScript.
But when you think of the modern internet,
that's not how websites work now.
Nowadays, it all runs with these big backend computer--
with these big backend softwares--
excuse me-- with an enormous amount of backend software, database connections.
And so that's a point that the kids really
connect with in the CS50 Web curriculum is
that they're building dynamic websites, not just static pages,
with a lot of design elements.
And in doing that, I want to just mention--
I promise I will stop talking about this in a second.
You are not exclusively bound to CSS--
or to CS50.
You can take modules that interest you and throw out other ones that doesn't.
In my AP class, for example, I very rarely got to Unit 5,
usually for lack of time.
But I also felt, for the test, when I have such limited time,
I didn't necessarily need Unit 5, or the Flask unit.
As interesting as they are, I just could never make it work in my schedule.
So if you look here, you've got my web development
class, which starts with understanding technology and the internet,
and then you jump into Wix for education.
It's not a CS50 module, but it works.
It helps them introduce it slowly to the point where they understand,
OK, Python and Flask.
And then you move to Django.
So they get a little rampup, right?
Same with the intro to computer science class--
my intro to computer science class had a digital arts and file
systems, which had no CS50 units.
It was all about building stuff in or designing stuff in Adobe Photoshop
and teaching kids how to use file systems to search for tools.
And then we use the CS50 Scratch.
And this is a topic that we'll do--
that I'm going to talk about when I talk about differentiation.
But in the CS50--
I would either, depending on how my class was doing,
we would either do the CS50 Python unit or we would use a different software
entirely because sometimes my intro class students really had a hard time
programming in just pure text.
And they had real trouble using the terminal window to do things--
to get the computer to do what they're trying to do.
So I'm talking at a CS50 teacher workshop, saying,
you don't necessarily have to use it for everything.
Before I jump into differentiation, are there any questions, comments,
curiosities from in the classroom or out of the classroom, or in the classroom
or from online?
OK.
So these are two topics that are very important in an American school system.
Again, I'm going to speak from an American perspective
because that's where I've lived.
But we have something called IEP and 504's.
But then we also all have students who have different learning differences.
And the CS50 curriculum provides a lot of benefits to that.
Now, with this AI tool that was introduced
an hour ago or two hours ago, is going to be a game changer in terms of kids
being able to work independently.
But one of the things I really like is that you
can get kids who will try the more is that in a class, you'll get--
say you have a class of 10 students.
You'll have one, maybe two students who are
so advanced that they can run circles around the students who are just
learning.
And then maybe you'll have a student who has
a lot of trouble understanding this.
Maybe they never had--
maybe they never had a chance to do complex logic puzzles.
For them, every class is really challenging.
And that's one of the things I really loved
using CS50 is that you've got the more and the less
for most major assignments.
So you can do the Mario More and the Mario Less.
But I will say the biggest challenge I found in my teaching time,
in my time teaching CS50, has not been processing speeds
but has actually been dyslexia.
I've had quite a few students who've had dyslexia.
And they tend to do great with Scratch because they don't have to type.
But once they have to go into the Python unit where they start having to type
and all, and it's really about making sure that they're--
if they're taking an English class, and they find a misspelling,
you can kind of fudge it because you understand what they're trying to say.
But the reality is if you type a variable name,
and the variable name is called var1, and the second variable name
is called vac, and they call it as vac accidentally,
the computer is not going to understand it.
So this is where creating a pathway for different students
really comes in of if you have a student--
I had a student last year--
last year-- two years ago--
very bright student, terrible dyslexia, to the point where he could not--
we started the Python unit.
He couldn't even get his programs-- the interpreter
to run because his misspellings in everything were so bad.
And I tried-- I spent a long time before I said, you know what?
Instead of this, we're going to have you do the Scratch unit to the end.
Similar experience-- obviously, it's not quite Python.
So you can't expand it in the same way.
But I really do encourage you to try it out.
It's hard to teach two classes simultaneously, and particularly
when you've got one group of students doing one curriculum and one
group of students doing the other.
But it helps keep them engaged.
It helps keep students who really struggle with--
who have a learning difference, who have a real issue working
at full speed-- working at the same speed as other students,
helps keep them engaged in the topic and makes
them feel like they're a part of something.
Any questions or comments?
And I will say that I'm speaking from having worked in private school
largely.
I have never worked with an IEP or a 504 student in computer science.
I worked with them in French, but not in computer science.
So I'm not quite sure what working with an aide is.
But the other benefit you have is that if your student has an aide,
they can get the tools as well.
The tools are all free.
The tools are all free, and you can easily add them to your classroom.
You can easily add them to your classroom
and give them the CS50 vault answers and help them and help guide them
so that the person helping them learns the tool as well.
So that's the topic of differentiation.
And this is a huge field.
And this is something that everyone will have to work on themselves.
And this is one that--
so the next one is the topic of women in computer science.
And I bring this up because reading this is really depressing.
So I've highlighted the key points to this,
which is that in 1984, 37.1% of computer science degrees were awarded to women.
By 1990, that had dropped to 29% to 26.5% in 1998,
and that by 2011, that number had dropped to 12% of bachelor's degrees
were awarded to women.
That's the United States.
By 2011, only 0.04% of women planned to major in computer science
compared to 3.3% of men.
The study also found that 15% of computer science majors were women.
Now, this is because there's a couple different studies here.
And reading that, it goes back to elementary, middle, and high school.
And this is a real part of it is that there is a--
partially culture, but I'll finish this page first.
Although teenage girls are using computers and the internet at rates
similar to their male peers, they are five times less
likely to consider a technology-related career
or take postsecondary technology classes.
The national center reports that the SAT takers
who intend to major in computer science, the proportion of girls
has steadily decreased from 20% in 2001 to 12% in 2006.
And it begs the question of why.
Why is this happening?
I obviously don't have the answer.
But what I can tell you is that you start to see this emerge.
The earlier a student is introduced to a topic, the better they will be at it.
Does anyone disagree with that statement?
Would anyone on planet Earth disagree that a student
who is introduced to it in first grade will likely continue doing it
throughout the rest of their life?
Probably not, right?
And that's something that--
and so there's a lot of research and I can't recommend
this woman enough, Dr. Allison Master.
I forgot to put the "doctor" on there, excuse me.
Dr. Allison Master at the University of Houston, she is speaking at CSTA.
But she has an enormous quantity and quality of research into this topic
and to ways to improve the number of women--
of girls who take computer science in the middle- and the high-school level.
One of the most-- and I encourage everyone to click on this specific link
and take a look here.
There's a fascinating statistic, and unfortunately it's not in this one.
But 80% of eighth-grade girls in the United States
do not feel that computer that they belong
in the computer science field, 80%.
Excuse me.
So, again, it begs the question of why.
Why is there such a dropoff at eighth grade?
Because students will do about the same.
They'll be equal throughout their elementary school years.
And then, suddenly, middle school, all of a sudden, girls just disappear.
They disappear from the field.
And then, if they try and rejoin, they get really behind.
They fall so far they're so far behind their male peers who
may have been taking it for years and years and years at that point
that they'll feel even more like they don't belong in the field.
And so it begs the question of what can we do to counter it.
There's some really interesting-- again, this is a grand societal problem.
But there's some really interesting, very small things
you can do that have been proven through research to work.
So, again, these are the three research articles that back this up.
I encourage everyone to read them if you can.
One of them is a fascinating one-- is create
a room that has neutral decorations.
And what it means by neutral is that they're not
excessively technology-based.
So I love movies like The Matrix, and I really enjoyed Dune.
And putting those up, I'm sure, would be absolutely a decoration.
But there is a sign that it's like, oh, this space
is only for people who love technology, which then discourages students who
don't feel-- and it's not just girls.
It's all.
But if someone feels they don't belong, if the decorations
say this is only for this group of people,
it discourages students from joining it.
I'm sure it's not just limited to computer science,
but it's the topic that we're working on here.
Discussing important female figures who were in the computer science field--
Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper are the two best
known in the United States.
Draper Labs had a fascinating piece about Margaret Hamilton,
who wrote the code for the Apollo mission computer.
Ada Lovelace basically invented the concept
of a computer that can do something more than just a mathematical calculation.
The whole idea of modern computing comes from a woman.
So discussing them could be another topic.
This is a fascinating one that I learned,
and this actually is from a book called Last Lectures.
So this one, I'm not quite sure if it's as research-based as the other ones.
But it's the idea of creation of stories--
really interesting idea of encouraging students
to create stories using programming.
And I've seen that with quite a few students.
One student in particular--
call her IV-- she created a very complex story using Scratch
that went into a whole bunch of different twists and turns
and that had fascinating links between the characters
because it was about a story-driven development as opposed
to a mathematical-driven development.
And I'm sure that we've all--
I hate this statement from students.
But I'm sure we've all heard the statement from at least one student,
oh, I don't do math.
I don't like math.
Math, unfortunately, will scare students away.
It's one of the things--
in computer science, you often see people talk about the Fibonacci
sequence which is really interesting.
But for a student who's really struggling with mathematical concepts,
doing the Fibonacci sequence is a pretty challenging concept.
Start early, and counter stereotypes before eighth grade.
I had that once where in a--
I think it was a fourth-grade class, I had a student who--
and I heard it this time.
I'm sure he said other dumb stuff.
But he said to another student, "Oh, that's a great project for a girl."
And that's where you step in.
You don't just let it go.
You have to step in and say, "No, it's a good project in the first place."
We have to actively help students, all students.
We can't let projects happen like that.
Or we can't-- excuse me.
We can't let statements go on like that in our Classroom
because it discourages women.
It all starts small, but it compiles.
It's like a snowball rolling down a hill.
It'll build up the longer and farther that you go.
And if it's not stopped at the first-grade level,
it's not going to stop.
It's going to keep rolling and rolling.
This is one--
I can't quite speak to this as much because I did this all the time,
but active checkins during work times.
I have heard-- I've not seen it myself-- that girls
are less likely to express that they're having
problems with a computer-- with a programming set.
Again, I would just wander around.
So making it less of a thing when a student asks
for help is a huge part of--
excuse me-- of building an inclusive classroom is making it not--
is making it a nonissue when someone asks, hey, I can't figure this one out.
And if another student is like, what do you mean you can't figure that out?
You say, well, you couldn't figure something out either, right?
Everyone learns at their own pace, and it's a tough topic.
So among the many other things-- so this is something
I would like to do now, which is a Padlet.
And I owe Catherine here from Belmont Schools.
Thank you for putting up a Padlet because I actually
don't have access to it anymore.
But I encourage everyone to throw in some ideas or some organizations
or some programs you know about these three topics-- about these topics.
What are some inclusive practices that you have found that have worked, maybe
have not worked?
What are some organizations that you know of that have worked really well?
Girls Who Code, I really like.
That's a really good one.
There's another really interesting one called
Art/Code, which encourages artistry as a part of the computer science
learning field.
Theatrical examples, which I think are-- which is a great one, the more active
a classroom is, the more interested the kids will be.
I think, is this--
do I have to reload it, or does it automatically populate?
AUDIENCE: Can you go back to the [INAUDIBLE]??
PETER WADE: Yeah.
Oh, sorry.
Excuse me.
There we go.
Sorry about that.
There we go.
But it's why I say that collaboration is the whole deal, right?
We all get into our rhythm of teaching where
we think we're doing it as best we can.
But it's when we talk to other teachers that we're like, oh,
that's a good idea.
I like that idea.
You can take another person's idea and remix it.
You can take another person's idea and match it.
Build something of your own off of someone else's idea.
That's the whole concept of CS50 when you think about it.
You take the existing program, and you make it work for you.
And let me put this--
I'm going to see.
I've almost been talking for an hour or so.
While we're here, are there any questions
out here in the audience-- questions, comments, suggestions?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: I haven't taught CS50 yet.
So I don't know of the projects that are in there
that would be more or less preferred by certain students.
But I know in the past, music--
any ones involving music.
And when I took CS50 myself, the piano one, I can imagine,
would be really popular with a wider audience, especially people
who aren't more on the math side.
Have you noticed certain projects being more or less popular with, like,
maybe women or other groups like that?
PETER WADE: So the question is, have I noticed certain projects are
more popular with certain--
with students who are artistically inclined, women gender nonconformity?
And the answer is yes.
There are projects that absolutely are knocked out of the ballpark every year.
A lot of them start appearing in memory because that's
when they can open up files.
Volume is always fun because they love trying
to see if they can break the computers.
Excuse me.
And I just jumped ahead.
The filter one is always very popular with everyone
because they get to make a filter that Instagram works.
That's what I tell them every year is it's how Instagram works.
And then they're like, ooh, that's exciting, until they start it.
And then they're like, oh, this is really complicated.
And I'm like, that it is, but you can see what's happening.
So I would say that there's definitely more interest in visual assignments,
depending on the assignment.
Mario is a great starter point because, again, they can see in the code
directly-- or they can see in the terminal window which
ones are larger and smaller.
But it is-- you teach it, and you'll see it.
And everyone has a different group of students.
Any others from the audience?
AUDIENCE: There is one question.
They're just asking, what was the code art website that you mentioned earlier?
PETER WADE: Code/Art.
I have to remember.
So if you look at the Code/Art--
or Code/Art-- excuse me.
Inspiring Girls to Code, this is an interesting organization.
Again, if you have not been, I encourage everyone
to join CSTA and see if you can attend their conference because there's
lots of vendors there.
And they're all trying to sell their stuff.
But there are some really good programs out there,
and it says that girls who are really into art
will really enjoy programming because if you
merge the concept of art and programming, it becomes another tool.
It becomes like a paintbrush or a--
yeah, like a paintbrush or modeling clay.
I'm going to throw up some ideas, and I'm at the end of my time,
and I know I am.
Be inviting, not just welcoming.
I've found that I can get more participation
from girls when I hand them a physical invitation to an activity or an event.
That is a really interesting one.
Let's see-- PyLadies or conduct introductory programming
workshop for peers or juniors.
I like that idea.
Throw before school a recruiting doughnut party.
I like that idea.
So, again, I wanted this to be, more than anything
else, unlike my last session, where I was walking everyone through processes,
I want this to be a resource.
So anyone looking in the future, when you're saying, well,
how do I improve this, how do I expand my program, how do I do something more,
can come back to this--
can come back to the slideshow and say, hey, those
are some good ideas I saw in there, because that's what we're here for.
And I really mean this.
Good luck.
Please-- and you can't see it because I switched the slideshow to black.
But please feel free to send me an email if you have questions or comments.
My email is peter.g.wade@gmail.com.
AUDIENCE: Thank you to Peter.
PETER WADE: Thank you.