MAMIE RHEINGOLD: Thanks for tuning
into this special edition of Google Developers Live.
Today, we're featuring Hadi Partovi
from code.org in celebration of computer science education
week.
You can find out more about computer science education week
and the Hour of Code campaign at csedweek.org.
Hi, my name is Mamie Rheingold, and I'm
your host for this special edition of Google Developers
Live.
Our guest today is Hadi Partovi.
And after getting his Bachelor's and Master's in computer
science from Harvard, he went on to Microsoft in 1994,
where he joined a small team to grow Internet Explorer.
He has since advised and invested in multiple start-ups,
including Dropbox and Facebook, and he also
founded many companies of his own, the most recent of which
is code.org.
So Hadi, I'd love to start by hearing more from you about why
should we all care about computer science?
What is your vision with code.org?
And tell us more about this week's Hour of Code events.
HADI PARTOVI: Sure.
Well, code.org was a realization that computers are now
everywhere.
They're not just on your desktop and in your laptops or at work.
They're in your pockets, they're in your cars,
they're in your appliances.
They're literally are all over the place,
and every industry in the world depends on software.
Whether it's transportation, agriculture, food,
and yet the vast majority of Americans
have no idea how these things work,
and the vast majority of schools don't even
offer courses in introducing these things to you.
And a lot of people think that code.org or other sites
like this are designed to basically produce more software
engineers to get jobs at companies like Google.
And that's a side effect of people learning how to code.
My main vision is that every student in every school
should have an opportunity to learn not because they
want to get a job at Google.
And computer science, it is a class
that you can take and get a great job,
but more importantly, it's a class
that you should take if you want to become
a doctor in the 21st century or if you want to become a lawyer,
or a journalist, or even the president.
Every career that you can think of in the modern day world
should have some background in this.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: Great, and so what
are these Hour of Code events?
HADI PARTOVI: The Hour of Code was a coming together
of a number of ideas we had for how to promote computer
science, not just to students, but to parents and to teachers,
to help remove the veil of mystery that separates
the average person from the Mark Zuckerbergs
or the genius coders of the world,
and to help everybody learn that not only this
is important to learn, but that it's easy to learn,
that a seven-year-old can start basic computer programing.
And starting with that idea, we thought what
if we could get millions of students in schools
and communities worldwide to try to learn just one
hour of computer science and how could we
bring the best companies, organizations, celebrities,
governments to come to bear to basically grow this
into a real movement?
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: And since this is about
learning to code, when did you first learn to code?
HADI PARTOVI: The very, very first computer program I wrote
was on a programmable calculator,
I think, when I was around eight years old.
And my first computer I got when I was about 10 years old
was a Commodore 64.
And my dad gave me this computer,
yet there was no games on it out--
we were living in Iran, where you couldn't even
buy a computer in that country there.
It was sort of imported from Italy.
And they said, if you want to play any games on it,
you have to write them yourself.
And my twin brother and I immediately
started finding magazines that had sort of basic programs
that you could type into the computer
to create your own game.
And then starting from there, we learned how to change the games
and write our own.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: Cool.
I just took two months off to learn how to code.
And like learning anything new, it can be hard.
And for me it was like learning to see and think
in a whole new way.
And sometimes I could take just an hour
to understand the problem I was trying to solve.
So tell me more about what you're
envisioning kids doing in an hour of code.
HADI PARTOVI: So as you've learned yourself in doing it,
coding and writing computer programs
isn't about learning a new language.
And the average computer language
has just about 50 words in it.
And I compare it a lot more to LEGOs.
When you use LEGOs, it's not like there's
10,000 different LEGO blocks.
There's about 50 different major blocks.
But the art is in how you build something complicated
using that limited set of commands.
And the most important thing a kid
can learn in one hour of writing code
is to realize that there's not a lot to memorize and it it's
more about solving problems and creating whatever you want.
And unleashing the creativity and empowering a kid
to realize, well, I can actually do this stuff.
That's our number one goal at the end of one hour.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: Cool.
Yeah, and for those kids that know
they don't want to be engineers, they
don't want to grow up to be a computer science,
why should they participate?
HADI PARTOVI: At least 95 people don't
want to grow up and become a software engineer.
And our goal is to get all of them to learn the basics.
And the basics of computer science
mean not just learning how to code,
but also learning how does the internet work, what's
a software virus.
When I went to high school, every single school
and every single student taught and learned
how electricity works or how to dissect a frog
to see the digestive system.
And in this century, schools should
teach how do you effectively dissect an app to learn
the insides [INAUDIBLE] to that.
And that's relevant if you want to become a doctor,
health care is dominated now by technology.
If you want to become a lawyer, understanding
IP law or understanding how you're
going to regulate things like the NSA.
We see our government stumbling with efforts in technology,
and it's not because they need to become software engineers,
but they need to have at least more of a basic understanding
than the absolute zero that our schools currently offer.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: So it's like the physics
or the biology of the digital world?
HADI PARTOVI: Exactly.
This year's Nobel Prize winners in chemistry
were computer scientists.
That's the best way of realizing this
is a field that impacts everything.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: I love that.
And since this is Google Developers Live,
we have a lot of developers out there tuning in.
And so what can people who are already
developers, what can they do to help
your mission with code.org?
HADI PARTOVI: So most developers automatically jump
to think this is awesome.
If you're already a developer, you already
realize that you have a special power that most people don't
and that you can harness thousands of computers
to do your bidding, which is an unusual thing.
There's no other skill that helps amplify
the creativity of the human mind that the way computer
programming does.
And sharing that is something that developers very naturally
want to do.
The best ways to do that are to basically get
people in your community, especially your local school,
but if not a local school, an after school club,
like a Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts,
or so on, to add computer science.
It's harder to get schools to do this,
because they are government organizations.
But Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and boys and girls clubs,
and so on readily can engage in this stuff.
To make it easier for developers,
we've got a sign-up page, where engineers can sign up
as volunteers to say I want to get involved,
which will then actually help local communities who
want a software engineer as a mentor come and pull them in.
We've also released a 20-hour online course
that's something that comes after the first hour of code
to teach you 20 hours worth of more computer
programming and also learning about things
like how the internet works.
And that's an online course you can
teach to your kids and family members,
or bring to a local school or club.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: Cool.
And also our developer community is global.
And I noticed that for an hour of code, it says,
you don't even need a computer to participate.
So I want to learn more about that.
How can people participate, if they don't have access
to computers or the internet?
HADI PARTOVI: Yeah, so there's both you can do it,
if you don't have a computer, you
could do it if you don't have the internet.
We've tried to solve for all the versions of this stuff.
If you have absolutely nothing, there's
paper and pen exercises, where somebody can write programs
on a piece of paper.
And it's more like sort of social exercise,
where one kid pretends like they're the computer managing
a robotic arm, doing what another kid's program is
telling them to do.
And we have a bunch of puzzles like how does a robotic arm
take a stack of cups and then build a Christmas tree
pattern out of them?
And one kid needs to write the program,
but the other kid to execute to do that.
Now, in a lot of the modern world people have computers,
but they don't have great internet connectivity,
or they don't have lots of computers.
But our tutorials, we have tutorials
that work on an offline computer or on a smartphone,
or a tablet.
Smartphones are pretty popular these days.
And you can learn to code on one.
And that's a great way to start.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: Yeah, it's actually
when I was learning to code, writing things out
and white boarding has been actually
like the first step for anything just
to understand what is it that we're trying to do
and map out how to break code to do that.
So like that.
HADI PARTOVI: Yeah, it's all about problem solving.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: Yeah.
HADI PARTOVI: It forces you to organize your thoughts better
than most other things you learn.
And it's interesting that the ability
to organize your thoughts and to break a big problem down
into smaller problems is really useful,
even if you want to become a lawyer or a manager.
Learning how to break down a problem
is really valuable for learning how to build a team
and manage who does what.
They're very related skills.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: Yeah, applies to everything.
It's like essential life skill.
And so what happens if 10 million kids all learn to code.
What does that future look like to you?
HADI PARTOVI: First of all, hopefully our servers
will hold up.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: Yeah.
HADI PARTOVI: We don't know how many people
are going to hit our site for the Hour of Code,
but it's a little frightening.
But if 10 million kids learn at least the basics
of computer science, I think, a number of things will happen.
First of all, we'll hit an inflection
point of effectively, whether the school system wants it
or not, the world audience is going
to start learning coding and computer science at a larger
scale than they have been.
A large percentage of the population
has some familiarity with this stuff.
I think, you'll see more innovation
in every field software can create innovation.
We just heard about Amazon using drones to deliver packages.
We hear about nanobots being used in your bloodstream
to cure illnesses by having a little robotic thing
in your blood doing stuff to you.
The hardest challenges in most of these things
are actually in the software and the code.
Building a drone is easy.
Programming that drone so it doesn't run into a tree,
that's actually where it's harder
or how it communicates with other drones
so they don't hit each other.
So what do you think about transportation, communication,
medicine, agriculture, food.
All over in every industry, it's the software
that actually is driving the innovation.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: And so after this week, then what?
Where do you want to see code.org go from here?
HADI PARTOVI: So code.org is a surprisingly small
organization.
We have about, I think, 16 full-time employees.
But we have a lot of ambition, a lot of big ideas.
There's, at least, four different things
we're going to be doing after the Hour of Code.
One, we have curriculum at the elementary school level
that we built in partnership with Google and Microsoft,
and Facebook, and Twitter employees.
So we want to extend that to out to curriculum tools.
They go all the way from kindergarten
through 12th grade.
That's point one.
Point two is actually getting this into public schools.
By fall of next year, we should, basically, put computer science
into about 400 schools.
We want to get to 4,000 schools and 40,000 schools.
So that's a multi-year effort bringing computer science
into schools.
And then the third thing we're working on
is changing policies.
In 36 states in the country, computer science
doesn't count towards high school graduation requirements
in math or science.
And that's actually a great way developers
can help petition their school board saying,
why don't you fix the graduation rules so computer science is
treated as a matter of science.
So we're lobbying.
And then lastly, we're going to continue doing marketing
to help get underrepresented groups
to engage in computer science more, especially girls
and minorities.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: Cool.
These are big, big problems you are trying to solve.
Have there been any obstacles along the way?
I mean, education policy, those are
big systems you're changing.
HADI PARTOVI: Yeah, it's funny, on the policy
side, any time you want to try to change the system,
you expect obstacles.
I've never worked on anything, where there's
been such an engagement of people embracing what we're
doing and getting behind it.
At the policy level, we've changed
on the order of six states in six months,
which is unheard of.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: Whoa, that's fast.
HADI PARTOVI: Yeah that's really, really fast,
because the opposition is nonexistent.
Nobody says, oh no, we shouldn't be doing this.
The hardest opposition, though, we
have is in changing the public schools to offer a new class.
And because their mindset is literally,
if we add this, what are we going to need to cut?
And I've had conversations with districts' heads of curriculum,
when they say, I guess this is an elective,
so we need to probably cut another elective.
What if we cut ceramics?
What are those kids who want to do ceramics are going to do?
I'm just overwhelmed just thinking, well, first of all,
they can learn ceramics in an after-school class.
Let's teach computer science in the real school.
There's no jobs in ceramics, there's
a million jobs in computer science over the next 10 years.
And then, lastly, why don't we let the kids decide.
Why is the school deciding that isn't available,
but ceramics is.
If you have to make a choice, choose
the one that's going to be more popular, let the kids decide,
rather than you deciding.
But either way, that's by far the hardest obstacle
is finding school districts who are willing to create change.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: And so just to recap,
what are the things that folks can do after they watch this
if they're inspired to help you and your mission.
How can they help?
HADI PARTOVI: How people can help?
The easiest way is sign the petition at code.org.
The next easiest way is doing Hour of Code yourself.
Or if you know it already, do it with a brother or sister,
or daughter, or son, or your mother.
Harder ways, you can spend some money
and buy one of our teachers to help promote code, especially,
if you're a girl.
And the best way you help if you're an engineer
is get your local school to teach computer science.
[INAUDIBLE] on our website to help you
do that, to help you advocate for that.
MAMIE RHEINGOLD: That's great, Hadi.
Thank you for joining us and thank you all for tuning in.
Make sure to join in on the fun at code.org during Computer
Science Education Week.