- Computing, computers, technology,
everything around us has been invented to solve problems.
It's not to build a better flashcard.
At an essence, what we're doing is we're teaching our students
to be hackers in its purest definition.
- We've gone through a school system so many times
where "here's the answer, here's the experiment that you do,
and then make sure that you got it right."
That's not true when you're doing anything
in the real world.
Hey, I'm Melanie Shimano,
and I run The Food Computer Program in Baltimore, Maryland.
- Hi Melanie, I'm Charlie Reisinger.
I'm the director of technology
for Penn Manor School District
in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
As educators, our job is to give our students
or expose our students to the widest range of ideas
and skills, and modes of thinking,
to teach them how to think critically, how to problem solve,
and ultimately give them the agency to decide
what interests them, what motivates them,
what they're passionate about
and what they would like to pursue potentially
as a lifelong endeavor or as a career.
- When we talk about education,
we talk about the curriculum.
I think education is more about how do we become who we are
and how do we contribute to that
and make that useful for ourselves and for our communities.
What's important for the future
and how do you continue to think about
what's important for the future and not get stuck
in what's been done before?
- I like to think that self discovery,
it maybe expresses itself more like freeform jazz,
where you have a team of individuals
that are working together in that social setting,
listening to each other
and kind of riffing off of each other's work.
And what comes out of that amazing cacophony is
a brilliant work that could never be done
if everybody was singing in lock step.
- Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that totally aligns with,
and maybe you think this also,
of how open source is in general.
I think open source and education
are not two totally different things.
They maybe are the same thing, right?
Same mentality at least,
in terms of you can't do stuff on your own,
you can't have an impact on your own.
And especially as we're facing big challenges,
like climate change or whatever,
you need to think about
how we think of these problems collectively,
and how we solve them collectively.
Why should people have to reinvent the wheel
every time they're doing stuff?
- We've created these systems
that sort of beats curiosity out of our kids.
I have to do the right thing
to make sure that I get the right SAT score
to get into the right school, right?
And it just sort of,
there's not a lot of room for curiosity.
I think that open-source tools, technologies,
communities, software development,
the entire concept of open source
is a methodology to rekindle that curiosity.
- If we can think about Baltimore as a city,
what space do we have available?
Students understand what's happening in the city
and then putting those things together and say like,
we have access to one of the rooms in the basement
that no one is using,
and so we're gonna build a hydroponic
computer-controlled farm in there.
And then think about what does this mean for our school?
What does this mean for the immediate community?
What does this mean for what you as students
are interested in, in general?
And how can you build on that and continue
to maybe have that in the back of your mind
as you're going through stuff?
Regardless of whether
you become a computer programmer or not.
- What we're both doing is
we're putting down those little breadcrumbs,
actually more so than breadcrumbs.
I don't know, little power-ups for our students
that down the road some day they can say,
oh, I remember when I worked on the Food Computer
and I did this, and maybe now that'll help me
build a better rocket or be a better doctor, for example.
So, yeah, I think that liberal arts kind of philosophy
is important.
One young lady comes up to me, fourth grade student,
she comes up to me and she's showing me
how she has made objects,
and the scratch card essentially just create a big circle.
She said, oftentimes her older brothers and sisters
pick on her, and now she knows how to do something
on the computer that they do not.
Like she suddenly had a superpower
that the rest of her family did not.
That she had command and control
over a computer, over technology.
I hope if we did our job well,
she will remember that moment, 20, 30, 40 years from now.
And she will never remember the worksheets that she did
in her classes.
So I think that's the goal.
Create these powerful experiences
through technology that kids will remember
for the rest of their lives.