RICK BOROVOY: Hi, I'm Rick Borovoy.
I'm the Lead Product Manager for Google Play for Education.
JULIE FARAGO: And I'm Julie Farago.
I'm the Engineering Manager for Google Play for Education.
RICK BOROVOY: So I get you.
You want to change the world with your mad software skills,
but you don't know where to start.
So in five minutes we're going to pitch you
on a "rock your paradigm" educational Android app that we
are dying for someone to build that could transform
a classroom into an amazing place for collaboration
and exploration.
JULIE FARAGO: I'm really excited about this,
but we're not just going to tantalize you
with exciting ideas.
We're actually going to teach you about the Google APIs
that you can use that makes it easy to build
these apps and really any app that you're excited about.
And we've actually already created the Google Play
for Education store that you could put your app there
and super easily get it into the hands of teachers and students.
So the biggest thing that needs to be done
is just building that app.
So let's learn how.
RICK BOROVOY: We want you to build
an app that nails one of the most awesome, most
popular, collaborative tablet use cases in school.
It's called the Photo Hunt, or sometimes the Photo Safari.
As in, I'm the teacher.
Hey, kids.
For our unit on energy conservation
go grab your tablets and take some pictures of examples
of how we're wasting energy at school.
That's easy.
And it's really empowering for kids
to go and find some examples of waste with their camera.
Like a door left open when the air conditioner's running.
Or school buses belching carbon monoxide
while they're sitting there waiting for the kids
to come out.
Or entire labs where the computers
powered on but sitting unused.
JULIE FARAGO: Turn them off.
RICK BOROVOY: Now there are existing apps
for this that support the basic photo collection reasonably
well.
But as awesome as kids taking pictures around the school is,
it's actually not the magic moment of the Photo Hunt.
The real magic happens when the kids gather back together
with the teacher and they look over what they've collected
and they start talking about it and start
pulling out ideas and really getting
focused on what they've collected.
It turns out that that focus can be a challenge.
Teacher may want to point out a couple of photos,
but the kids are wandering off.
In fact, a teacher once told me that kids
have a superhuman ability to be on the wrong page
at the wrong time.
So how about building something straight into the Photo Hunt
app that lets a teacher walk students
through a particular photo, so that they can control the focus
and really make an awesome conversation.
JULIE FARAGO: Totally.
So I love this idea.
I think I get it.
Let's walk through how to actually build it.
So first of all, if you want to use the tablet as a camera,
or for that matter an audio sensor or a video recorder,
please actually check out the Google Android media and camera
APIs.
These are going to give you all the tools that you need
to capture and record multimedia so that when you're building
for a tablet you can actually take advantage
of the awesome mobility and multimedia of that tablet.
We want apps that just shine on tablets-- that you just
couldn't do otherwise-- because the tablet form
factor is so fabulous.
And we think that you can build apps
that take advantage of that.
So, all right, let's say you understand how to take photos.
What you're going to need is a source of identity.
And when kids are gathering and commenting on photos,
they actually need a way to say who they are.
And I'm going to go a little melodramatic here, but bear
with me.
Because the thing that you want to be careful of
is that identity is the first place where apps go to die.
I know, intense.
But so we went to a classroom earlier this year
in New Hampshire.
And what we saw was 20 pages-- 20 plus or minus--
stapled together mapping app name to kid name
to username to password.
And there is nothing that will make
a teacher abandon your app more quickly than wasting her,
or even more importantly, her student's time.
And requiring unique usernames and passwords
for all of these students?
It's just a waste of time.
So you can make this easier with Google Login.
So with really minimal effort, you
can get a trusted registration system
that's familiar to users.
It's consistent across devices.
And it just lets you skip all that time intensive username
and password entering.
And it makes registration faster and more secure.
And the awesome thing about this is
that all the students in your classes
are actually going to have Google Apps accounts.
They're going to have Google Login available to them.
Because you need it in order to use Google Play for Education.
So 100% of those students are going
to be able to click that sign in button
and use it for registration, use it for log in, and just go.
So no login, no password.
Happy teachers.
Great.
RICK BOROVOY: Amazing.
JULIE FARAGO: Amazing.
So now the next question is, how do we really
get to the heart of what Rick was talking about earlier?
How do we get students all talking
about the same thing, on the same page, at the same time?
And for that we're actually introducing a new Android
API that lets an app go into lock to app mode.
This API actually needs to be authorized
through device management.
So you want to be thoughtful about how you use it and use it
in apps like testing apps, or classroom management apps,
or, in this case, a task focused app, where you really
want to keep all the kids on the same image,
keep the discussion focused, and keep kids
from getting distracted and going off to another place.
So now what you can do is you can
build this special discussion mode into your app
so that when a teacher, for example, swipes between photos,
the students' tablets follow along.
So they can all look at this one picture of the exhaust pipe
and all the gas coming out of it.
And because you've used this lock to app API,
all of the basic navigation buttons and the notifications
are turned off so they can't accidentally or intentionally
switch out of the app and wander off.
So you can find out more about this in the Android L Preview
release.
RICK BOROVOY: I love the idea of a discussion mode.
So that feels like that completely
nails the Photo Safari use case.
But I'm thinking if you give kids this awesome power
to collect these photos and discuss them and start
to think about the world around them,
they're going to want to start arranging them
in a way that represents the world around them.
They're going to want to map.
Of course, we love maps at Google.
But we also think it's an amazing way for kids
to work together to build an understanding of the world
around them and maybe even to use a map
to advocate for positive social change.
JULIE FARAGO: Totally.
RICK BOROVOY: Remarkably, there isn't
a tool that makes this really simple for kids
to do-- to decide what matters to them and map it out.
For example, a tool that would help our conservation
minded kids.
Maybe they want to make their school more bike friendly
or find out how bike friendly it is.
So they want to map the surrounding first
for bike friendliness.
Maybe they want to map out three things.
Where are bike racks?
Where are bike lanes?
Or where are bike hazards that they should be aware of?
So imagine a tool that lets kids decide those three markers, fan
out with their GPS devices, start marking on the map where
those things are, take some photos, and then just magically
have it gather all together so they can study it themselves
and then share it with other people.
JULIE FARAGO: I love this app.
I want to use this app.
It sounds fabulous.
And the big question is, how do you do it easily?
And the Google Maps API actually makes this really easy.
You can build this functionality on top of Google Maps,
and you can get a bunch of gnarly engineering work
for free.
So you can get a shared Cloud synced set of map markers
that are contributed to by a group of users.
You can get GPS integration, fantastic and familiar
touch UX, maps that span the entire earth, and, of course,
custom map markers.
In fact, actually, one of our schools
earlier this year did this amazing project
where kids went around their town
and they took pictures of street lights--
street lights that were working, street lights that were out,
where they needed more street lights.
And using that, they actually made a shared proposal
to their local town government about what
they should do about their streetlights.
And it was fantastic.
But the challenge was actually that it
required a ton of IT support.
And, of course, a ton of teacher support.
You want the teacher supportive, but you
don't want them to have to work long weekends in order
to enable this project to happen.
And so what we really need here is
we want students all over the country
to be able to do these types of things, teachers
to be able to do it, without having
to invest oodles of time.
And for that we need an app.
And we're hopeful that you'll build one.
RICK BOROVOY: Boom.
Awesome.
All right.
So now we've got this app that lets kids collaborate, explore,
document their world, organize it.
But I don't think we're done.
I think that the missing piece is
that these kids want to do more than just collect photos.
They want to collect data.
Maybe it's not just the kids that want to collect data.
Maybe it's the teachers that want to collect data.
I have not met a teacher that isn't really
passionate about getting their kids to be
excited about collecting and analyzing data.
It's an ultimate 21st century skill.
But there's a funny truth about how it often
goes down in schools.
It often looks something like kid
in the back measuring the pH value of the puddle.
And I think that's just less exciting than maybe teachers
and we all hope it's going to be.
Kids somehow figured out that this
isn't the way to a Nobel Prize.
And it's not the most exciting use of data.
So what if we just took a lot better advantage
of what we have to offer here?
You don't just have one kid and one scientific instrument.
You've got a whole classroom worth of tablets.
Isn't there some cool way we can combine these tablets together
into some super scientific instrument?
You've ever been to the Very Large Array in Arizona?
JULIE FARAGO: I have not, actually.
RICK BOROVOY: It's totally awesome.
It's like the modern day Stonehenge.
There are all these radio telescopes
that all work together.
I'm not talking about making radio telescopes work together.
But what if you can take nine tablets
and put them together in an array and then
use that single big array to go measure sound in the school.
Maybe you take it into a classroom and you look and see
how the sound travels in there.
Or maybe you take it into an auditorium and you look and see
how the sound travels there.
Or maybe you take it out to the field and you look and see
how sound travels there.
And maybe you ask this question, what
is the loudest room in the school anyway?
JULIE FARAGO: I love the vision.
I love the division of data fluency
and helping teach our kids that.
It's fabulous.
And also creating these cool scientific instruments.
And the question is, how do you, as a developer,
enable this type of data fluency-- this cross device
data gathering and analysis and collaboration?
And you already know how to use the Android Media
APIs because you've already done that with the photos.
But let's look at the APIs for data collaboration
and for collection.
So as it turns out there are actually
more than 30 million active apps for Edu users.
These students and teachers use tools
like Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets
to create content and collaborate around it
all the time, which is exactly what we want to do.
So our Spreadsheets API offers the ability
to create spreadsheets, add rows of data,
manipulate individual cells of data,
and basically you can use it as a place
to store all that awesome audio data that your kids are
gathering.
And then those kids can go into Google Drive,
they can collaboratively create charts and understand
how sound travels through and compares
across different locations.
And then you can even do more things,
like use the Drive APIs for Google Docs
or for Google Spreadsheets, which are all very similar.
So we'd be really excited if you also checked out
the developer site for the Drive APIs.
RICK BOROVOY: So bringing it all together here.
Our goal with Google Play for Education
for all these awesome Google APIs
is to make it really easy for you to build some apps that
make some collaborative learning activities easy for kids.
And then to make it easy for schools to find those
apps and just start using them right away.
JULIE FARAGO: Absolutely.
So we want it to be easy for teachers, easy for you,
easy for students.
Easy, easy, easy.
So please go do it.
We cannot wait to see what you're going to build.