cold is the next universal language in
the 70s it was punk music that drove the
whole generation in the 80s it was
probably money but for my generation of
people software is the interface to our
imagination and our world and that means
that we need a radically radically more
diverse set of people to build those
products to not see computers as
mechanical and lonely and boring and
magic to see them as things that they
can tinker on and turn around and twist
and so forth my personal journey into
the world of programming and technology
started at the tender age of 14 I had
this mad teenage crush on an older man
and the older man in question just
happened to be the den vice president of
United States
Mr Al Gore and I did what every single
teenage girl would want to do I wanted
to somehow Express all of this love so I
built him a website it's over here and
in 2001 there was no tumblr there was no
Facebook there was no Pinterest so I
needed to learn to code in order to
express all of this longing and loving
and that is how programming started for
me it started as a mean of
self-expression just like when I was
smaller I would use crayons and Legos
and when I was older I would use guitar
lessons and theater of plays but then
there were other things to get excited
about like poetry and and knitting socks
and and and conjugating French irregular
verbs and coming up with make-believe
worlds and and Bern and Russell and his
philosophy and I started to be one of
those people who felt that computers are
boring and technical and lonely here's
what I think today little girls don't
know that they are not supposed to like
computers little girls are amazing they
are really really good at like
concentrating on things and and being
exact and they ask amazing questions
like
what and why and how when what if and
they don't know that they are not
supposed to like computers it's the
parents who do it's as parents who feel
like computer science is this esoteric
weird science discipline that only
belongs to the mystery makers that is
almost as far removed from everyday life
as say not clear physics and they are
partly right about that there's a lot of
syntax and controls and data structures
and algorithms and practices protocols
and paradigms in programming and we as a
community we've made computers smaller
and smaller we've built layers and
layers of abstraction on top of each
other between the man and the machine to
the point that we no longer have any
idea how computers work or how to talk
to them and we do teach our kids how the
human body works we teach them how the
combustion engine functions and we even
tell them that if you want to really be
an astronaut you can become one but when
the kid comes to us and asks so what is
a bubble sort algorithm or how does the
computer know what happens when I press
play how does it know which video to
show up
Lynda is internet a place we adults we
grow utterly silent it's magic some of
us say it's too complicated the others
say well it's neither it's not magic and
it's not complicated it all just
happened really really really fast
computer scientists built these amazing
beautiful machines but they made them
very very foreign to us and also the
language we stick to the computer so
that we don't know how to speak to the
computers anymore without our fancy user
interfaces and that's why no one
recognized that when I was conjugating
French irregular verbs
I was actually practicing my pattern
recognition skills and when I was
excited about knitting
I actually was following a sequence of
symbolic commands that included loops
inside of them and that Bernard
Russell's lifelong quest to find an
exact language between English and
mathematics found its home inside of a
computer I was a programmer but no one
knew it
the kids of today they tap swipe and
pinch their way through the world but
unless we give them tools to build with
computers
we are raising only consumers instead of
creators this whole quest led me to this
little girl hilary name is Ruby she is 6
years old she's completely fearless
imaginative and little bit bossy and
every time I would run into a problem in
trying to teach myself programming like
what is object-oriented design or what
is garbage collection I would try to
imagine how a six-year-old little girl
would explain the problem and I wrote a
book about her and illustrated it and
the things Ruby told me go like this
Ruby taught me that you're not supposed
to be afraid of the bugs under your bed
and even the biggest of the problems are
just a group of tiny problems stuck
together and Ruby also introduced me to
her friends the sort of colorful side of
the internet culture she has friends
like the Snow Leopard was beautiful but
doesn't want to play with the other kids
and she has friends like their green
robots that are really friendly but
super messy and she has friends like
Linux the penguin who's really
ruthlessly efficient but somewhat hard
to understand and idealistic foxes and
so on in Ruby's world you learn
technology through play and for instance
computers are really good at repeating
stuff so the way Ruby would teach loops
goes like this this is Ruby's favorite
dance move it goes clap clap stomp stomp
clap clap and dump and you learn counter
loops by repeating that four times and
you learn while loops by repeating that
sequence while I'm standing on one leg
and you learn until loops by repeating
that sequence until mom gets really mad
and most of all you'll learn that there
are no ready answers when coming up with
the curriculum for Ruby's world I needed
to really ask the kids how they see the
world and how what kind of questions
they have and I would organize
playtesting sessions I would start by
showing the kids these four pictures I
would show them a picture of a car a
grocery store a dog and a toilet and I
would ask which one of these do you
think is a computer and the case would
be very conservative
like none of these is a computer I know
what a computer is
it's the glowing box in front of which
mom or dad spends way too much time but
then we would talk and we would discover
that actually a car is a computer it has
a navigation system inside of it and a
dog a dog might not be a computer but it
has a color and the color might have a
computer inside of it and grocery stores
they have so many different kinds of
computers like the cashier system and
the burglar alarms and kids you know
what in Japan toilets our computers and
there's even hackers who cut them and we
go further and I give them these little
stickers with an on/off button on them
and I tell the kids you know what today
you have this magic ability to make
anything in this room into your computer
and again the kids go sounds really hard
I don't know the right answer for this
but I tell them that don't worry your
parents don't know the right answer
either they've just started to hear
about this thing called the Internet of
Things but your kids you're going to be
the ones who are really going to live up
in a world where everything is a
computer and then I had this little girl
who came to me and took a bicycle lamp
and she said if this bicycle lamp is it
where a computer it would change colors
and I'm that's a really good idea what
else could it do and she thinks and she
thinks and she goes ha ha
if this bicycle land for a computer we
could go on a biking trip with my father
and we would sleep in a tent and they
spiking a lamp could also be a movie
projector and that's the moment I'm
looking for the moment when the kid
realizes that the world is definitely
not ready yet that a really awesome way
of making the world more ready is by
doing by building technology and that
each one of us can be a part of that
change final story we also build a
computer and we get to know the basi CPU
and the helpful ramen room that helped
it remember things and after we've
assembled our computer together we also
design an application for it and my
favorite story is this little boy he's
six years old and his favorite thing in
the world is to be an astral
and the boy he has this huge headphones
on and he's completely immersed in his
tiny paper computer because you see he
still his own intergalactic planetary
navigation application and his father
the lone astronaut in the Martian orbit
is on the other side of the room and the
boy's important mission is to bring the
father safely back to earth and these
kids are going to have a profoundly
different view of the world and the way
we build it with technology finally the
more approachable the more inclusive and
the more diverse we make the world of
technology the more colorful and better
the world will look like so imagine with
me for a moment a world where the
stories we tell about how things get
made don't only include the 20-something
year old Silicon Valley boys but also
Kenyan schoolgirls and Norwegian
librarians imagine a world where the
little other Lovelace's of tomorrow who
live in the permanent reality of ones
and zeros they grow up to be very
optimistic and and brave about
technology day they embrace the powers
and the opportunities and the
limitations of the world a world of
technology that is wonderful whimsical
and a tiny bit weird when I was a girl I
wanted to be a storyteller I loved to
make believe worlds and my favorite
thing to do was to wake up in the
mornings in Moomin Valley in the
afternoons I would roam around the
Tatooine and in the evenings I would go
to sleep in Narnia and programming
turned out to be the perfect profession
for me I still create worlds instead of
stories I do them with code programming
gives me this amazing power to build my
whole little universe with its own rules
and paradigms and practices create
something out of nothing with the pure
power of logic thank you