Transcriber: Brian Smiga Reviewer: Carlos Arturo Morales
When I was a kid, I was always
fascinated by building things.
I liked to be a creator, rather than a consumer.
I tinkered around with art and technology,
and so when I was three years old
I started picking up Photoshop.
(Laughter)
Over the years my skill set developed,
I started learning how to code websites,
and when I was eleven years old,
I scored my first freelance web design job.
and when I tell people this,
they give me this weird face
and say something along the lines of:
"What?"
But if I had said I learned how to...
play the piano when I was eleven,
no one really would have questioned that.
There's this confusion that surrounds coding and programming
that makes it sound so mysterious and difficult.
Really a lot of people don't even know what coding means.
When people picture programming,
they think of something that looks like this.
Something really scary and hard,
and really only just for a niche group of people.
But in reality, coding is not that difficult.
Coding isn't about learning complex theories
or studying reference books.
It's all about learning how to think.
Coding is about giving a machine
some instructions to perform.
It's about communicating your thoughts logically and orderly.
Teaching a computer how to play a program...
is like teaching a computer how to drive a car.
You have to explain the basics,
like how to accelerate and how to steer,
but once the computer gets the hang of it,
you can start teaching it some more advanced things
like wheelies, and drag racing for pink slips, I don't know.
(Laughter)
Every single day, all of us use tools online for
shopping, blogging, banking and gaming.
But most of us just have no clue how these services actually really work.
Computer programming and coding in general
is not just for those people who want to become
software programmers or developers or even engineers.
it can open anyone's eyes
to how the entire world operates.
Twenty years ago,
we were all adapting to word processing and spreadsheets.
And that was a little mysterious and scary back then,
but it was very interesting.
And today, every student is taught those skills.
Coding is the home economics of tomorrow.
It's our students' survival skills.
In a few years, we're all going to expect
eleven year olds to be making their own
programs and websites and apps.
And it won't be such a foreign idea at all.
In fact, by the year 2020, there will be
1 million more computer programming jobs than there will be graduates.
The reason behind this is simply because
only 9 out of 10 schools don't even offer
these computer programming classes.
Yet, it's the highest paid college degree.
The students that have access to these courses
are not just learning how to code and manipulate technology.
They're learning how to diagnose and figure out what's going wrong,
how to collaborate and work as a team,
how to organize their thoughts logically,
and most importantly:
how the technologies they use every single day work.
To show you just how practical coding is,
I've created a quick piece of software
that you can check out right now.
A big aspect of programming
is just telling different services to work together.
So I told Gmail to be constantly on the look out for images,
and once it gets one, it sends it over to Flickr,
just another consumer service.
Flickr resizes that image and sends it down to our website.
So, when we take a break, I want all of you to check it out.
Snap a selfie on your phone, email it to tedselfie@gmail.com
and put your name in the subject line.
This program will know exactly what to do.
And when we break,
you'll see your photo aggregated with everyone else's
on one screen.
And this entire program—
it only took me about a half hour to create.
So go ahead, check it out,
let me know what you think,
and enjoy the rest of your conference.
(Applause)