Episode 146: PSF Education Outreach Workgroup and the Education Summit

Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Foreign. Sean Tibor: Hello, and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 146, and this week we're going to be talking about the PyCon education and outreach Workgroup. My name's Sean Tibor, I'm a coder who teaches. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And my name's Kelly Schuster Paredes, and I am a teacher who codes. Sean Tibor: And this week we're joined by Cheuk Ting Ho and Keith Murray, both from the Education and Outreach workgroup, which you probably haven't heard of before because it is brand new. So I'm super excited to welcome both of you and talk about all the work you've been doing to establish this work group within the Python Software Foundation. Cheuk Ting Ho: Yeah, thank you so much. And we are super excited because education is something, I think a lot of us agree, that is very important for the Python community. So right now we keep getting people saying, like, okay, we are into education. How can we do something more? And finally, we have the work group, hopefully something that can bring in the community's input together, work with the psf, the board, and then we would do something that can benefit people who are into Python education. Sean Tibor: Wonderful. I'm excited to get into that. We're going to dig in deeper here in a bit, and I'll give a little bit longer introduction for each of you as we get to the meat of the show. But before we do that, let's start where we always do with the wins of the week. And, Keith, I'm going to make you go first this week with. With your win. Keith Murray: Okay, so my win of the week, I am the communications chair for PI Ohio, and we're trying to do a bit more communication and technology, do some outreach in the Ohio region. And one of the ways of doing that we're thinking of is a blog post to talk about just stuff and go, hey, this is happening in the Python community. So starting things is really, really hard. And I have been stalling on that for two months now. And yesterday I finally reached out to Katney, the chair, and was like, hey, I just need an accountability buddy. Can you hop on a call with me for 10 minutes just so I can get over this blocker? And so my win of the week is just asking for help. And I got through it. It's not done, but I got a lot further in the process. And it was one of those times where I was just very thankful that I can ask for help and just kind of. It's been a thing I have been learning about myself. And I was really pleased that, like, hey, you noticed that you needed Help and you asked for it and it worked out. So that's my win. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's actually a good win because I understand the whole accountability. I write it down and I make sure that I have. That's my accountability thing. I have that note and I slap it on my computer and it has to be those three things have, that have to get done. Those have to's. If I don't do it, it doesn't get done. And well, you're lucky you had Catney as your, as your person. That's. I can imagine she's a good person to make sure things get done. So cool. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I think, I don't know how many episodes we would have gotten through if it was just one of us. Right. Having that accountability. Teaching Python would have ended after two episodes, I think and they would have been six months apart for sure. All right, Cheuk, how about you? What's your win this week? Cheuk Ting Ho: Win for this week is. So I talk with some other organizers of the workshop that I have started with some friends years ago. It's called Humble Data Workshop. It's a beginners focused, a workshop to teach people Python but also data science. So we have plans to do three or four workshops this year also. There are other people who also do some workshop as well. So we'll have probably more than four workshop this year around the world. So very excited. Sean Tibor: That's a lot of fun. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I love data. Are you going into the full everything within the beginner data science or what's the short plan? Cheuk Ting Ho: So is going to be a workshop that is really like for someone who have never code before. So we have done it before in the past. We have people who want to maybe change career, want to start learning coding and start understanding what is data science, what are these like AI stuff going on and like, you know, that's where they can start. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So yeah, that's super. I love that. I took a boot camp in data science and that was for beginners Python and they kept saying it was unfair because I knew Python and I'm like. And I was like, yes, I have a win. That was fun. But anyways, Sean, you want to do your win or. Sean Tibor: I mean my win is, is totally a middle school win. My daughter is in sixth grade and that's when she was younger in, in school I, I really didn't know as much about that. I could kind of see like, okay, this is stuff that, that I know the pedagogy of it or I saw some, some parts of that. But now she's fully into the Space that I'm familiar with. And it's so interesting to watch her navigate and go through everything. And the last couple weeks, I would say there's been a lot of, like, drama, sixth grade girl drama and who said what and who did this and everything. And I think she's doing a pretty good job of it. She's making mistakes. She's learning from it. She's, like, changing and growing from it. And it was so rewarding to see it because I realized, or I continue to realize, how those middle school years are so incredibly formative for kids as they are establishing their independence, their own identity of self and who they are. And. And they have all these, like, interactions with others because everyone else around them is doing the same thing, right? They're all in that same kind of, I don't know, like a primordial ooze of social behavior, right? Like, where when they come out of it, right, they have all of these, like, skills and behaviors and traits and everything. And you can see how they can take those lessons that they learn now and bring that with them throughout their lives, right? This is the place where they're really learning it and practicing it and figuring out who they are. And it's just been really great to see her do that and be, you know, lucky enough to recognize that it's happening from my time as a middle school teacher. So a lot of times you miss those things as they're happening, and you have to look back to see that it happened. I get to watch it as it's happening, and that's been pretty cool to. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: See, having just lived it. I have an eighth grader. I can't wait till she gets in eighth grade. Sean Tibor: Oh, no, I. And that's the other thing is, I know, like, right now it's like, you know, there's drama and there's social stuff, and they're figuring all that stuff out. But I know what's to come, right? And I know how much more challenging and complicated it gets as she goes. And, you know, I'm committed to being here for her and helping her through it, but a lot of it, she's just going to have to figure out on her own. And that's part of the process also. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100%. Well, I have two wins, and this is like, third quarter. I feel like third quarter is conference season for educators. And my first win, I went and I presented with the amazing Dora Palfi, the CEO of Imagi. Co CEO of Imagi. She's so great. We showed up. We hadn't really Hung out with each other before, and she showed up in her hot pink suit, and I showed up in my really loud red and green jacket with red shoes. So we were quite the loud presenters. And we presented to a bunch of educational technologists about getting into coding. People like me, who they. They threw you in at the school and said, hey, you're good at computers, you go do technology. And we presented the idea of just getting into code, coding Python. And she showed her product, which I just love. It's a little charm, like hardware that has. She's going to kill me. I think it's got 30 pixels on it. Neopixels. It's got a great little LED screen with pixels, and you can easily coat it with all colors of the rainbow. And we got to show some teachers some code. And it was so cute because this one educator, she's like, I want this color in this background to scroll this color. And we were making variables all within five minutes. And it's nice to see people just jumping in and accepting these challenges. And it was a great win. We had a great turnout. I got to meet a lot of people. And that was at fetc. And then tomorrow I'm on a flight to go to bet, which is the. I don't even know what it stands for. It's the technology convention in the uk. It's one of the largest. I have to look that up. British Educational Technology. Something. Sean's Googling it for me right now. Sean Tibor: I'm working on it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Okay. And three of us are going to London and I'm going to take them to visit my former school in the UK and another competitor school of my former school. I'm gonna go talk to some other educationalists about AI encoding education and get to see everybody. I'm hopefully getting to see some people from Anaconda. And so hopefully Sean gets this turned around and produced by Sunday. And anyone who's gonna go to BET can hit me up on LinkedIn. Sean Tibor: I think we can make it happen. We're caught up now. It's gonna happen. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: We'll see. Excellent. You Google it in time. Sean Tibor: Actually, right now, I think it just stands for bet. I mean, I'm looking at it. I don't see any acronym. They have it capitalized like a proper down. So I think it's just bet. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: There you go. Sean Tibor: And you know, the fastest way we'll find out that it actually stands out for something else is by saying that on the show. And we'll get a great comment from someone's like, hey, here's what it actually means. So I. This is why I love the Internet. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm gonna find that. Exactly, Absolutely. Sean Tibor: Let's jump in. Let's talk about the Education Outreach work group, let's talk about the Python Software foundation and the role here. And then hopefully we have some time to talk about the education Summit that's coming up at PyCon US in May, and we'll be able to talk about what's happening there and what people can get excited for this year. So why don't we start, Keith, why don't we have you introduce yourself and then Cheuk, you can introduce yourself and then tell us a little bit about how the work group got started and what the vision forward is. Keith Murray: Okay, cool. So I'm Keith. Around the Internet, I'm Keith the ee, which if you say it fast, it's wonderfully. It's Keithy. So I am the communications chair for PI Ohio. I handle like, kind of reaching out with stuff. I just am kind of like connecting people, getting information out and taking information in. I'm also a member of the Python Discord, which is a community run Discord and I am now one of the directors of it. So the three directors. And we kind of make decisions about it and we've just. That is a thing that happened this week. So we're going to figure out like the changes we want. Kind of trying to take advantage of the energy and make those changes. But I'm also the outreach lead with that group and between PI Ohio, that and the Education Outreach work group, I really like finding the people who are doing amazing things in Python and Python related groups, communities and just going, hey, this person over here wants to hear what you're saying. You two are great talk with one another. And there's a lot of wonderful people in the Python community who have lots of energy to do many things and more people should know about them. And one of those amazing people is Chuk. Cheuk Ting Ho: So I guess it's a very smooth transition to, you know, give me the ball. So now I have to. It's my turn. So, yeah, like, I'm Cheuk, I am one of the board member in Python Software Foundation. So for the education and outreach work group, actually it's not the first time it has started. Actually there was a work group, but it has been inactive for quite a long time. So I still remember there's a time I talked with some other board members and then we was asking ourselves questions is like, how can we make all the developers learn Python? So I think like one of the idea Is that like, oh, what if everybody who the little coders, like young coders, when they're learning coding, they learn Python. So it would be like everybody learn Python. Which is something that I think for those of you who care about a community, who want the community to thrive, that's part of the very important track to get. Because if there's a community that nobody coming in, it would just strain down. Right. We need people, especially young people, to come in to learn Python and to hopefully contribute to the community as well. So that's very important and to make it happen. Educators are also very important. They are key, you know, players in this scheme. So, yeah, that's why we want to, you know, start the work group again. I have a lot of, like, great help, including Keith and also a lot of my co chair, Sheena and a lot of. And also Abigail, also Abigail is now in the US actually, but she's from Ghana. So we have people around the world to work to do this together. And also thank you for the education summit. I think we'll talk about that afterwards. But that's also something I think is very important. And part of the mission of the work group, I think right now is to see how we can support to make the summit, like even better. Like, it was great, but hopefully, like, we can just make it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I was really excited when Catney reached out and introduced you guys. It's exciting to see the focus in on developing educations because I agree every time I speak with teachers or other educators, I'm always like, but we have to start with Python. Why are we starting anywhere else? And I'm getting this question a lot about, well, what's the future of coding? Salesforce is not hiring any more software engineers. I just had that conversation today, you know, and then we have Janssen. So it's really nice to see that that's coming back into fruition. Being a new work group. What besides working with education and just getting output, how will you guys know that you're going to measure your success for the school? For the school year. For the, for the year. Sorry, school teacher here. Cheuk Ting Ho: I think we have some setting some goals, like when we are like kind of designing the charter, which is kind of like, you know, the document that we always look at to see if we are doing the right thing. So like we have some goal that we have set there. So Keith, do you want to, you know, talk a little bit about it? Because I know you have also a lot of input when we are setting the goals. Keith Murray: One of the important parts With, I think restarting this work group is to try and make sure that we don't become so ambitious that we never feel like we're making progress. So a couple of things we're focusing on is just keeping the kind of scope of our charter limited when you look at it from one direction and kind of like large scope, if you look at it from another direction. So one of our goals that I was passionate about is seeking and receiving feedback about the PSF's education resources, because teachers will pull from that and then go, well, this didn't work for me, or we use Chromebooks and that causes these problems. And that's a lot of people with a lot of input and that's super helpful to find out. And so seeking and receiving feedback is kind of a small enough tactile goal that is also kind of really large goal that helps us identify some of the stuff that we're doing and thinking about the resources. One of our other goals is going through some of the Python Software foundation resources on the wikis on different pages and kind of asking, hey, what just hasn't been touched in a few years. And then in these bits of outreach, hopefully we hear, and we have heard lots of people say, oh, I'm really interested in helping out, build out these resources or help create these lessons plans. And then if we've found something that hasn't been touched in a few years and there's another individual who is particularly interested in that specific lesson plan, that's just a connection, it's going to be like, hey, this is over here. Why don't you take a shot at it? And our charter kind of builds that out and then also focuses on going like, okay, the PSF funds pycon us and there's the Education Summit. Let's make sure we put a lot of our energy into making that summit as impactful as possible. And so there is a fair amount of our effort that is going to be picking up speed this semester to figure out what are the needs of educators who can make it to the summit, what are the needs of educators who can't but are interested, and other kinds of things. And Chuk also was, I had a line that I really wanted which was seek and receive feedback. Chuk had everything else. CH and Abigail, the three of them had everything else. I was just like, I have this little corner because I like outreach. They're all amazingly focused in different areas of education and have great visions in those aspects. Cheuk Ting Ho: I think it's a really. I'm just saying that we are very like, inspired by. I think it's last year or the year before, I can't remember, but we have a group of high school students coming to PyCon US and I think it's amazing. We want to make sure that if we can do it, I'm not sure yet, we need to talk with other organizers and staff who work on PyCon US. But it'll be great if we have that happening every year. We don't know how much we can do, but we would sort it out. Sean Tibor: So, yeah, I think they're really great goals because, you know, one of the amazing things about education resources in, in Python and specifically in computer science in general, is that there's so much of it, right? There's so many different things that we could be using. So many different tools, platforms, lesson plans, books, videos, you know, there's so many things out there and it's amazing because it gives us a tremendous amount of diversity for different learning approaches, different entry points, different ways that people learn at different points in their lives. Right. But it's also kind of overwhelming. It's hard to see what resources are really good. You know, I, I love telling people some of the best places to learn about Python is in the Python documentation. Right. The Python Doc site is really great. Right. It's really good. And nobody expects that from a language Doc site because they're always expecting it to be written by coders for coders. But there's this beautiful explanation and tutorials and every time I'm in the Doc site I learned something new. But what's that version of the official education resources? And it doesn't mean it has to be like a closed walled setup, but how do we show like a kind of a curated or organized or well structured approach to all the different resources that are out there and have that come from the PSF and from this work group. I think that's a very big, but a very useful and worthwhile task to pursue. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, And I just want to second that because we were just talking at our, our presentation that one of the beautiful, beautiful things about Python is the fact of the community. And, and I made the statement of the Pycon. You know, you came for the conference, you stayed for the community, and I said that to the, the audience in our work group and, and it's true. And I think if you're wanting to get people in Python, you have to have stuff that's reliable and readily accessible. Because I know I go in and I will do a search for a lesson on Rock Paper, Scissors and there's about 5,000 different videos that I could give to the students to just help support them. But when you start, you have to look through them all because not all of them are really that great. And so being able to go to a reliable source that is probably vetted by some really top notch Python developers and developer advocates and stuff like that I think is going to be quite useful and exciting and definitely getting some high schoolers in there. I know it's going to be a game changer actually having students come in to be advocates because once you have a kid who is saying yeah, I code in Python or yeah, I'm doing this and yeah, I'm doing that on the side because my school doesn't offer it or etc. It really does bring a lot of other kids on board. You'll be quite surprised of how many kids come and still see me from high school because there's no Python in high school. At our, I mean there's a little bit, but not like our middle school. And they come in, I'm still using Python and I'm doing this research project and I'm doing this and I was going to use the Circuit PI, the playground, even though I hated it in eighth grade, but I really understand I need it now and I'm laughing at them and it's kind of nice to be, to be able to bring that in and have the, the kids really promote Python. So that's exciting news. Cheuk Ting Ho: I understand the, the struggle of like, oh, how can I learn this? Because to be honest, like I was like, I learned Python because of, I was a data scientist so it's kind of like, you know, part of the job. But before I learned Python actually I tried to learn another programming language but it's so hard to learn because it's mainly used by researcher who like if you are not in an academic environment, you may not be able to find a lot of people who can help you. So I ended up like, luckily the team is using Python eventually. So I'm like just, you know, Python got so many much more resources out there. There's a very clear documentation I can seek help. And so it kind of make a difference why I stay with Python and not the other programming language. So also I got lots of people like doctors, researchers asking me like, how can I learn Python? Because like, I think for a lot of people, especially adults who have their profession, they want to do something related to their profession or their pass about. It's not like kids, maybe they're Passionate about games. That's why they learn how to use Python to make games. But for adults, like, oh, where can I find a project that I can for example, go to doctors? They would be like, oh, I want to, you know, learn some machine learning to like maybe help me diagnose patients and like so Python is so, so flexible. There's so many ways you can use Python. So I think that's also why the challenge is like, oh, we don't have one tutorial and then you do that, you load Python. No, that's never that easy. I know Keith is working on it. Kiv is like trying to gather all the resources and probably create a portal. Maybe Keith, you can explain like what are you creating to help people find resources? Keith Murray: Okay, so in order to keep the very first goal is just to create a list of what are the resources on the Python software foundations, websites in different capacities and different resources and, and there's a lot of wikis and then there's a lot of PSF blogspot and it spreads very, very wide. And I have run into them very frequently. I used to moderate the Python subreddit and in doing so I was trying to build a frequently frequently asked questions guide and I'd Google stuff and I would come into the Python wiki but I would keep hitting different parts of the Python wiki from different entry points and just going oh, this is okay. I why didn't I end up here three months ago when I was also doing this? So the very first goal was just creating a spreadsheet of these are the links on the Python wiki and other websites. These have links to third party resources that go outside of it and these also link to other pages within the Python PSF umbrella and just creating a list of that so we can kind of see. Cool. We have a really big gap in Python for non programmers that are interested in music or we are over saturated in jupyter notebooks for visual machine learning projects and just kind of creating a way to see the really gnarled web that is many years of many excited additions to the Python ecosystem, but which might have gotten a little bit of atrophy over years. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's interesting. I have Edu Sig. I don't know if that's one on your list, but somehow I got on their talk group and there are a bunch of interesting. They get some deep conversations about Dunder methods. Keith Murray: 10 links in. I did find that and I went why have I never heard of this? It's very similar to an education group. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I know I got on their mailing list somehow some way long time ago. And I still, I don't actively participate, but I love reading the conversations and some of them date back from years. So it'll be interesting because I think some of those people in that group would really benefit from other people and I think that's beautiful. If everyone can just filter into the beginning and inside. I'm going to switch gears and I'm going to throw this out to the, to the, into the wind because just at the, at fetc I ran into a gentleman who works at CMU and he goes, I see you, you, you're a part of the Ed Summit and when is that coming out and when is this, this and all these excitement about. And I kind of want to throw it out for you guys and for our listeners because a lot of people are asking what can they do for the Ed Summit? And Sean and I volunteer to help run it. We were excited to do it because we love the community. What would you like to hear about for the education we gave you, our opinions on? What we want is do you, are you seeking other people and conversations about what other people would like as well to help grow the Ed Summit? Cheuk Ting Ho: Yeah, I actually have a lot of questions about Education Summit because I've never been like I've been to Pycon, yes, but not the Education Summit. So I want to know usually who are the people who attend the summit and I just want to, because like education is a very broad field. I would just want to know like what are the focus right now from the community? Is it more for like, you know, younger coders or is it more of professionals who may want to start using Python for their professional work? What's the landscape? Sean Tibor: Yes. So I guess with the Education Summit it's a little different than the other summits that happen at Pycon. I know like the Language Summit, for example, is a very like discussion and decision oriented summit from my understanding. So there's a lot of discussion about where do we take the language, what are the proposals that are currently out there, what, what pips are out there for improving the language. We're not in that same sort of mode of being decision oriented. This is really, at least since Kelly and I have been involved with it has turned into more of like a forum and a discussion place and a way for people to connect and share knowledge and information. So from a format perspective, it always happens the Thursday of Pycon. So it's right before the main talk days on Friday and Saturday. We keep Our own little miniature talk track that has, I think we have five, maybe six presenters. We can do some lightning talks in there. So people submit talk proposals usually a couple months beforehand. We are not as early in the process as the main summit or main conference, but everyone gets an opportunity to submit their talks. We have had everything from early education, right? Kelly and I are bringing in, talking with people that are in elementary school education thinking about Python. We had law professors from Duquesne University last year who came in and talked about Python in law school and what they're doing to incorporate that. And so we were really not trying to limit ourselves or define ourselves as being classroom teachers or formal trained educators. Really the definition is if you're trying to help someone else learn how to use Python, you're an educator, right? That can be peer level, that can be content creators, that can be classroom teachers, but really it's trying to be as inclusive as possible and share as much knowledge as we can with one another. Because Kelly and I, I think we're sitting there listening to these two guys from Duquesne and just like eating up every word they said, like, oh, but wait, tell me about this and tell me about that. And you know, and then we're talking about content creation and how do you, you know, create content without getting that feedback in the classroom to know is it working? And, and, and everything. So we, and then, and then I think the last part of this, that, that really helps tie it together is we make the afternoon more about small group working sessions so that we create a number of different topics and people propose topics in advance and we have different people come in to create little. We take parts of the room that we're in and we say, okay, everybody who's interested in this, come over here and have that conversation or do that workshop that you want to do. So Catney has come in and done a bunch of hardware stuff with Circuit Python before. Um, let's see here. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Nick did pyscript last year and Eric Mathis, did he. No, he did a little bit of talk, but not like before, I think. Sean Tibor: Two years ago, right? As, I mean, this was March or April, right after chat. GPT had just come out in November and we're all struggling with how do we, how do we solve for this, right? What's the good, what's the bad, what's the ugly? Eric Mathis said, hey, I'm going to pull together a group and we're just going to ask all the questions. We're not going to have any of the answers. And that's okay, but we're going to have all the questions and we're going to be talking about it with other people who are just as curious as we are. Coming at it from different perspectives, but all with the same goal. How do we understand and leverage and appreciate what this new generative AI can do for us and also maybe make some further conversations and connections. So at the end of it, you know, you think about the outcome of the day. What we want everyone to do is to have made at least one connection with someone else. Right? So some sort of. That was really cool. I want to keep talking about this with you. Sort of connection to have learned something, right? So some new approach or new technique or something that you didn't know beforehand. And lastly, to feel inspired, right, that, like, when you leave the Education Summit, that you're hopeful about what you can do when you go back to your work as an educator, how do you feel about the day that you just had? Hopefully, everyone walks away going, wow, that was amazing. I can't wait to go back and try some new stuff on Monday after the conference is over. Cheuk Ting Ho: I think this, like, sounds really exciting. I. I already, like, you know, I have to go. You did a really good job convincing me. So I hope, like, everybody who listen also are convinced. But then how can I participate? What if, like, oh, I really want to give a talk, I really want to share something. How can I participate? Or, like, you know, if I just want to join, can I just walk in or do I have to, like, register in advance and all this stuff? Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yes and yes. The proposals, we try to get them out in or not. The submissions, we try to get them out in February, end of February, and then it's a quick turnaround, April. And to be honest, I really love. I think the last year we had a lot more short talks. There are so much. We were able to cram a lot more topics and a little bit of time. I'm hoping that maybe we can get a lot more people wanting to do the lightning talks, because those are just great. We take as many. As many submissions as possible. We don't try to get rid of them. So if you're in there and you did a submission for a longer talk, we might just say, hey, can you make it a lightning talk so that we can just hear your voice and get that out. In the past, you did have to, like, click, I'm going to the Ed Summit. But I think Sean and I, we got rid of the U2 off the list. And if there's room in, you know, and we have the ability to accommodate, then we allow the doors to come in and we want you to feel welcomed if you want to peek in. And it's. Sometimes it's a ebb and flow. Some people are going to other summits on that day, so they'll come in for a little bit or they'll come in for the afternoon session. So it's very fluid. Sean Tibor: No one has ever been turned away from the Education Summit in the last four or five years. Right. And. And look, a lot of that is because we're still recovering from COVID I remember Kelly and I, our first year at the Education Summit, it was a smaller room. You did have to register in advance, there wasn't as much seating available. But since then, since COVID especially with some of the health and safety precautions, we've been afforded the opportunity to have bigger rooms. Right. So we've had plenty of room for anybody who wanted to come. We haven't had to turn away anyone. I think the only requirement we have is you probably should be actually attending the conference. We don't want just random people to walk in. But. But beyond that, really, there's no restrictions. And honestly, we've tried to make it as open and welcoming as possible, because one of the things that I appreciated the most from when we first went to PyCon six years ago now, is that we were very new. We didn't know anybody. We didn't know anything about Python really, other than what we'd been teaching the first semester of our class. And everyone welcomed us, right. And everyone felt like we made us feel like we belonged there. So we want to keep that spirit going with the Education Summit. Even if you're not an educator, right. Even with our very loose definition, if you're just curious about education, you should feel welcome at the Education Summit because you're going to learn something and you're going to make a connection with someone else. And I'm pretty sure I haven't seen anybody walk away uninspired yet. Everyone seems just excited and energized by the end of the day. Keith Murray: I can confirm that the open doors are wonderful because that's how I attended last year. I checked to make sure that there was space and I sat in on the Summit last year and it is definitely a very inspiring thing. There were lots of talks about how to use Python to further classrooms in a number of different ways, or just further techniques to learn. It's very nice. Cheuk Ting Ho: Yeah, I also want to. Yeah, I also want to add A little bit. Good thing about Pycon us is that at the main conference days we'll have open space which if someone have go to the summit first, make friends and then get inspired and then if you want to dive a little bit deeper, you can book a room, have the open space and get the people who are also interested to talk a little bit more afterwards. So that's really good. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I, I have to second that. The, the open spaces are amazing and I think you'd be surprised at how narrow you can define your open space. And people will show up. Right. Even if you get five people with your very narrowly defined topic, you're going to have an amazing conversation with those five people in the open space. So I think we did that the first year we did like teachers in python and like 25 people showed up at this, you know, and I think that was the first time that I met Eric Mathis and I had been reading his book and using it as a guide for learning everything and, and it turns out that I'm at the open space sitting right next to him and it was amazing. Keith Murray: The open spaces are also housed. Cheuk Ting Ho: Yeah, I remember last year. Sorry, go ahead. Keith Murray: The open spaces are how I met Abigail, who's one of our other members of the education and outreach work group. She was running a open space about starting communities and one of her like large goals with the education and outreach work group is to similar to the consolidating and analyzing the resources that the PSF has, helping build out those resources for someone who wants to start a meetup or a workshop or some sort of educational thing. And the open space was where I met her and got to chatting with her and over the couple of months afterwards I poked other people and was like, hey, the education and outreach work group, that should happen again. Cheuk Ting Ho: There's awesome people and that's how you make friends. I've heard someone said that they have done a sushi open space. Just anything can be an open space and you make friends and we are all like, you know, welcoming and have fun. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I love that they should bring food in with it too. We're going to do next time. Cheuk Ting Ho: I don't know if we can do that but you know, that would be great. Just enjoy. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. Well, I'm going to be mindful the time because I really want to have these questions, this opportunity for you guys to talk about why and how to get involved if you want and if somebody wants to talk about giving some information, not just to us about the educational summit, maybe ways that the The EOW can. Am I okay with saying the eow Education Outreach? We were okay with that. That's your, that's your acronym the EOW can support. They have some ideas what, where and how and can they get in contact with you guys too. Cheuk Ting Ho: So like I said before, we had like just restarted it. So it's kind of still at an early day. So what we recommend is that I hope that we can put the link somewhere in the description or something that like we have a form that's, you know, you can just put in your detail and consent that like we would send you like updates. We won't spam you, just give you maybe once in a while, tell you like, hey, this is like for example, oh, Education Summit, please come, you know, that kind of thing. So yeah, like that's the way that we can get in touch, let you know. Like for example, if the work group have projects that we, when we are more mature, we have projects that we want inputs, then, you know, we'll let you know via the, you know, the contact form there. So I think that's the first step. Also our charter is what has been. You can, if you want to know more, you can read our charter to see what we are trying to do. And I think in the future we definitely want to include more members, but I think we are not at that stage yet. So fill in the form, get in touch and then we'll see. Keith, is there anything else you want to add? Keith Murray: One of the other things is one of our goals is partially to make it so that we have some sort of space and we have met as a group officially once. So we are still figuring out a lot of things. But one of our goals is to figure out a place where people can put resources or stuff without necessarily needing to be in the education and outreach work group. That way work can be done and improved and iterated on, on the schedule that the person who has the energy to do it has and doesn't have to necessarily wait on us. We don't know how to do this yet. And part of the getting feedback goal of this is to figure out how to do it. But hopefully there will be ways that will tell you through that get in touch form where we can go. Okay, this space, if you have thoughts on these ideas or tutorials or similar to the LED matrix that you were talking about some small project or rock, paper, scissors type project that going from zero to something and then something else that the students can change and manipulate, there can be a GitHub somewhere where you just post code examples and if people like it, they'll talk about it and say, yes, this works in classroom, or this has these problems in a classroom, but works really good in a workshop type stuff. And hopefully we can get a space or a GitHub type space where people can submit and do things without necessarily needing to wait on us to figure out things. Because if you have energy to build tutorials and resources for educators, please pursue that at your own abilities. Because that's why we're trying to be an education and outreach work group is because that's an amazing thing and that help is desperately needed for so many things. Sean Tibor: I'm going to make a suggestion to anybody who's listening. Also, if there's things that you want to see from the education work group, I think add that in the contact form. But also if there's areas where you can volunteer, like, you know, you guys both have a great background in outreach and community management and engagement, but, you know, there's all sorts of different tasks that happen as part of, you know, organizing and getting something like this off the ground. So if you have a particular set of skills or interests or enthusiasm for something, I would suggest putting that into the interest form as well. Because there may be something that comes up that says, hey, someone's like, I'm an expert in fundraising. That would be amazing. Because then, you know, you have people saying, you know, how do we get this to the psf? Right? How do we get this to the education work group? How do we get people connected that want to support this financially as well? Those sorts of things. Who knows where it comes from? But getting that kind of support and being able to organize that, it would be really great as well. And I'm excited to see that come from the community here as well. Cheuk Ting Ho: That's a very good point. If your company have a big check to write to us, then please email the psf. We were happy to talk about that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Can I put a form out there too? Any big checks? You want to support a teacher? Cheuk Ting Ho: I'm happy I can give you the PSF email. You can email us if you have a big check to sign and give to the psf. We would gladly. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's funny. I. I do want to clarify for anyone so that you guys don't get tons of emails. If, if anyone has any suggestions for the education summit, we will field them so we don't spam Keith and choke with all the stuff about Ed Summit. Because there are a lot of lovely educators very excited about the summit and they've been emailing me a lot, asking us when are we going to open up the proposals. So I'm so excited. This year is going to be, you know, we keep getting a larger amount of submissions, so I'm scared and excited at the same time that we're going to have a lot of submissions this year. So very exciting. Sean Tibor: What an amazing problem to have that we would have to do an overflow or two rooms with different sessions going at the same time. I would love to have that problem. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That would be really cool there. You might need to get us two rooms, just in case. Sean Tibor: All right. Keith Murray: That's exciting. Like having so many educators wanting to participate. My mom was a teacher and my partner's mom is a teacher, so I'm familiar with how much work teachers put into this. So it's not a surprise that they're very interested in participating and learning more and figuring out better ways to make a classroom an engaging space to be in. But it's so exciting to be starting an education outreach workgroup like this and go, cool, we're not going to be alone. If you're a teacher and interested in this, we're really excited about this because that energy is exactly what we need. Love to meet you guys at the summit. We'd love to hear about the things you're interested in online. Some areas where just stuff needs a little bit of love and care. Let us know. That's great. I'm so excited that you're hearing lots of people going like, okay, when can we sign up for the summit? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Soon, right? Sean Tibor: Very soon. So I'm going to let Kelly come back from BET before we. Before we dig into it in detail and get everything published. But I think, you know, the other thing that we're also excited about too, is that every year we find something that's a little bit of an add to it, a little bit of a enhancement, something that makes it a little bit better, something we learned from last year. So every year that we've been involved, I feel like it. I get more and more out of it just because it seems to be more engaged. And it's also been an interesting time to come back from COVID and come back from the virtual conferences with PyCon and start to see more of the kind of re engagement of the community into education. And I think a lot of that is coming because of the influx of new people that we've had into Python over the last five to 10 years. Everyone had to learn somewhere, right? And so as they get into it, they realize Sometimes that was a really great experience, sometimes it wasn't. Keith Murray: And. Sean Tibor: And education is really the gateway to joining the community and learning the language and getting those new superpowers of being able to write code with Python. That I think is the part that's been exciting for me over the last five to six years of being involved here, is that I wouldn't call it a renaissance because that would imply that it was kind of like dead for a while. It just keeps accelerating. Every time I go to pycon or every time I'm talking to someone in the community, I think, wow, it's amazing how far we've come and how much is happening in just the short period of time that I've been involved now. It's what's next, what's bigger, what's better, how do we make it even more engaging for everyone? Cheuk Ting Ho: Yeah, I love like when, because I've been to some conference that in opening, the organizer will ask who is their first time here? And I, I'm surprised. Sometimes I see like, you know, 80, 90% of like, you know, hands up, I would be like, oh, that's so good. It's not just like people we see all the time, the new people coming in. I'm so happy about it. So. Sean Tibor: Absolutely. So why don't we. I know we're kind of coming up on time here, so as a kind of to close us out, we will be sharing the intake form. Right. So the way to get in touch and get engaged with the eow, we'll be sharing that in the show notes. We'll be sharing information about kind of the upcoming schedule of the education summit and how to get involved there. And then we're also open to suggestions. So I wanted to remind everyone that, you know, always contact the show at TeachingPython FM. You can always go to our website and submit feedback for us there. We've gotten some really great comments. I know that the episode with Kudzai from Nigeria was really well received. Got some great feedback from that. So I am just, you know, I guess the ask out to the community is please, please engage, please share, please get excited for Education Summit. I think one of the things that people were pleasantly surprised by was how, how vibrant of a city that Pittsburgh is, especially in May. It's a beautiful time of year and I think I personally introduced probably a half dozen people to Pamela's Diner every morning for breakfast. So I will keep doing that this year. Cheuk Ting Ho: You know what I remember about Pittsburgh? There's like a giant ketchup, like neon Signs. Sean Tibor: Yep. So when I was there for university, that's where I went to university, there were times of the year when they would be processing a large amount of ketchup because it was the tomato harvest season and the whole city would smell like vinegar. And it was kind of amazing at the same time because it was like, wow, it's ketchup time in Pittsburgh. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Just makes you want to go eat one of those sandwiches with French fries on it. Right. Sean Tibor: There's a reason why Pittsburgh loves french fries and birding. Keith Murray: And there is a national aviary in Pittsburgh as well. That is an amazing experience. So if you're thinking of coming to the conference and have a little bit of time before or after, it's a great place to be. I will be going again. It's just lovely. Pittsburgh is so much fun. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Awesome. Sean Tibor: I think the day, the Sunday of the conference, before I left for my next stop on that trip, a good friend of mine, Chris Williams, and I, we went to the Heinz History Museum and we went to the Mr. Rogers exhibit and they have his entire set there. They have his shoes there, his sweater. They have the castle with the puppets and everything there. It's for anyone who grew up with Mr. Rogers. It is a very special and moving exhibit. And I. And that's just one of the amazing exhibits they have at the Heinz History Museum. Keith Murray: That's on my list. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: We could probably talk a whole new show again. And I think maybe Sean will do another show of the top 30 things that you have to eat or see in Pittsburgh. So maybe that's going to be a top. A top show because he was the quite the tour guide and we had quite a large group of some really good food. Sean Tibor: I'm not even a local, so maybe that's a good show topic. We'll get some Pittsburgh locals on the show and we'll talk about things to go and do while you're at Pycon. I think that'd be a lot of fun. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. So wrapping it up. Sean Tibor: Yep. Keith, Cheuk, thank you so much for joining the call. Best of luck on the workgroup. I know we'll be involved in various forms over the course of the next few years with the workgroup. We're excited to have you on the show. I'm sure we will have you back again in the future to share more about your progress and share updates. And if you have news that you'd like us to hand out through the show as well about the workgroup and its progress, call to actions. We're happy to do that. As well, so thank you again for joining today and sharing the journey that you're on with us. Cheuk Ting Ho: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this episode. Thank you. Keith Murray: Thanks so much for having us. This was a lovely chat. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Excellent. Sean Tibor: All right, well, I think that'll wrap us up. So for Teaching Python, this is Sean. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And this is Kelly signing off.