Episode 75: Lunch with Kelly & Sean

Sean Tibor: Alright. Hello and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 75. Can you believe it? Kelly? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I can't believe it. I can't believe it at all. It's just insane in saying that I've been coding for three years. I've been four years. This is our fourth year together in a classroom. Crazy. Sean Tibor: I know it's hard to fathom. We've been doing quite a bit over the last three or four years and as you can definitely imagine, it has been kind of a busy school year. I mean, you don't have to imagine you were here with me, but as our viewers can imagine, it's been a really busy school year, Sean. I guess the only thing I have to be thankful for, I actually have many things to be thankful for, but the thing I'm most thankful for about the start of the school year is that it is definitely not as crazy and hectic and busy as last year was. So compared to last year. I feel like we can do anything. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I don't know. This year for me has been crazy busy, but the COVID Zoom feature that we don't have that going on right now. It's kind of a nice thing we can organize. We're a little bit of a mess if you can hear Sean moving around a mic. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I think I've got it now. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: We got a little bit of Reverb going on, but it's what happens. So thank you guys for joining. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I think we're going to have a few listeners join in and we'll get them on the stream here so hopefully we can get some questions and answers going as well. Maybe you can tweet out the link now that we're live and share it with everyone. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: All right, let me see what's or that we're here. Sean Tibor: We're here at come party with us. It's lunch time. It's time to talk about what's been going on. I think we've been pretty busy and there's been a lot of progress and I was looking at it. We're almost a month since the last time we recorded, so there's a lot to cover, so I don't know if it's a win of the week or win of the month, but why don't we start there? Because that's what we normally go with. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Alright, so one of the week, one of the month successfully launched our project class link. Got to turn this down a little bit and everybody is up and running apps are running fine. I am living in about 50 to 100 emails a day. I'm getting my inbox down so it's nice, but that's a boring stuff. I think the biggest one this week has been my six graders. I am so stoked. I can't even tell you how excited I am about these six graders. I tweeted out a couple of days ago all the concepts that we've covered already. It's just the third week of school. Not even right. Third week of school, two and a half two and a half. We've covered print statement, we've covered assigning variables. We've covered input basic conditionals equal to the operators. We started four loops. I even threw in methods because one kid kept saying, but what if it's an s and it ends with an s? We can't put apostrophes and I'm like, oh, my God, kids, we're going to go into stream manipulation already in the Sean week of school. What the heck? So we went into and it starts with we did the title upper. These are things that I was really covering four weeks, five weeks into the quarter, and now I'm already doing it. So excited about the 6th graders. It's off the charts. Sean Tibor: That's awesome. I mean, I definitely think the students are the win of the month, right? It's great to have them back, and it's great to have the opportunity to meet with them again and to see where they are. And I think to your point, if your 6th graders are the win, the 8th graders are the win. For me. They are just flying through the content. And really what I love to see is the way that they're thinking through the problems and the way they're researching in the way they're finding. Sean, I've done some activities where I've little daily coding challenge with my 7th grader and the 8th graders, and I'll do the same challenge, and the 7th graders tend to struggle a little bit more to find the right information and decode and decipher the problem statement. And the 8th graders are just getting it consistently over and over again. And I think part of that's because I am being more specific and more prescriptive with the language that I'm using for the challenges. And the 8th graders are already more used to it after they're to previous years in coding, but the 7th graders are still getting the hang of it and still trying to figure out what does this actually mean. So it's been really good to see that my one of the week is absolutely the students and getting to code with them and getting to see what they're able to do. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This is the product, right? This is our third year with these kids and their 8th grade year. This should be a solid product. I'm excited. I taught these kids in 6th grade. It was, UM. It was bumpy their for 6th grade year. I'm not going to lie to anyone, but 7th grade turned out great. The 7th grade year with them was amazing. So I just see great things coming out from them. Sean Tibor: Sean, I think what's interesting about this is that I think by 8th grade, they start to realize that the bumps are normal and they're part of the process. Right. In 6th grade, it might be really daunting for them to try to overcome those issues, the roadblocks, the stumbles that I don't get. It the frustration. And now that they're eight graders, they recognize that I felt this before, and I got through it. So I'm going to get through this also. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. I agree. It fails this week. Too many to list. Sean Tibor: Now there's a lot of things that have feeling like you're kind of slogging through, so nothing that's really impediment, but just things like lots of ipads that need updates and changes now that we're really getting into the middle part of the start of the year, like, the start start is over. No, where in the middle start now they're using more and more of the technology in the class room. And what's happening on my side is that I am the one who gets everything escalated to me. So I'm spending more time troubleshooting more advanced issues or solving some problems. They're just a little weird or hard to uncover, and I'm making progress. But it seems like for every two that you knock down another two or three pop up, so it's kind of normal. I guess the fails, it's going slower than I would like. I just wish it would go faster and I could get through them quicker. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. I think one of the fails I'm experiencing this year. I had such a bonding experience with the 6th graders last year and their 7th graders this year, and they're very comfortable in the room. We made it so that we make it every year that our students understand that this is their classroom. This is their space. If they need to take a moment, take a break. They can take a break if they need to go the bathroom, go to the bathroom. So my 7th graders, I'm kind of trying to bring them back a little bit. They're very comfortable. They walk in. It's like, hey, I'm here in computer science, and I'm comfortable. I can be myself, but at the same time, you know, they forget that they can be loud and they can get unfocused. So I think a big fail is just the fact of not reading them back in into coding. But we did do some code along. They do love code along. That's usually how I corral them back from the psychotic events that happened when they code by themselves. More coding this year. I see. Sean Tibor: I think it's interesting, and I guess we can make this kind of our first topic for discussion as creating that environment, especially at the beginning of the year at the beginning of the quarter, whenever you have students coming in, how do you create that environment for them to coding and be creative? And while not letting it become a free for all right, there has to be some sort of boundaries guidelines guardrails that keep them focused and encourage that creativity in their coding and that mental flexibility that they need. But how do you ensure that that is not taken too far? Right. So what are some of the things that you do early on to establish the classroom environment? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So I guess I'll stick with the 6th graders because they're new into the into this middle school. And the first thing I establish is Sean immediate comfort. I want them to understand that they come into this classroom. It's totally different. They're not little fifth graders anymore that this is their classroom. They need to respect it. They need to respect when somebody is speaking and they need to be ready to listen. But at the same time, not afraid to speak out and protect what they want to say that try to explain it. I want them to feel comfortable enough to say, hey, you need to stop. You need to slow down. I need this question answered, but I need to let them know that they have to wait to the right moment. So we kind of established this routine of 1 second. I'm talking or 1 second. It's someone says, turn or 1 second. I've already answered a question from you. I'm going to come back to you. Just hold that question. But I need to help somebody else first. I want them to feel like it's okay to ask questions. It's okay to be themselves. It's okay to explore the space, but respect others. So that's a huge thing for me. Sean Tibor: Yeah. I like to think of it as advocating for yourself. Right. So the student needs to advocate for themselves in a a confident, self asserted way, even when they don't necessarily feel that way, they may feel like they don't get it or that they may be feeling demoralized or run down by maybe a string of things that aren't working. But that's the best time to advocate for themselves and say, I need help. Retreating into yourself and just kind of giving up is not what we want them to do. We want them to be able to take that step forward and say, okay, I've reached the limits of what I can do. I'm going to advocate for myself, to get the help that I need. And there's the other side of that balance, too, which is you also don't want them to be too quick to ask for help. Right. So sometimes that wait a moment, right? Or wait for your moment is another way to put it. Wait for your moment to be able to ask that question. And by the time they get to the moment where it's a good opportunity for them, they've already solved their problem. So we see that a lot, right. I see that a lot with my students where they I got to have this answer right now. By the time I actually get back to them, they found the answer for themselves. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, I experienced it a lot with 6th grades. You've had enough of you, and I on the 8th grade years of saying, no go back struggle. But in the first couple of weeks, they read a problem, and we start them on pie bites right away. Shout out to Julian and Bob for getting pie bites running for us so quickly this school year show that with a freebie Julian. But we get them on newbie bytes right away and they read the problem and it's something that can easily solve. Something is assigned to something and they miss s or they miss extra or they put an extra white space and they immediately go, I can't do it. I can't do it. And they come running up to the class to the teacher, or they come running up to their friends and their so eager to ask somebody to find the answer by asking somebody that they are afraid to sit there and not Sean help. And I think that's like one of the things I fight with in the very beginning of the school year, like, I am not your source of information. I am not your Google, Sean. So next to you is not your Google. Go sit back with it. Go take a chance to read and trust in your abilities. And I keep saying that I know you can code. What do you need just to stand next to me to show me that you can code and we do that a lot in 6th grade. Sean Tibor: Yeah. And it's interesting that I found that I have to be really consistent with my own responses. So the thing that I'll see is it's often easier for me to just give the answer right? Even for simple things. Right. So if I give them the answer when it's this assignment do when it's something that they can look up for themselves or what's the proper name for this thing, then I find myself often doing the same thing for all the questions they need to answer on their own. So being consistent about if this is something that you can Google, then I'm not going to answer it. Or if this is something that you have access to look up, I'm not going to answer it. I'm not your shortcut to getting the information, but if it's something that's a good question, like, why does this happen or when I'm trying this, I get something unexpected. I've tried these things and I don't understand what's happening. Can you help me do it? Those are very different questions. Those are the questions that I will answer. Not when is this assignment due or how much time is left in class, which is the sign of like, they're really bored or distracted or something like that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: We're really excited and they don't want it to end. Time flies when you're having fun. Sean Tibor: That doesn't happen much for the craters. If they say witnesses class end, they are not asking because they don't want it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's funny. Sean Tibor: So that's kind of like the second that environment. I think this year our room environment, the physical setup is the same as what we've had in the past year. We kept it very similar. The major difference this year is that we don't have any kids in our classroom that are on Zoom, so we're all in the room together, coding together. It's a full house of receipt is taken and I've noticed that that has some interesting side effects that I wasn't expecting, right? That students are much more likely to collaborate because the the person is right there and it doesn't have to be instituted or initiated by us as the teacher. It happens more organically, which is nice to see happening again. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, I think I'm feeling that pain of no Zoom for me. I've noticed the slower pace, especially with my graders because they line up at my desk because I'm trying to code and we're doing a code along. They're like, this isn't working, and what happens? Can I just share my screen where everybody can see the mistake and everybody can fix the mistake? I've got these kids wanting me to look at their screen, so I think I am going to start implementing we got replet team, maybe sharing that code there or just having everybody in replet so we can just click on that student code. It's one of these changes that I need to start soon because this slow pace of can you help me look at this or can we try to phone solve this instead of it being a class thing that we had last year with Zoom, it turns into a me and a student thing, and I don't like that because I thought that learning of seeing a mistakes on everybody else's code really helped push us to the next level in the emphasis. Sean Tibor: Not just the part about efficiency of solving problems is the empathy of having people working together and seeing that everyone's making mistakes, how to solve them and how to overcome them and being able to relate to other people through the mistakes that we made. So I think that that's something that I want to bring back in some way, whether it's through replot teams or something else, but some easier way of sharing screens and being able to see what each person is doing. We're working a little bit in the 8th grade with Code Live Share, which I think will be an interesting way of approaching this as well. But I'm constantly on the lookout for better ways to use the tools that we already have to be able to share code and share what's happening more so than looking for a brand new tool. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: One other thing I'm trying to really focus on this year, especially with six graders, is watching my vocabulary. When I'm talking to students. I thought about this because I did a presentation this summer during our TTT about high expectation teaching, and I noticed when I was reflecting about how I would talk to certain students, it would be harder on specific students, a little bit easier on others, and I was not really focusing on my high expectations. So one of the things I'm working on with six grade is just to make sure that everybody feels that I expect them to work at the the effective effort that they can provide, and that I told them to keep telling them every day is just because Johnny is coding rock paper and scissors in 6th grade, and and he's asking me to do all these things. Doesn't Sean, that's where you have to be. My expectations for you are different. And that's not because you're slower or faster or not as smart. That just means you're at a different part. And I like to keep reminding them that everybody is capable of doing the work that I am providing when you get to that point where you're at that success level. I'm raising the bar right. And I'm saying that over and over for the past two and a half weeks with these six graders, and I think they're finally getting it like they're not screaming about these challenges and not crying, which is the first in three years that I haven't had a child cry every time I get them a class challenge, so hopefully fingers cross it. It sustained throughout the year. Sean Tibor: So what else are you doing different this year? What else is new and different in your curriculum that you're excited about or finding interesting? This is like me interviewing you even though we spend the whole day together. Go ahead. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I don't know about you, but I'm kicking myself in the butt for doing this. I'm in grading hell hockey thing. Sean Tibor: I don't know what you're talking about. Says my to do list. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I got this wild, crazy idea that we should do these class challenges every single day. And I got this from the jet brains courses that have been taking where you're supposed to go back and repeat topics. And we have these class challenges, but they're once a week. But now every time the kids walk in, they have a class challenge. So that means every time they walk in, we have at least one thing degrade per class. I like it because it is given me a great benchmark, but it does take a toll on our time. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I think that's going to be a short term problem, though, from what I can see, I really do, because with the new Repot team subscription that we have, I'm not ready to implement it yet or to deploy it to the students, but it has auto grading and has unit tests that you can write for code. And so one of the things that I'm focusing on this quarter is collecting good daily challenges, so making sure we know which challenges work well, which ones the students are getting, because we do want that effective effort where a large portion of the students get the challenge and feel that confidence of getting the challenge while other students, if they don't make it, are not that far off, they understand the concept of maybe flub the execution. And if we can put in this auto grading where they can submit as many times as they need to until they get it right. I think it will train them to think about this. Iterative approach to solving the problem. And how do you know that it's right by solving the problem in an Iterative manner. So that's something that I hope will help a lot at the same time. It will reduce our grading workload because we'll know by the end, how far did they get or how many tests did they pass to make it work? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Sean, I think people a lot of people ask us, can you share some curriculum, some lesson plants? And I think we've said this so many times. We're perfectionist, although we both know that will never reach perfection. I guess we try. And so we're constantly making new lessons, new activities. We have the same concepts. Our curriculum is solid, but our lesson plans always change. Like today grade. Someone looked at me and I was like, I want to close the deck of cards. Okay, we don't usually do that to fifth or 6th week. They wanted something fun, and I needed to engage them. So I wanted to show them guess a card game because we had just guessed the number game, and I wanted to bring in that function. So my idea is to keep coming back to the card game to add in more levels of concepts. We'll see it could be a total lot, but I got an exporter to fix it. Sean Tibor: Yeah, that's right. We take an Iterative approach to teaching, but the good news about this is that because we've been teaching this a few years now, we have the ability to be more improvisational in the lesson planning, the selections, things like that because we now have a backlog of lessons that we've taught, and we can kind of teach that at a moment's. Notice what's nice about that approach to because it can be, although it's in the moment it can be much more energetic and engaging from us in the delivery, because it's not something that we've taught the same way, over and over and over again. We're pulling it out and we're trying to teach it in a new way. We haven't taught it for six months or a year in that particular lesson plan. So we have to remember how we did it or come up with something new. And so it feels new to us, even though we're very comfortable and familiar with the example. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm doing the same thing in 6th grade. I used to do the ice cream social app or make an invite app, and I gave them a concept. Sean, between you and I, we hate when we give them something of code because there's never any fun for us to grade. So I told them today next week, you're going to have 72 minutes. You have to use the concepts on the board, and you have to use a minimum of 30 lines, and I'll give you some random percentage of print statements you can use, so they don't have 30 lines of print statements. And I said, you're going to write a program and I don't know what you're going to write. And I really don't care. As long as it's funny, you're enjoying it. If you want to start writing it over the four day weekend, more power to you. You can iterate it and make it better. And they're like, really anything. And I'm like, yeah, go for it. So I'm excited. Nice little change. Sean Tibor: Nice. Well, looking ahead, I am planning to finish up my review of Python next week. We have a short week due to the Labor Day weekend here in the US and an extra day off that we put in there. But I'm planning to finish up my review of Python, the official part of it by the end of next week. And then after that in the 8th grade, I'm planning to bring them into some new territory that they may not have seen before, and we may spiral back on some of the concepts that we went over quickly during the review. But as an example, I want to go in and start bringing in some data, load some words from a word list, and do some analysis on that. I think that lesson really is one of the first ones that get students to think about how code goes from not just the code that they're writing in the instructions, but it can then be applied to a lot of things that are bigger than themselves, whether it's a huge word list or data that's on the Internet or something that's new and surprising if they type everything in themselves, including the data that's in their lists or in their dictionaries. There's no surprises there. There's no delight. There's no astonishment like, wow, I can't believe that that work. You get that when you start doing files and live data and things are real time. So that's something that I'm looking forward to doing with the 8th graders because has been a really successful way of seeing those kind of like a moments from the students. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Another thing we're changing this year because again, trying to make things harder on ourselves, we change the choice towards up. I saw somewhere on Twitter, someone did this or that now keeping the same concepts of safe functions. And the kids have an option of doing this activity for function or that activity for function. And before we had pick pick four out of the seven or pick three out of the six. Now it's whatever this or that that we want to cover and the kids can pick one or the other. Some of our kids are doing both, which is awesome. And again, that's been a good one. It's harder to code on the co labs that we're using in 7th grade. I think that's a little bit hard for me because I like writing comments on documents, and it's not as easy to write comments on Colab. I'm seeing it. So I just end up writing comments in the LMS, but at least I can run their code in 7th grade, which is cool. Sean Tibor: Nice, nice. I think the other thing that we're doing and to switching gears a little bit from the pure computer science, the robotics classes that we're teaching now have a little bit different bent to them. And that's something that I'm excited about. We took everything that was working really well last year with our exploration of robotics, sensors and movement and deep racers and artificial intelligence, all those topics and themes within robotics. And we've made that class and kept for that going in. And Kelly, you're refining that, adding to it. And it's really cool. And then we've also brought in another robotics coach who's leading up a competitive program to do vexiq as a competitive team based competition with our students. And so we're seeing students gravitates, and I really want to get into the competition and win the game and do really well. And other students who are saying, well, there's so many other things that I want to play with. I want to explore. I want to try. And so our robotics program has fractured a little bit, but in a really good because I think it's giving students more choices of what they want to do and how they want to engage with robotics. So we're a few weeks in and I think it's already going really well because I'm seeing kids try things out, decide that this is right for them or not right for them and moving and then finding ultimately a place where they're much happier. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. I think it's going to be a fun move. I've set up I've set up the exploratory sort of like how I use it to teach robotics. We have tons of challenges, and we're doing Lego Spike Prime right now just because kids can get in there, start building. And we had a challenge already in the first two days of Robotics Club, and it's just so much fun because you add that time factor of who's going to get first and they're not winning anything to a number on a sheet. And it's so cute. And the 8th grade boys that I have are helping the 6th grade kids. I have a bunch of girls in there, and I don't know something appealing about Spike Prime. It's just awesome. And I'm going to use a dance off activity where they have to build the break dancing. But but I'm going to add a creative flare and tell them that they have to pick their own music and it has to move for 30 seconds to that beat. Sean Tibor: So we'll see nice, very cool. And what I like also about this is we have options for both of these programs when it comes to the coding side of it. So both the IQ and the Spike Prime, and a lot of the other programs that are robots that we're using in the Exploratory program have both block based coding as well as text based. So with Spike Prime, it's Python, it looks really nice and polished, is so nice. Vexiq means I have to dust off my C Plus Plus coding skills, which I think I last touched back in my intro to CS course 20 plus years ago. So it's going to be interesting, but the nice thing about that is it's again, really polished, really smooth. So it doesn't have to be super complex to be very useful. It can be clean and simple and elegant. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: The kids ask me, how do I do this in block? I'm like, no clue, but I'll show you how to code it in Python. Like, if you haven't checked out Spike Prime Editor, it's brilliant. They have this little Sidebar on the right, and it's like motor sensors, etc. Etc. And they have all the code scripted, so you just need to know where to place it. Put in a couple of conditional statements in there, place your Motors, make sure they're plugged into the right Port and you can do a nice, clean code. The imports come in. I don't know. I'm in love with Spike. Sean Tibor: That's the brilliant thing of the block based coding. It's not so much the way that it all snaps together like Lego blocks. That part is hit or miss, in my opinion. What's brilliant about the block based code is that drawer of all of the different things that you can do and having it visible to the programmer. So the student who is coding a block based program can look at this whole library and see all the things that are in there. And it also makes it easier for them to do discover new things. So this may be kind of hard to fathom. I think for a lot of text based programmers who have done a lot of coding in Python or C Plus or Swift or whatever. We discover new code and new functions, new methods, new objects by reading through documentation or seeing a video or taking a training course or something like that. There isn't a place where you can normally look and see. Here are all of the pieces of code that I could be using here and with Spike because it's a relatively limited live. It means that they can put it all in there and organize the information so that you can quickly grab just the snippet of code that you need to make your Python code run. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It was funny, though, one of our graders who I've taught him in six, I think I remember who taught in Sean doesn't matter, but he's like, I want to put a variable. I want to do this. And how do you do an LS and conditional with a block? And I looked at him listed. I have no clue, but it's written in Python. Go figure it out in block code. If you don't want to write it to ask you the wrong person. I forgot the block code four years ago when they made me learn Python. Sean Tibor: Yeah. I mean, you don't have so much room in your head for it, right? Eventually you have to garbage collect your brain. So let's see other things that are going on around the podcast. There's some things that we've done. We're officially an LLC now in the US, so we're a registered company. We have a bank account. We have all kinds of stuff. One of the things we're trying to figure out from just the business of podcasting perspective is how to monetize our podcast. So far, we've essentially paid for podcasting out of our pocket. We've had a few sponsors in the past, and that has been Sean a really good thing, but we're trying to figure out the best way to monetize this people who have kept us going. Our Patreon sponsors, for example, our Patreon sponsors have been really, really helpful for ensuring that our show continues to get to everyone week by week. But we don't really know how to grow yet. We're working on that. We're trying to solve that problem because we know that there are a lot more people out there who are trying to teach coding, who are trying to learn coding, who are trying to bring concepts of computer science out there. And we want to get our podcast to as many people as possible. So we're working on a lot of new efforts and new initiatives from guests and influencers people that we can connect with to increase the reach of our show, as well as bringing back some of our guests that have been very popular and had great conversations. A lot of our growth from this point on is through kind of better execution. I think of delivering the podcast, reaching out into new channels like email, more blog posts, things that help grow our reach without compromising on the things that apparently people really like, which is kind of the conversations, the interactions, the authenticity of the teaching experience. And so as we grow, making sure that we keep that spirit of teaching Python in the community that has grown up with us in and thriving. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And that same line is in the building of our community. I'm finding people that are teaching middle school Python little by little, and we want to I say I, but we want to meet more people out there. For example, I just met Tommy, and I promise I'll get back to you, Tammy. We were tweeting together and I haven't replied to your email because my email is ridiculous right now, but she also teaches middle school, and she also is a new coder. And we made this joke because I'm trying to learn Unicode and Encode and decode and binary and all that gibberish that you computer science people knew, and she's just like it's to make people feel dumb. That's why they have it. I don't think, oh, God, thank goodness there's somebody that understands me. And I think there are more people out there. So I think when we're growing with teaching Python this year, one of our goals is actually to grow our community. We have a lot of developer people that are helping me learn helping Sean thrive even more. But we also want to hear more about the teachers out there trying to get computer clubs going, trying to get computer science in their middle school or their lower school and the high school or even College. I think that's the only way that we can grow the community and learn from each other. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I agree. And so one of the things that helps with that growth is the financial side of it, finding the ways to fuel that growth and make it happen. So we're working on solving that problem. If you have ideas or thoughts and things that you can share that can do that without compromising the community, please send them our way. That's something that would definitely help us do a better job of growing the community in an authentic and sincere away. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Can I share? Sean Tibor: Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm always reading books. So I just got this book has nothing to do with coding, but Middle School Matters by Phyllis Fagel nice. I'm starting to read this book and I'm starting to think of in the classroom with computer science, like the things with middle school and learning to code and this risk failure. It brought up an interesting topic that Sean and I were discussing. We have a couple of kids that are doing learning some really cool and really strong code, but they might be learning it and going make not necessarily wrong way, but not necessarily in the path of good. How do I package up this really fun code that's going to open up 5000 windows on Sean so his computer and we're like, this is that middle school mind understanding why middle schoolers take the risk? And I think that's something to think about when you're teaching coding and how to help them deal with dilemmas of online presence, digital footprint, making the right choices when you code coding for social good. And I think this is just a nice book to read. Plus, I'm having a middle schooler next year. So as a parent, this is a parent book, what I'm going to face and I just started reading it and it's really cool. Sean Tibor: Nice. Yeah. I think that I'm looking forward to stealing it from you after you're finished with it and reading more because that's something that is really important to me. Also, it's not just the technical aspects of coding or computer science. It's the ethical and the social emotional aspects of it as well. How do we help our students navigate all these new powers that they're getting and use them in a way that's appropriate and ethical and respectful, because that growth and learning takes time also. So I'm looking forward to learning more about that. It's definitely something that I'm interested in. I know that when I was in middle school, I learned how to use Photoshop, so I had, like, I think it was like 14. I had a state ID for my learner's permit for driving. And so of course I scanned it in and I gave myself a must. Sean, I figured out, can I change my date of birth? So it looks like I'm 21 or 25 or whatever. And not that it went anywhere. It's not like I turned that into an actual fake ID. But how do you make sure that that stays limited to an interesting exercise in learning Photoshop and not into something darker or more consequential for the student? So that's something that we're trying to navigate as well as teachers, because I don't think it necessarily falls to any of our colleagues because they don't always understand the implications of what a student is doing on the computer the way that we do. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So that was another big push, though. Thinking about this summer and we were talking about digital citizenship and some of my tweets earlier this summer, we're about implementing digital citizenship in the classroom in the computer science classroom. I wrote a blog post about that. If you haven't checked it out, and it's just this idea that our colleagues and not necessarily our colleagues here, but my colleagues, even in the past, have said, Well, you teach computer science, so they're getting all their digital citizenship in computer science. And it's like not so much. There's a lot to do, but we surely can help focus on topics with code and really highlight how the digital footprint can be made through a computer science class. So if you haven't checked out that blog that was posted, I think last month. Okay. It's got some good hints. Sean Tibor: Yeah, I think it's true. Why would we assume that the digital world is somehow completely separate from the other things that we teach just because it's online. So digital citizenship and responsibility for online behaviors is something that we all have a responsibility for, and maybe just in some areas, it's not so evenly distributed. Maybe we have a little bit more responsibility in the computer science or the technology realm, but that doesn't mean that it's less important in English. Sure. Social Sciences. In fact, I'd argue those are some of the perfect places to talk about these issues online. It looks like we have a few people in the live stream, so high people in the live stream. Nice to see you in there. If you have comments, questions, thoughts, please feel free to share them in the chat, and we can address them as well. I think we are kind of coming towards the end of our time, though I'm trying to think if there was anything else that I wanted to talk about on the show this week. Kelly, anything that you wanted to mention or anything else that's come up recently? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Not much. I'm still working on my Jet Frames Academy. I do have to give a thank you, and I applied for a three month extension, and they were gracious enough to give it to me because apparently you're supposed to finish your study track in the short amount of time and I emailed them and I'm like, I need an extension. So hopefully I'm going to finish that developer track. It's been really fun. I have to say some of the topics are way above my pay grade at the beginning and I've had to re them. So if you haven't checked out JetBrains Academy, they are not one of our sponsors. They should be just say, amount of time I spend on their website if you haven't checked out their Academy, it's amazing. Sean Tibor: Yeah, definitely. Like a lot of the examples that you've shown me. How cool is this? Look at this example. Look at how they're teaching this idea. It looks like it's a really strong and clear example, and sometimes that doesn't always come through in educational materials that are written by developers because we have our own language. It's not the bytes and the bits and the binary and the Unicode and all that stuff that excludes people. It's usually the jargon. It's the way that people write it. It's the way they explain it. The examples that they choose that can be exclusionary, not the technical no itself. So what I really like about what you've shown me so far is that the examples are clear, they're concise without being over, simplified or trivial. Sometimes the toy examples that are given don't really help because you can't relate to anything in there. So they've done a really nice job of making that work. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, Sean, the chunking of information is great. Sean Tibor: I did see something I wanted to pass along is from Ruben Learner. I'm going to put the link to his tweet in the show notes. Really cool, kind of clever use of dictionaries. And actually, I think you could do it with the counter object from the collections class in Python. But what he showed was that you can make a really simple histogram or value count bar chart by iterating over a pair of dictionary keys and values. Let's Sean picture in your mind and I'll post this in a show no picture that in your dictionary. Each of the keys is a unique unit category, like Miss Paredes, the students, Mr. Tibor students, and then the value is the count, like the number of students in your classes versus mine classes. And then what you do is you iterate over the dictionary items method. So you get those tuples of the name and the value and you print the name and then you print some character, like an Ampersand or hashtag or something. Like that times the value and it produces the string that's the length of that value. So I'll put the step it up there. But it was really cool, like four lines of code to produce a textual bar chart that looks pretty good, actually, when you get it finished, it's rather nice. Combine it with a little like padding and stuff like that so that it's fixed with and you're in business. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very cool. It was funny because I saw the tweet today. I tweeted out and I know we have to go soon about the AI and facial recognition. It's been something that's been on Sean to do list forever, and we have the three AWS visual recognition. Sean Tibor: The deep ones, Sean. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So that was kind of the ideas, and I do have to. I'm trying to find their names. I can't find the name right now, but the way that they set it up so that it is only taking the information locally. Sashi Krishna, they made this board and they have facial recognition and it's on a Raspberry Pi because in UK GDP are where they have to make sure that none of the kids are being data sent out. They did a really nice job. It would be interesting to see what they did on the back end of the raspberry Pi and how they set that up. But John and I were talking about doing some sentiment analysis or something, and I saw I think that is pretty cool. Sean Tibor: Yeah. It should be really interesting because I did that little tiny Python library that I made a few months ago called Pi encourage, and it gives you random encouragements on demand. So one of the things we were thinking about was assessing the sentiment. And then based on the sentiment, serving up some sort of encouragement. If they're looking a little bit down according to the algorithm, maybe give them something that encourages them and says, Keep going, you can do this or people care about you. And then when we get to someone who's happy do something that's maybe appropriate for that as well. Like, glad that you're having a great day. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Keep it going at the kindness it forward. Sean Tibor: Exactly. So lots of cool stuff that we're going to share out. And we are also planning to do more live stream recording soon. One of the things that kind of hit my teacher decision tree about how I was going to handle it was I'm going to be traveling to Alaska next week for my uncle's funeral. He's very old and all for the best, as best as any of us can hope to pass through this life. But I'm going to be out. And one of the things that I talk about with my students, I had to decide was how much of this do I share with my students? How much do I tell them the reason for me being out and where I'm going and things like that. I decided to err on the side of being transparent and sharing with them what was happening, but I will be out next week. We will resume episodes, probably in another week after that. With our live streams. I may try to do something from Alaska, at least being available and in touch, but I want to make sure that I'm there and focused on the right things for the right reasons. So if you hear more from Kelly than you do from me next week, that is the reason. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Why would that be scary if I did a podcast by myself like John did, I can't even imagine how he did it. Then I would never marry without you. Sean Tibor: Sean is maybe I can get you a cricket in track that you can use to fill in the blank spaces when I'm not there. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. Sean Tibor: All right. Well, I think that's everything for Teaching Python. We've got a lot of different places. You can reach us. Our website is Teaching Python FM. You can always engage with us on Twitter at Teaching Python. There we have the Patreon account, which is always linked in our show notes. So if you want to sponsor the show and be a part of it, you can join us on that. We are looking at adding some new Patreon tiers over the next couple of weeks and months with some rewards and levels and things like that. So keep an eye on that and let's see here. I'm SM Tibor on Twitter as well. Kelly is at Kelly Pared. I'm at SM Tiber on Peloton. So if you want to watch me work out infrequently that's the place to find me. And I think for teaching Python, that's it so for teaching Python, this is Sean. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This is Kelly signing off.