Ali Partovi | Beyond the Hour of Code: Bringing Computer Science to the Classroom

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Speaking of my twin brother, I want to start by clarifying, while we did start Code.org together, my brother Hadi actually runs Code.org day in and day out. I'm here to talk about some of the accomplishments of the organization, but really it's Hadi who deserves the credit for it. So our goal at Code.org is to bring computer science into the curriculum, and that's a tough challenge, but really actually the single biggest challenge in it, or the biggest part of the challenge, is getting over some mental obstacles and actually just getting to common understanding of what we're talking about. So before going into what we're doing, I'm going to dispel some of the common myths about computer science. I'm going to start with this very short video which was, I'd say, in very large part the inspiration for the starting of Code.org. And by the way, this is the interruption that we heard in the middle of the last talk. Sorry about that.

I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer. You should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. And so I view computer science as a liberal art. It should be something that everybody learns, you know, takes a year in their life, one of the courses they take is, you know, learning how to program.

So that's Steve Jobs a long time ago. Saying that computer science is a liberal art. Computer science is a liberal art, and that everyone in this country should learn it. So let me start by asking you, how many people here know about the Hour of Code? Raise your hand. OK. Well, when I was here 2 years ago, there was only maybe 10%. Next week is the 3rd annual Hour of Code, and it's a massively successful event. But what I started by talking about was computer science in the curriculum. I'll tell you a little bit about the Hour of Code and where it fits in, but the main focus of our organization is about bringing computer science into the curriculum. So let me dispel some of the common myths about this, starting with this statement. This is not what we advocate for. We advocate for kids learning computer science. There's a difference. Just as you wouldn't advocate that kids should learn how to perform surgery. Some kids might grow up to become surgeons, but what we teach in school is biology. And, you know, in advanced biology class, you might dissect a fetal pig or dissect a frog. That doesn't mean our kids should learn to dissect. Our kids should learn biology. They should learn anatomy. And in the same way, computer programming is one of the tools for learning computer science. Now, we assume that computer science is about technology, but actually it's about much more. It's about logic, problem-solving, and creativity. Computer science stems back to the philosophers of ancient Greece. To give you a sense, you know, just as Steve Jobs said, it teaches you how to think. To really drive this point home, the first computer was invented in 1943. Now, guess when the first computer program was written? 1843, a full 100 years before the technology existed that was capable of running a computer program. Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program. Computer scientists started writing computer programs 100 years before the technology existed that could actually run those programs. Computer science teaches you how to think. Now another common myth, especially here in Silicon Valley, we assume computer science education is on the rise. Not true. It's on the recovery from a 10-year decline. Fewer students today study computer science in class than there were 10 years ago, and half as many girls. Now it's rapidly turning around, and largely due to Code.org's efforts. But we're still below where computer science education was 10 years ago. Another common assumption is that the tech industry is desperately trying to hire computer programmers. Actually, every industry is desperately trying to hire computer programmers. Now, that's a statement about jobs, which leads to another misperception, which is this assumption that computer science is vocational. Actually, I would say computer science is foundational. You would not send your kids to a school that wouldn't teach them what photosynthesis was. You would not send your kids to a school where they wouldn't learn what H2O is or how to solve an equation for X. I would suspect that everyone in this room knows how their esophagus works, but not everyone in this room knows how the internet works. And the kids that are in school today will be using the internet more than their own esophagus, and they deserve to know how both work. Which leads me to one of the biggest obstacles to teaching computer science is the assumption that computer science is not cool. We're here to prove that computer science is cool. Now you might wonder, how did 2 twins who didn't have any friends in high school come up with— how would 2 nerdy guys make something cool? And we weren't sure how to do this ourselves either, but we realized the secret to making anything cool, it's actually quite simple, is to have girls be involved with it. And that leads to my last misperception, which is the assumption that computer science is for boys. Computer science is for everybody. And you earlier saw the picture of Ada Lovelace. She was the first computer programmer. The other seminal person who sort of started the field of computer programming and computer science is Grace Hopper. That's a picture of her. She and Ada Lovelace were both born in the second week of December, and that's why next week is Computer Science Education Week. That's why we celebrate the Hour of Code next week. And the purpose, the strategy behind the Hour of Code is that it's not an elective. It's something that an entire school does for their entire student body. Everybody participates, whether they're white or Latino or black, whether they're male or female. And when everybody does something together, it becomes a social experience, and it becomes cool. As simple as that. So with that, I'm going to show just a little bit about the Hour of Code campaign. This year we have hundreds of thousands of classrooms already signed up to run Hour of Code events. all around the world in every country on this planet. And we've already had 140 million children do the Hour of Code. That includes 1 out of every 2 kids in the United States of America. So it's kind of hard to top that, but we are going to try. This is a short video for this year's Hour of Code. Oh, sorry. These are just the events that have already signed up to run Hour of Code. In the United States and across the world.

Okay, now you're going to press run. The hour of code! This is so cool!

Hour of code. The hour of code. Code opens.

Я программи а код. Nan che hello, dohats kod. Your teacher says you guys are into it. We are. It's very awesome. Code.org has partnered with 30 public school districts across the country, including New York, Chicago, and Denver, to provide lessons in teacher training and writing.

The largest education events in history.

Organizers set what they called an ambitious goal of reaching 10 million students this week.

Almost 15 million signed up. This week I'm proud to join the students, teachers, businesses, and nonprofit organizations taking new steps to support computer science in America's schools. I ran an Hour of Code. It was easy to do.

I got it!

They've been so excited about it.

Oh my gosh, it's working! I did it, baby! They don't even have to be a computer science engineer. Maybe they want to do something else, but in our world, this is going to be the basis for everything that we do.

Move.

Set my cone.

I'm so excited! I received my cone! When you're building a program, you have to think outside of the box. If you can change technology, you can change the world. I challenge girls in every single country to learn one Hour of Code.

Every district should do. Every district can do it. Please help us get the Hour of Code to every school and every classroom and every child.

And my school's doing it. Thank you.

So the goal of my organization is not the Hour of Code. The Hour of Code has been very successful. In fact, so far, actually, the number is 140 million. Almost half the participants in it have been female, which accomplishes the earlier goal I mentioned. But we actually view the Hour of Code, believe it or not, as a marketing stunt. The vast majority of what we do is what comes next. The point of the Hour of Code is to overcome some of those misperceptions I talked about earlier, and it's to create the desire for teachers who see how excited their kids became about it, for kids who realize this is not as scary as I thought, I want to learn this subject. And so how do you bring that curriculum into schools? The vast majority of what we do is focused on that, and we measure ourselves very carefully. The goal for us is that every school in the country should be teaching computer science. Every student should be exposed to the basics, and those who want to take it further can take advanced classes in it. But you should not graduate from school in the 21st century and not have a basic idea of how a computer works, and it— you know, any more than you could graduate and not have a sense of how your own digestive system works. So the things that we work on, we've developed online curriculum that's already being used in the classroom by 5 million students. We've partnered with 70+ school districts, including some to be announced next week. We have already trained 15,000 teachers, and we've built teacher training workshops around the country which are currently training 10,000 teachers as we speak. And that— when those 25,000 teachers collectively begin teaching classes, that means there will be triple or almost quadruple the number of computer science classrooms in this country as there were when we started. And we've changed policies in 20 states around America. So first, I'm going to talk about our curriculum. The curriculum we've created is primarily aimed at K through 5, although we've also just very recently launched curriculum for computer science principles for a high school level course. The online curriculum is now about 2 years old. 150,000 classrooms are actively teaching with it, with 5 million student accounts. 10% of America's kids are learning on it, and literally 10,000 students are being added to that platform every single day. And the percentage participation in those classrooms is very close to even on gender and is very close to representative on race. And that's what happens when something becomes part of standard curriculum rather than just being an elective. People take it. And when you offer computer science alongside chemistry algebra, et cetera, kids will take it regardless of their gender or their race. Our partnerships with school districts are focused around fixing— or sorry, helping schools with the things that are their biggest challenges. Every single one of the largest districts in the country is now our partner. And we're focused on urban cities because we do care about the equity of computer science being available to disadvantaged neighborhoods. And what the district commits to is that they will teach computer science. And what we commit to is that we will train their teachers for free. So this is what the bulk of our work is, is setting up these teacher training centers around the country. The teacher training we do is among the most popular and successful professional development that teachers experience in their whole career. The vast, vast majority of teachers that attend it tell us that it was— that it's something that they would recommend to others, and an incredibly large majority says that this was the best professional development they've ever received. And I should also mention that the vast majority, about 85% of our computer science teachers, are female, and we're very proud both of that fact and of the fact that the majority of our own staff is female. So, and then lastly, I'll talk briefly about the advocacy work we do. When we began our work, only I think about 9 states in this country recognized computer science as a core academic subject, as satisfying graduation requirements, which means that if you took computer science, AP Computer Science, which counts as a college science class, it would not count towards your high school graduation. It does not count as a high school science class, and as a result, it's categorized as an elective. And, you know, when kids are choosing their electives, they've already chosen the tough courses like calculus or chemistry. When you're choosing your electives, you want the fun courses. You want the courses that have girls in them. You're going to go choose chorus. The people who end up choosing computer science when it's an elective are only the ones who've already been exposed to it, who already realize how fun it is, Usually it's white or Asian boys whose parents introduced them to computer science, and that's what leads to inequity. So changing this policy has a lot of impact because it allows all kids to take that course and to satisfy graduation requirements. So today, 27 states count computer science as satisfying math and science requirements, and some of them have gone much further. Texas and Arkansas have mandated computer science to be taught in every school. Arkansas and several other states have also provided enormous amount of funding for it. These policy changes really make it a much more sustainable thing for computer science to be taught in school. And I'm hoping that California will join the majority of states in recognizing computer science as satisfying graduation requirements. California is not one of the states that has changed its policies, but we are signatories to an effort that actually was published earlier this week to try to get those policies to change. So I'm going to just say everything I just described has happened in the past 2 years. Computer science is now the fastest growing course in public education. It's the fastest growing AP exam. And for the first time ever, diversity in computer science is getting better instead of worse. But we do have a very long way to go. And that's why I hope that everyone in this room will go back and try to get someone to do the Hour of Code next week. Next week is the 3rd annual Hour of Code, and we are hoping to reach 200 million kids, which is a lot. Thank you very much, everybody. That's the end of my presentation.

Thank you.