Training Tomorrow’s Tech Talent with Sarah Cooper

Startups get the party Startups get the party started Startups get the party Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador quentan frijoles founders trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos el gordo the tacos standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset La Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside the Tijuana Estee be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SD TechOS with your host Neil Bloom. Startups get the party Startups get the.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host Neil Bloom, San Diego's Tech Ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle. I want to take a moment to thank our friends at Cox Business who have enabled us to tell these amazing stories of local leaders, technologists, founders and funders. Cox is actually a 121-year-old family run private company that thinks in terms of decades in connecting communities a lot like we do in building a tech ecosystem. For years now, the local Cox Business team has helped us grow through partnering at San Diego Startup Week, South Dakota Quick pitch and celebrating our technical leaders at the Top Tech Awards this October. We're very excited to kick off an entire month of virtual networking and learning at San Diego Startup Month with talks on sales, marketing, data, people, design, development and more. There's something for everyone in the startup and tech community. Drop in on the pitch competitions, get your LinkedIn reviewed, meet new colleagues and listen in on investor panels on the future of deep tech. Check out the schedule and more@sandagostartupweek.com and thanks again to Cox Business for your partnership.

And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neil Bloom and I am joined today with Sarah Tuakli Cooper, Executive Director of the League of Amazing Programmers. Sarah welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Give us an overview of what is the League of Amazing Programmers.

It's a fantastic name, isn't it? The league actually started as Wintris Technical Schools and we had a rebrand in 2014 to the league of Amazing Programmers because that was so much more enticing for young people. And what we are is an after school Java programming course. So we take kids from grades 5 through 12 and teach them programming for as long as they can stomach it. And if they make it through all of the 10 levels, they will end up taking the Oracle certification, which is an entry level certification for programming, which means they can go straight into industry or work their way through college. And quite often they will take the computer science AP as a midway point at school. But whether or not they end up doing it as a job, following it as their career, they will have learned a great deal about how their world is made.

Wow. Incredible. What an experience for children to have. But I want to get to know your experiences. What led you here? I believe you started kind of in the music world, right? Even musician's background.

I started well. I studied composition and as part of that I studied electronic composition using very early Apple Macintoshes, as we called them then, to create synthesis and record sound and break it down. So my interest was as an artist rather than as a traditional nerd. Although I had spent a childhood breaking things so that I could put them back together, if that counts. I was always very interested in how things work and that persisted into how sound works. And so I studied electronic composition and taught music technology for 20 years before I came to the States.

Oh, wow. So where was that? Were you in the uk?

I was in the uk, in a school called the Gateway inside Kingston University, teaching computer composition and sound recording and sound design for 218 year olds, you know, who made fairly horrible noises as far as I was concerned. But.

But you love teaching?

Apparently, yes. I find that intersection between technology and art and humans very interesting. So education is where all of that is happening, you know, and not knowing something and being determined to discover and explore is something that children, you know, they come gift wrapped for those of us who are interested in exploration.

So what, what led you to San Diego?

Oh, marriage. My husband spent seven years in the UK studying and finally had it with the weather. So we came back home to his where he grew up, which is El Cajon. And yeah, I pretended not to like it for a couple of years, just, you know, because I'm English and we're snobs. But, yeah, so I've been here since 2008 and my daughter is a bona fide California princess. And I'm. And a long distance with my other two kids who stayed in the uk. They're much older, but, yeah, I go home about once every two years.

Okay. But now the states are officially home, too, because I hear you're a recent citizen.

I am. It was so funny. You know, obviously Covid and my citizenship ceremony, which I was really looking forward to, turned out to be a drive through. It was actually quicker than getting in and out. I mean, I drove up, the guy gave me a little flag to wave and read the oath, and I said, I do. And then they gave me the packet and I was out of there. It was very funny. And everyone spent all day saying congratulations, but I wasn't really sure what it meant, but I do. It was interesting to be a foreigner for that long and now to feel, you know, responsible for whatever happens next.

So it's been like two months or so since you've been a citizen. Does it feel different?

It does, actually. It feels like I'm going to vote, I'm going to argue with people. I can get arrested if necessary without fear of deportation. So, yeah, I feel. I feel proud.

Well, welcome. We're extremely happy to have you officially take us through how you got to know the league. What was the relationship like from the beginning? How did you become aware of it and a little bit how that path from teaching music became teaching technology.

I was looking for things to do as a volunteer, and I got a message on Volunteer match about the league needing someone to help them get set up in Salesforce, and I was a Salesforce certified administrator. So I just took it on as a volunteering gig and got to know Vic, the founder, and his wife Diane, who are very precious, lovely people. And I got to know June Clark, who was the. Then the head of the school. And although I didn't spend very long having that task of setting them up, I did maintain that relationship with them. And then I came back to work as an operations manager in 2018. So I'd maintain that relationship. I tried. My daughter, you know, did the Java program for about, I don't know, eight weeks, but it conflicted with all of her dance and theater. So we're a very lovey family. But I just. I felt that what they were doing was really critical. And it's. The new, you know, literacy nowadays is bound up with digital in a very, you know, unbreakable way. It's really important that Kids are not merely consumers of digital content and digital tools, but that they have a sense of what's happening, a sense of agency. And I just love the way the school empowers them to make their own games, not just play games that other people have made or create projects for social good, build websites. And the journey that they go on from, you know, just treating it as a hobby, something that is fascinating to realizing that this is something that can be a very well paying career. It's really inspiring. So I was really excited to come and work at the league.

How long ago was that that you assumed the executive director role?

I took over as executive director in January of 2019. So it's been about a year and a half, just over. I think it's a confluence of experience in, as you say, in education, but also having that operations management background. When I came to San Diego initially I knew I didn't want to hear another 18 year old boy's music. So I went into marketing and operations and I worked in places like Vistage and worked with a lot of wealth managers doing marketing. So the management side of it, being interested in nonprofits, I'm a chair in a nonprofit. I'm a volunteer at Voices for Children. So that whole con combination of what society is and what it can become with what we're teaching our children is really important to me.

If you would have asked my parents, they would have definitely said a third grade violin version of myself was way worse than 18 year old musician. But I hear what you're saying either way.

But you know, if you're teaching 100 kids and they will think they've invented hip hop, you know, it can get a little wearing.

So yeah, I get that. So take us through a little bit about the experience that that children have and what's the earliest that they can start learning code with you?

They start at as early as 10 years old. We often have people asking if they can send their kids earlier because they're such a genius and they're really fascinated and you know, this is their life and they love it. But what we find is that we need them to have reached a certain level of emotional maturity to be able to cope with the demands that we're making of them. It's quite a long time, a long session for a kid. It's an hour and a half long and they're going through recipes and programming tasks at their own pace. So they join in a workshop group setting where they're all learning the same thing. But quite quickly they branch off and start to work on their own projects even though they're children. We're not treating them, we're not using it as a. I'm trying to think what the term is. I'm trying to not be pejorative. We're not using drag and drop sections of code. We're actually asking them to type out the full thing with their learning the syntax of object oriented programming right from the beginning. So they're writing the underlying code that makes up the majority of options for younger children like scratch and makey makey. I mean all of those things are great as enticement inducement to the tech, but we want these kids to understand the language from the get go and be using it and then quite quickly they'll move on to working in teams to make projects. So they're also going to be learning how to collaborate with one another, which is another very important aspect of work in the industry is to be able to, you know, have your individuated challenge that you are, you've got a deadline and you've got to meet it, but then to understand how it works with everything else. So actually asking them almost to work as little programmers right from the get go. And as they get, we're not restricting people. They don't have to start at 10 and work all the way through. They can come in at any age. And obviously an older student is going to make progress probably more quickly. But it's very important for us that at every step of the way they're learning something new, they've got a new challenge and they have the choices of what thing they're going to take on next. So it's a very mental style of relationship between the teachers and the students and what they're doing is it's mastery based learning. They're mastering it from, you know, going through this journey.

Gotta imagine that in person part. It's gotta be a big help here. What has Covid done to the style of learning that these children are going through?

So that was very interesting. We're just about to do a study to see how, what the difference is between the students who already had an in person relationship with their teacher and their group and those students who have joined since COVID because we take students all year round and it's going to be very interesting to see if the online experience, which I have to say we've done a fantastic job. My staff moved online really, really quickly because essentially what we do is online. It's just that we gather in small rooms to do it. But if it's important to have that in person relationship. I want to know about it. So we're going to be looking at how the newer students are doing and whether we've changed our teaching style in any way to address that difference of being in zoom. But as I say, we went online very quickly because the curriculum was always online, the kids were always working online. You know, they make their code and then they can commit it to GitHub and push up requests and do work in groups online. So it wasn't a complete shock to the system for most of the kids to have to do stuff online. I think one of the things we struggled with was those kids who don't have the digital equity gap has really been telling on our school because we have about a third of the students who are on scholarship by virtue of coming from very low incomes. And for those kids, many of them didn't have a laptop, they didn't have a private space to study in, they didn't have adequate broadband access. So we spent a couple of weeks driving around trying to get make sure all the kids were online. Now that the schools are coming back and having to work online as well, most of the kids are being given adequate devices and some kind of solution to their wi fi access. But initially that was a big shock to our system was having to make sure that those kids somehow could get online and spend time in the classroom with us. The other thing I would say is that for the kids who don't have a background which is tech steeped in digital activity, the persistence and having someone that they can turn to with questions or just someone to encourage them is really important. So that's been a really key role for our volunteers and for our student ambassadors is to make sure that if someone drops off the face of the class, they go and check back in with them, find out what's happening for them and see if we can resolve those problems. But I don't know, we're enjoying being online, I have to say. You know, I don't know how quickly we're going to return back to the classroom. Even once schools go back, we have to contend with the fact that our kids are coming from different schools, different Covid pods if you like. And it's going to be quite a while. I think that we'll be an online school. So we've stopped thinking of it as an interim fix and started thinking of this as the interim normal and to stop thinking of crisis management and start putting more systems in place to ensure that the online experience is as Good as, if not better than the in person experience.

That's great. And I'm interested to see those study results too. You know, the difference of style of teaching, what's that really done? It's smart that you're from the beginning going to look at data points to collect over time and see how different that is. That'll be really handy.

I think it's critical and it's an opportunity, you know, that we wouldn't have if we, we couldn't invent this study. So we, we have to make use of the situation. But a lot of things I think will have changed when we get back about how the students, what their expectations are and what their capacity is for digital environment learning.

Sure. And during that time they will have obviously seen this rapid virtualization which includes the like the more necessitation of technology everywhere which hopefully connects them to, you know, the importance of what they're learning. But do you detect that they get that at 10, that this is a language that's going to be important for me for life? Or does it feel like what we're when we're learning a second language at 10 years old?

I think with the middle school, the middle schoolers, it's just like learning a second language. It's like learning music or Spanish and it's just another string to their bow. They don't have the preconceptions that we all have about what normal is. They're much more open minded, you know, so that's an advantage for the middle schoolers, the high schoolers, especially in the States. There's this pressure to perform and a pressure to have, you know, attain certain grades. And you're immediately immersed into thinking about four year college. And that is the determinant of whether or not you will have a successful life. That's very much the culture that I've encountered in the education system here with my own child. And it worries me slightly because it means that a lot of high schoolers are already thinking of themselves as second class citizens before they begin. And that to me is one of the things that we can address by giving them this incredible capability where having the biggest vocab isn't the first thing understanding how the machinery works. All of those other people are going to be coming to you for help. I feel like we're ahead of the curve. We've been ahead of the curve. Vic started the league in 2006. He already had this foresight that this was going to be important and I think it was. Kara Suisha. I've heard Saying that we've been catapulted 10 years ahead in terms of what technology wants and what society is going to be. We have to address it now, even though we're all in the middle of a pandemic. And to me, the kids are actually going to be teaching us as much as we're teaching them. You know, the relationships between the teacher, the student and the material has been flipped to a certain extent. You know, we've got classrooms now where the kids accessing the content on an individual basis and then they come together to provide commentary and evaluate and assess what the next steps are with the teacher. The League has been teaching in that way for a long time. So that's not new for us, but it's new for schools and the teachers. My heart goes out to the teachers in traditional schools who are trying to deliver the Common Core curriculum. So we're all going to have to help one another, the tech world and education. And again, it's a confluence that we can't ignore.

Absolutely. I'm curious to hear a little bit of the impact you think you've had on, like, local workforce in a few veins. I mean, I understand we're teaching kids way early, way before we're thinking about a career, but we're hopefully readying them for their life, right, a life long that sets them on maybe a different path. And you've experienced a few communities, right, in London, in San Diego. 1. Is this teaching this early on unique? I mean, is this very special to San Diego? And what do you think its impact is having on our local workforce?

I don't think it's unique to the League, but I think what the League does very differently is, as I say, take the approach of not giving them playthings, but approaching it as work. Although for children, all learning is play. And if it's not fun, then don't bother. We're asking them to. Again, going back to that analogy with music, you know, we're teaching them the fundamental principles with which they're going to build a technique and that will mean that there'll be so much more ahead when they get to college. And I do feel that, you know, I have anecdotal evidence from my alumni that this did change their life, that it changed their college experience because they were able to sail through things that before would have seemed very esoteric and difficult. So we're teaching them, you know, algorithmic thinking, which is very useful to a wide number of applications. We're teaching them design thinking and project management and collaborative leadership and all of those things are pushing them ahead of the curve. So I feel that I'm not sure I can, I'm not sure I'm sticking to the question. But I feel that we're preparing kids for a future in the way that the massive education kind of cruise liner is not able to turn quickly enough to align itself to what's coming down the pike. And it's coming quicker and quicker. So we have to be much more ready with the systems thinking and the change management. And the education system just isn't designed to do that well. Although I do think that this COVID 19 experience has pushed us into an accelerating pattern.

So you think regular K12 schools may start thinking about this as they are thinking about it?

Yeah, I party to a number of different initiatives that are going on around San Diego. So the STEM ecosystem, we had a collab lab last week and in the Promise Zone we have maybe 400 partners that join in with various working committees, including jobs and education. And everywhere I go I'm hearing the same questions come up about digital equity education and online learning. So we're all pulling in the same direction.

That's great. Are you seeing a number of companies, kind of tech companies jump in and push for this as well? I know Qualcomm has been at it for a very long time with their.

Thinkabit lab, the Biocom Institute, lots of companies recognize that in San Diego. I'm quoting numbers, I might get them wrong because I don't have the figures in front of me. But over the next five years, as I understand it, we're pushing out 2,000 less programmers than we need for the workforce as it's growing. And that was at the beginning of the year. So I have no idea what that looks like at this time in August. But we need more tech savvy students to be coming out of colleges in order to do the work that's on the table. So I feel that the companies that are getting involved have the vision to understand and more companies need to join in with supporting programs like ours, of course, but also getting involved in the conversations with school districts and state district, you know, state bodies that are working towards improving our online learning understanding. We've got to understand what we're doing because it's a different thing. It's not just putting the words on a screen. It changes so much about how the children learn. It changes their relationship to information, how they acquire it and how they process it. So, you know, understanding what we're doing, evaluating how it's working at every Step of the way is really key and we can't do that without the industry.

Could we be utilizing like high school level coding talent to do, you know, some early qa, quality assurance and stuff like that? Like does the industry really purely need college talent only or can we be getting them in earlier?

I've got 16 year old students who are earning 60 bucks an hour. I mean, it's okay, you know, they are for the kids who take to it like a duck to water. They are going to be really special in what their, their ability to move quickly, you know, and to not be swayed by assumptions or expectations and to just have that. I don't know if it's innocence, but disregard of, you know, some of the things that weigh adults down, some of the considerations. It's useful to have that invigorating energy that you get with high schoolers. They're not frightened yet. By the same token, obviously they can't be allowed to just go in and break everything. But it's so good to have them working on problems together with older people in a team.

So what does that industry relationship look like? What can, you know, professional programmers and companies be doing with, with you, the league specifically? Right now?

There are, I think there are a number of organizations in San Diego that I know of that are trying to strengthen that channel of having, building relationships. We have within our program, we have relationships with a number of companies that provide internships, for example, to our students. Even, you know, older high school students go and do six to eight weeks of internship in an, in a company and work with a mentor and have done, you know, proven themselves to be able to perform so internships. We have a lot of volunteers from industry that come in and teach the kids at the higher levels of the courses and work with them. And that is a two way relationship. So as I said, I feel that the kids teach us as much as we teach them. So when the volunteers come to teach the programming, they're also getting a lot of insight that they can take back into their organizations. And then there's, you know, the just the boring nuts and bolts of money industry needs to put money into the next generation, especially if we want it to be an equitable generation. Because this stuff's not cheap.

Absolutely. Well, it's great to see the community come together for, you know, for making these kind of long term investments. Right. We're investing in 10 year olds who we hope to benefit. They're not going to help us with the 2000 program or gap this year, but we know if we plant these seeds like they will bear fruit in 15 years. And that's pretty special.

And I think that's going to address some of the problems that are endemic that we don't seem to have answers for. You know, you can teach people how to program, but how do you teach us to improve society, to increase diversity? For me, when I manage to increase the diversity in a class, everyone in the class is benefiting and the tech is benefiting. You know, there's study after study about how diversity benefits the bottom line, profit making. And there are also studies on things like AI and machine learning and all of the things where we actually need to know what the, the whole population looks like, not just the one we've invented as a veneer, which is very homogenous. So for me, bringing, you know, kids from a Chula Vista school up to do a Tech Discovery Day where they do a bit of electrical engineering and make a battery and they learn how to program a robot and then they do some web design that's benefiting everybody in San Diego, not just the children that we're bringing.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious, what does the future look like for the league? What are you trying to achieve over the next few years? I'm sure Covid changed some things, but maybe it's helped you do a few other things by not having to rely on the in person part.

Yes. Well, we've got a plan to grow from about 450 kids where we are now to 2000. And we do a very good job of having 30%, I think we're at now of girls to boys. 30% of them are girls and about 30% are from under resourced areas of San Diego because we run scholarship programs as I said. So we operate all the way from Logan Heights up to San Marcos and various satellite locations. And we want to see those increase to 50%. So we'd like to see equal numbers of women to men and a wide range of all of the other isms identities.

Well, you've been in San Diego for a bit now. You've gotten to know our culture a little bit, our food. You know, I got to know like what is, what's that like for you in terms of after a lifelong of culture in the uk, what's the San Diego culture like for you?

I'd say for the first five years it was very difficult for me because in London Indian food is king. By the same token, my husband spent seven years looking for Mexican food and he didn't find any. He found some pretend Mexican food once in a pub and was really, really sad. So I feel that that was another pull back to San Diego. But I couldn't find Indian food here, so food was a big thing. But I found a few little outlets now, so, you know, you just have to keep looking. The switch to Mexican food was hard for me, although in my married family, I'd have to say that's like four times a week. So, you know, it's just gradual. It's a gradual culture change, as you say, in terms of drinking and eating and having friends. I tell you what, the biggest change for me was the way we're so segregated. So people would come over and the men would go out to the barbecue, and the women would stay in the kitchen, and the kids would be playing in the living room. I'd be like, what's this? Because in. In the uk, you're just all in. We haven't got that much space. You know, there's no barbecuing, there's no grilling. Sorry. So, yeah, that was a change. Interesting. I like to float around between the different groups, but being 15 minutes away from going to dinner in Mexico has been an amazing thing. So, yeah, if I. If I have to. To say what's my favorite thing about San Diego? It's being so close to Mexico.

Yeah. All right, so then my next question about tacos being so good. Might have to have one on either side of the border. Do you have a favorite spot?

There's a place in Vallada, Guadalupe, which I visited, that even if I could remember the name, I would have no idea how to pronounce it, but that was where I obviously had the best tacos here. I'm pretty lazy. We go to Gilberto's. We go to Ajijo. We're in La Mesa, so we just go to whatever's closest.

Great options.

I do like my fish taco now. It's a staple, of course.

Well, we've also got to know the Indian food then. What's the Indian. Where are the Indian spots in Singapore?

Oh, so I go to Himalayan in La Mesa, which is a Tibetan restaurant. And my favorites there, I would say, are probably the shrimp tikka masala and the dahl. They do amazing dal.

Okay. Good shout outs. Well, Sarah, it's been great to get to know you as well as great to get to know the league. We're really excited for what you're doing, for training our future workforce. So thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, come and help. We take volunteers from everywhere.

Okay. We absolutely will. We'll make sure our listeners know about it too. And thanks again.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech Podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter Eelbloom as well as fresh brewed Tech and Tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

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