Coding the Future (Zachary Sims, Founder of Codecademy & Rohan Silva) | DLD13

So I started a company called Codecademy. We teach people to program online. And I'm going to start today with a true story about a girl named Martha. So in 2011, Martha was a student in high school in Kenya. She looked— she studied a whole wide swath of subjects like most high schoolers do. Studied math, reading, English, and she showed particular aptitude when she was studying math and science. And so a lot of her teachers told Martha that she should study math and science to become a doctor, potentially go to college, maybe work in public health. And so she took books home from school, spent a lot of time with mentors in her local community in order to study to become a doctor. But the thing that she wasn't able to do was access perhaps the greatest trove of information on the internet, because Martha in Kenya had no computer, and no access to the internet besides the one or two computers that existed at her school in Kenya. So the summer of 2012, Martha decided to get an internship at a public health nonprofit in Kenya. She worked with a whole bunch of doctors, learning from them and learning from what they were telling her to do on the job. But perhaps what she learned the most from during this period was the computer she had access to on an everyday basis. So for the first time, she started using social media like Facebook and Twitter and Google+. And she started learning from sources like Wikipedia. But what attracted Martha most to computers that summer was the fact that people anywhere in the world could create something that could reach millions and millions of people all over the place. So she sort of became intrigued by what created those programs. And Martha started to learn to program. So over the summer, while she had access to a computer every single day, she found a site called Codecademy that I started with a friend in the summer of 2011. And she started learning coding really simply. She typed her name into a box on the console on codecademy.com. She learned strings. She decided to learn a language called Ruby. And 2 weeks after she started Codecademy, she quit her internship she used all of her savings to buy a laptop, and she started learning to code every single day, abandoning medicine in the pursuit of learning to program. 2 months later, when she would have finished her internship in public health, Martha ended up getting a job as a Ruby on Rails programmer at a Ruby on Rails shop in Kenya. Instead of learning from her peers in person in Kenya and becoming a doctor, she learned from a global community of makers and people online that were teaching each other how to program. So what's special about Martha's circumstance is not just that she was directed and driven and that she managed to learn so much information so fast by herself, but also who she learned from and how she learned. In the absence of any formal educational structure, with no college to go to to teach her computer science and no classes in high school, Martha created her own learning community online. She learned from her peers. And she interacted with them to teach them different things. In fact, 3 months before Martha started learning to program, 2 15-year-olds in Texas, Joah and Hailey, started learning as well. The 2 of them were tired with what they were learning in school, and on their free time picked up Codecademy, started learning JavaScript, and started building games and applications to share with their friends. The 2 of them, as they were learning, figured out that they learned best when they could apply what they were learning by teaching it to other people. So they created lessons, created games for people to play, they created calculators for them to build, and different programs for them to dissect and play around with. And halfway around the world, Martha in Kenya learned from the two 15-year-olds in Texas that had created their own lessons. The two— the three of them were interacting for the first time in a global community that was teaching people to program. Now, the experiences of Martha, Joah, and Haley are not— they're not alone. They're learning with millions of people on Codecademy since August of 2011. They're learning in a community that is global, where more than 60% of people on Codecademy are from outside of the US. Community of millions of people who are learning not from institutions and colleges and titans of industry, but from people just like them that are creating content on Codecademy, with tens of thousands of people that have created lessons on things like loops in JavaScript, or ways to build simple websites with HTML and CSS. And together, they've written billions of lines of code. Now this wasn't always the way we thought it would be when we started Codecademy in August of 2011. I myself had always been a bit of a programmer, playing with PHP while I was in high school, and HTML and CSS. But always finding the experience to be really frustrating and difficult to understand. Whereas my co-founder Ryan came at it from the opposite perspective. Having been programming since he was in middle school, Ryan found that every time a friend asked him, "How should I start programming?" he never had an answer that didn't make his friends bang their heads against their walls. So when we got to Columbia and met each other, Ryan started an organization called the Application Development Initiative that taught people to program in a hands-on way where there was a community of people that were learning and teaching each other, whether it was a freshman teaching a senior data structures or a senior teaching a sophomore how to prototype things quickly. It was a community of people that learned from each other and learned by doing and creating. So in the summer of 2011, the two of us started working on a bunch of different projects together in an apartment in Sunnyvale. Built things and discovered that I was nowhere near as good of an engineer as we thought I was. And so we built something for me. We built a way for people that didn't have any coding knowledge to become proficient as quickly as possible online in a community of their peers. So we spent 3 weeks building a really quick prototype. I learned JavaScript in order to write the first couple of JavaScript lessons. And we put the site up one afternoon in late August, hoping that maybe a few people would use the site. Soon as we put it up, went out for lunch, and Ryan, my co-founder, and I made a bet that no more than 50 people would use the site at the same time that day or within the next couple of weeks. Went to lunch, halfway through lunch more than 100 people were on the site at the same time. By the time we got home, there were thousands of people using Codecademy all across the world. The next 72 hours, we saw more than 200,000 people use Codecademy all across the world. And what had started as 2 people in an apartment in Sunnyvale became a movement that was in French, German, Chinese, Russian, every language across the world as people started translating courses and sharing their enthusiasm for programming. Now, one of the key things about Codecademy and why it spread so quickly is that it's so easy to start learning by doing. We decided to build net-native education, the education the internet deserves, not education that you take off from offline and bring online. So we scrapped all the things we didn't like about the offline educational experience and embraced the maxim that you learn more from your friends outside of the classroom than you do from lectures inside the classroom. So we threw out lectures that we used to fall asleep in. We got rid of quizzes that we crammed for and then forgot all the material from the next day. And we threw out homework that we spent 10 and 20 hours on, learning things that were frustrating and hard to follow. And instead, we built something that started simply, started by typing in your name, by choosing a language that you wanted to learn, and by interacting with the computer at every single step of the way. We wanted to build net-native education for everyone. It was in this process that we realized that programming, for most people, is 21st century literacy. We're all walking around with phones, with computers, with tablets in our bag, but we're consuming things on them instead of creating things on them. We all have the ability to create so much more, and the way to do that is with programming. So in January of 2012, we started a campaign called Code Year where we tried to get people to make their New Year's resolutions to be to learn to program. We put a counter on the site that shared with everyone how many people had signed up and originally set it not to show up until 1,000 people had made their resolution to be to learn to code, figuring that we'd put something up and it would fizzle out. But within a few days, more than 400,000 people had made their 2012 resolution to to learn to program, including people like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, including a bunch of journalists who started a weekly Google Hangout group to figure out how to apply what they learned in Code Year to their jobs as journalists, or librarians in the American Library Association who started working together to figure out how to build better cataloging tools and communicate with each other. And what we saw was that programming underlies everything we do, whether you're in banking or you're a lawyer. Or you're a programmer. And programming truly is the underlying basis of most of what we're working on today. The problem with programming being 21st century literacy, along with reading, writing, and math, is that it's not taught in schools. In the US, we have a severe deficiency of computer programming teachers. The UK scrapped their entire computer science curriculum in order to build a fresh one. And it doesn't look like there will be enough teachers anytime soon to make computer science mainstream. So in 2012, we put together an after-school package for teachers all over the world to teach their students to program. Teachers who don't necessarily have any programming experience, who might be English teachers or history teachers, but instead see the virtue in teaching our future generations how to program. Within, within a few weeks of putting it up, we found that more than 3,000 schools all over the world had started after-school programming clubs. Clubs where kids who 2 weeks earlier weren't interested in math and science decided that they wanted to be engineers, and they wanted to go to college, and they wanted to create things with programming.

So I'm going to end with another quick story.

In January of 2012, Ryan Hanna was a network administrator at a company in the United States who couldn't code. Instead, he set up networks and was an IT guy at his company, was sick and tired of of playing with computers but not being able to create anything with them. So he spent a few weeks learning on Codecademy. And what he learned was how to build applications with HTML and CSS and JavaScript and jQuery. And he put together a really simple application called Sorkit that helped him track his circuit training routines. And Ryan posted his app in the App Store. More than 150,000 people downloaded it in a few weeks. Here's someone who went from knowing nothing about programming and being a really from being a basic consumer of technology and media to becoming a creator who within weeks reached more than 150,000 people. I think we have a really opport— a really good opportunity to create a generation of people that feel the same way, that can use the internet to spread their ideas, to spread their applications, all with coding, to build a global community of people that make things, people that teach each other on tools like Codecademy, a world we can program together. Thank you.

Fantastic, fantastic.

Thanks, Zach. Let me, let me start by asking all of you, put up your hands if you have played around with, with Codecademy. If you've been on the site, you've played around with it. That's an impressive show of hands. What is it, Zach, you think about My name is Rohan Silver. I work for the British Prime Minister on all areas of policy, but really try and focus on technology and innovation and enterprise. What is it, Zach, about the design of Codecademy you think that has caused such virality? It's not just, surely, that people want to learn to code, but you seem to have cracked something about design.

I think we make it all about learning by doing. You You know, there's no lectures, you don't sit there for an hour really bored. You sit there and you're constantly engaged, and you're learning from people that are just like you. So it's not the college experience, it's not the high school experience, it's something new and it's something native, and I think that's what people want when they're learning.

Yeah. You mentioned it in your talk, we're rewriting our school computer programming curriculum so it becomes about making things rather than just using PowerPoint. But— Codecademy suggests that maybe teachers and schools aren't necessary in learning code. I mean, how do you think governments around the world should approach this kind of question?

I think they help, but I think in a world where there are not enough computer science teachers, there are a lot of computer skills teachers. Tools like Codecademy can be involved in the classroom experience where teachers can act as facilitators and help the students along the way instead of, you know, just having a teacher who doesn't quite know how to teach computer science.

Right. Do you think that's generalizable for other subjects? You know, can we— will we see Codecademy branching into learning French and Cantonese in the years ahead?

I think any— you know, you should learn anything by doing. You should learn it interactively, and you should learn it in a community of your peers. So whether that's something we do or someone else does, I think it's hopefully an eventuality where, you know, the whole world is learning in a way that's better than how we can learn now because of what they have with the internet and technology, right?

I mean, a lot of people, I'm sure, at DLD and elsewhere are very excited about this concept of MOOCs and massive online courses. You know, how do you see the likes of Coursera and Udacity doing? What do you think about their methodology?

I think they're doing really cool things.

They're cracking the distribution problem, right? Especially Coursera, of having all this great knowledge locked up in institutions and finally being available to people. Uh, but it's very different from, from what we're doing, I think, where distribution is only one piece of what we're doing with Codecademy. What we're really doing is trying to build a new learning experience for people. It just so happens that that's available to millions of people, but I think the real great part of it is it empowers people not just to learn, like you do on a lot of the MOOC sites, but to become teachers. You know, whether it's two 15-year-olds in Texas or whether it's someone somewhere in the world who has something to share, uh, finally they can share it with a big audience. That they wouldn't get because they're not university professors. But they might be better teachers than a professor who spent a long time on research.

Because it does feel to me that a lot of the online education companies are simply taking offline and putting it online. You know, you can sit through an hour-long lecture of an MIT professor. And that's great. Better than not being able to do that. But yours is very different.

I think what we wanted to do was really create the 2.0 version of education. We didn't want to be the banner ad where You took something that existed offline, in that case the print ad, and you brought it online to become a banner ad, which eventually, obviously, Google did a much better job of advertising online. The way we think, you know, you can take classes from offline and bring them online, but if you create this true native experience, build something that people really want to use and really that people deserve on the web.

Yeah. The thing that, you know, really struck me as awesome about Codecademy was the way you can start to learn right on the home page. How are you going to reconcile that frictionless learning with at some point needing to generate revenue and maybe start getting payments out of people?

I think revenue comes a lot later down the line, and as to whether or not that comes from users paying straight up front, I think remains to be seen. I think the real power in it, as you mentioned, is you have to lower the barrier for people to learn, to make it so low that all it requires is typing in a name, right? You're not using any of these old conventions of enrolling in a class or a course or waiting to get an email from a professor. Instead, you can just get started learning just in time, you know, when you want something. And I think the whole learning process is the same way, where we prompt you with tips and help along the way to give you that sort of like just-in-time continued experience.

Yeah. And I wonder whether you might share with the audience a bit of an insight into the new API rollout you've just launched.

So we released something the other day with a bunch of API providers, including YouTube, and Twilio, and Stripe, and the Sunlight Foundation. Where we're teaching people to build applications with real-life technologies. So they can embed— learn how to embed YouTube videos on their page, collect payments with Stripe, call their phones with Twilio. What we've learned is people really want to build things that are practical, that they can share with their friends, and that they use every day. So it's not just about learning, you know, the boring parts of programming, but it's about creating something and then sharing that with people, and something that you want to use that, you know, you interact with all the time.

Yeah, I mean, We as the British government are opening up APIs in all of our data, all of our systems. Would you work with us? Is that something you'd be up for?

For sure. It would be great to teach people how to use government data, yeah.

As we're thinking about rewriting our IT curriculum, do you have any— besides use Codecademy, which I'm sure you'll say—

number one to get.

Yeah. Conceptually be thinking about this?

I think what you should be teaching people to do is really learn practical skills, learn languages that are in demand today in today's economy instead of building a curriculum for yesterday, which I think you find at a lot of educational institutions now is, is institutions are 5 to 10 years behind the reality of what people want in the workforce and what they need to learn in order to be, you know, productive members of the workforce. So look at what people need on the job, talk to companies, and see what will help people learn easiest but also become employable.

Yeah, well, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK was a geeky bedroom coder as a kid, so it's very easy for me to sell computer coding in the UK. One of our challenges at the moment is how our immigration system can allow top coders into the country, because the best computer programmers don't always have a PhD or a master's degree. Do you have any thoughts on how we should think about that?

We've had the same problem in the US. You know, we've hired a bunch of employees from elsewhere. Our first team member was from Jordan. We've hired someone from Finland, and we have the same problem with immigration. I think the workforce starts to evaluate people like we do on the job from GitHub and what they've done and what they've created. So that's sort of something I think you can embrace as a government, but training people to understand those signals is a lot harder than training them to understand degrees. Degrees. I think the future of understanding these things is much less about credentialing, and it's much more about what you've accomplished and what you've created in programming and creative fields than degrees.

Yeah, amazing. Well, I think we're just about out of time. I feel like a massive fraud because I can't, I can't code, but I now know where to go. So big round of applause for these, for Zach Sims.

Thank you.