infosys training review

melissa rasberry: as imentioned before i do want to thank you forjoining us tonight. we the team at the americaninstitute for research in supporting thecs10k community and we are excited tohave a number of learning opportunities just likethis one to offer you as part of our work in avirtual community space. tonight, i'll be heremainly for support. so if there's anything thatyou have questions or concerns

about you're welcometo either send me a direct message-- which you cando that by just scrolling over my name and that shouldgive you an option to send a private chat. or you're alsowelcome if there's something in general youcan put in a chat window and i'll take a look there. but hopefully everything shouldbe pretty self-explanatory. as we've notedhere we do you hope

that you will call inso that you can actually participate orally with us. you're welcome tochat in the window but we love hearingyour voices as well and emmanuel will bestopping from time to time so that you can ask questions. one thing we do askis that if you do call in we just askif you just make sure to mute your line if you'renot speaking so we can cut back

on some background noise. i'll be short to put theconference number in the chat window as well. for now i do want to justgive a brief introduction. emmanuel is the founder andprogram director of bootstrap. he's a former teachingfellow at citizen school and has received a numberof awards and accolades, including the alans. marx memorial prize for excellence supportingundergraduate education.

that's a long title there. but basically he was a prettyawesome professor at cornell. his background is abs in computer science as well as edd in algebraeducation from harvard. we're very excited tohave him with us tonight. without further ado, i'll goahead and pass it over to you emmanuel but as i said i'll bewatching the chat window to see if anyone needs support. thank you all for joining us.

emmanuel schanzer:great, alright well, thanks melissafor that introduction. i'll just do a quicktechnology check. can you guys all hear me? excellent. ok, fantastic. so i just want to clarifyreally quickly-- i appreciate the wonderfulintroduction-- i was actually not a professor at cornell.

that was just my experiencesas a head ta for a programming class there. my background is alsovery much as a teacher. i was a public high school mathteacher for a number of years. i also switched over to beinga middle school academic coach for a number of years as well. so i view myself as sortof a technology ex-pat who spent the majorityof his adult life as a teacher involvedin public schools.

so let's dive in. and being from fromboston you should know that means that i'mtotally comfortable with people interrupting me. i don't think it's rude. it's just being fromboston so please feel free to ask questionsin the middle of this. i'm totallycomfortable with that. so as i said my background isbrief life in the technology

sector. i went to go work for alarge tech company, redmond after graduation but thenswitched gears and became a high school teacher workingwith public high school students in boston. and what i realized atthe time was that algebra is very much a filter class. right it's a class thatseparates so many students. that's where a lot ofachievement gaps happen.

and i want to lookat how programming could be used withmy own students to help them with algebra. so what began sortof as a curriculum that i used withmy students years and years and years ago has nowgrown into a curriculum that reaches more than 10,000students every year in more than 17 statesin five countries. and we serve students inmiddle school, high school.

and they're actually now-- ijust learned this about a month ago-- apparently there aresome community colleges that are lookingat using bootstrap as sort of an algebraintervention for their rising freshman. that sort of is the scopeof things at the moment. i'm going to use this time totalk about just what bootstrap is and give you a sense forsort of where we come from. and i'm going to dothis in three acts.

so first i'm going to talkabout why algebra matters. i think that in the computerscience education world a lot of time we're really excitedabout teaching kids to code and we sort of say, yay,math is important too. but we don't really focuson exactly why algebra is so important whenwe start telling people why computer science can helpso we'll start with that. and then i'm going toask this question of whether or notprogramming can really

help students in algebra. it sounds like theanswer must be yes but it turns out the detailsare far more complex. and then finally sort ofthe least important thing. i'll tell you a littlebit about why bootstrap is different from some ofthe other programs that are out there and howour approach can be used. so first of allwhy algebra, right? why are we as, computerscience teachers, why should we

care about algebra? well first, obviously wecare about abstraction. and piaget himself actuallycalls out algebraic functions as being the dividingline between concrete and formal operational thinking. so to the extent that wecare about our students being able to thinkabstractly, we need them to be successful intheir first year of algebra because that's the firsttime that every student

in the country is goingto see formal abstraction. secondly, algebra is the gatewayclass for all stem fields. and i think all of us understandthat if a student fails algebra 1 they're sort ofscrewed for the end part. like, they're not goingto go into calculus. but we often forget that ifa student doesn't understand basic functions they'renot going to model projectile motion in physics. nor are they going tobalance chemical equations,

think about population growthor rates of change in biology, think about complex compoundinterest or economic growth models for whether they'rea business school student or going into economics. and they certainly aren't goingto go into computer science. so if we care aboutstem, well then we really need to be concernedabout how students are doing in algebra 1. because if they checkout of math at that point

they've made a careerdecision that closes off virtually all stem fields. but suppose you have askeptical student who says, hey man, it's allabout the benjamins. and that's fine, right? but a 2004 study looked at thecorrelation between the grades students get in high schooland their lifetime earnings. and what they found is thatthe grades a student gets an algebra 1 ismore significantly

correlated than any classwith the amount of money they're going to make forthe rest of their lives. so this is an economic issue. and when you think aboutthe achievement gap especially when youdisaggregate by race this also really becomesan equity issue as well. and then finally whetheryou love them or hate them we live in an era of high stakestesting and standardized tests. and that means thatif we want to get

coding into everyschool, we want to get computer scienceinto these schools, well, that's great. but remember if a student isn'tdoing well in their math class then we have an uphill battle. because a principal, asuperintendent, and even a parent is goingto be saying, look, if my kid doesn't pass thealgebra part of a math test they don't graduatefrom high school

so it doesn't matterhow engaged they are. if they're a highschool dropout they're not going to be successful. so given all of these reasons,and there are many more, we all sort of understandthat algebra matters a lot and we should becareful about it. and yet, how do we viewalgebra as a society? we're terrified. in fact i can go up toanybody on the street and say,

hey, i have a quickquestion for you. a train leaves chicago at6:00 p.m traveling east at 70 miles an hour. and before i even finishedthe problem statement i'm going to seethem start to sweat. i'm going to see people startlaughing and saying, oh, are you kidding me? oh my god not that again. but we have this, like, nationalptsd when it comes to algebra.

so why? why is algebra so hard? to understand that yougotta take a step backwards and think about whatwe tell children about math when they're young. so i'd like everyone inthe call to put yourselves in the shoes of,like, a three-year-old or a four-year-old. and when you're three yearsold math looks a lot like this.

an adult comes to us andsays, hey kid what's 4 plus 2? or they write it onthe board and they say solve the thing in red. so if i were to askyou all, hey kids, let young boys and girlssolve this thing in red. you all might say ohthe answer is six. you might just shout it out. it's six. and if i ask you, well,how did you get that?

well, some of you mighthold up two fingers and then four fingers and thensay that you counted them. others might have maybea different process for doing this. but what we learned whenwe were three years old is that math is a process. and whateveralgorithm you execute to achieve thatprocess if you're good at math that meansyou're good at the process

and you've got the right number. but if you didn'tget the right number. if you said 5 instead of 6 ormaybe you said 42 or something. well then now you start tofeel bad about yourself. you're thinking maybei'm not good at math. maybe i'm not goodat the process. but the importantthing to remember is that every three-year-oldin the room at this moment all agreed math is aprocess and their job is

to get the right number. and as we got older thisprocess got more complex. instead of doingjust addition we also added subtraction,multiplication, division, exponentiation, fractions,order of operations, and everything else. and yet, everysingle time we were asked to perform a piece ofmath our job was the same. turn the crank,execute the process,

and if you're good at mathyou get the right answer. and if you're badat math the number you come up with isnot the right answer. and then as kids geta little bit older now math looks like this. and let's see if there'sany real difference here. so again i could askeveryone on this call. i could say, hey guys,solve the thing in the red. shout out the answer.

go. and chances everyone in the callwould say it's 4 or x equals 4. so again math hasn'treally changed. you're stillcomputing the process. it's just now insteadof solving for a blank we're solving for the letter x. so 10 years latermath looks like this. so depending on whatstate you're in kids are encounteringfunction notation

around age 13, sometimes14, but at this point generally kids have beendoing math for 10 years. so think about that. how many pieces ofmath has a child seen before they encounterthe thing in red here? hundreds of thousands, right? or at least tens of thousands. and remember that every stepof the way that kid's been told your job is to get the answer.

so let me ask you, all rightguys, solve the thing in red. go, what's the answer? you can type it inthe chat if you like. is the answer 5? is it 17? maybe it's negative 2? what do you think? what's the answer? genie says multiple answers.

no, no, come on. we know what math is. andrea says it depends on x. what? that's crazy. your job is to giveme a number, right? britney says it's a line. sure, we could lookat this as a line but britney i want to knowthe answer to that line.

is it 7? is it 0? and you're allprobably laughing at me a little bit because youknow that what i'm saying is very silly. there is no answer to thisbecause this isn't a question. and that's the trick. that's what makes algebradifferent than everything a child has seen before.

because if you're thata-plus student who's always good at computingthe right number, well, this isn't justa harder process. this isn't any process at all. and if you're akid who's sitting there thinking that you'rebad at getting the answer. maybe you've struggled with theprocess for all these years. well, now you're in deeptrouble because you can't even figure out what the process is.

and that's becausealgebra is the first time that math changes from beingsolely about a process and now introduces these abstractobjects called functions. so this is cognitivechallenge number one. this is one reason whystudents struggle in algebra. because they have tomake a massive leap from all the processbased arithmetic they've seen before into thisworld of abstract objects. and a math teacher asksquestions about these objects.

instead of sayingcompute some number a math teacher mightask things like, is this functionlinear or exponential? is it 1 to 1 or is it on to? and if you're astudent and you think your job is to computethe answer as a number these questions aren'tjust hard they're nonsense. math didn't just get harder. math has changed.

so i'm a big fan of sayingthat arithmetic is to math as spelling is to journalism. if you're a greatspeller that doesn't mean you're going tobe a great journalist but if you don't know howto spell new york times is not going to hire you. the same is true for math. math is the study of abstractionbecause algebra is just the start of all of this.

eventually math becomesabout different kinds of abstract objects. we go into derivatives,integrals, manifolds, topologies, forms. all of these are greaterabstract objects. yeah, if you can't doarithmetic obviously you're not going to succeedin algebra but being wonderful atcomputation doesn't mean you're going to succeed either.

so challenge numberone is getting kids to think about thesefunctions as objects. but it gets worse. because these objects areso abstract that we actually can't look at them one on one. so a math teacher mightintroduce functions as-- sound. can you guys hear me? did i lose my sound? it looks like otherpeople are hearing me.

all right so maybe one personmay have lost their sound here. hopefully it will come back. so we introduce functions asbeing symbols in an equation, a line on a graph, a discreettable of inputs and outputs, and as a mapping betweendomain and range. and i know at leastone person on this call said that they havepreviously taught algebra. so at least one personknows that teaching any one of theserepresentations is non-trivial.

it takes a lot oftime to get kids comfortable just with graphing. there's all this vocabulary,all these skills, all these things youneed to learn just to be good at graphing. and then a wholeother set of things to work fluidly with tables,with function notation, and with a mappingbetween domain and range. and challenge numbertwo for students

is not only thatthey have to learn all these differentrepresentations but they have to realizethat they are connected. and that's not justme saying this. like, this is nctm hasbeen advocating for this. if you're from oneof those states that is all about commoncore you know that this is a big part of common core. if you're from otherstates, at texas, minnesota,

a lot of thesestandards are talking about multiple representation. so if you bought my argumentthat algebra really matters and that it's aproblem for all of us even in the computerscience world, then if we care aboutalgebra so much, what does theliterature say we have to do if you want tohelp students out? well, we need to make theserepresentations of functions

concrete and we needto make them connected. if we want to make adent in algebra scores these are our goal posts. act two, can programming help? well, back in 1970a mathematician named seymour papert publisheda groundbreaking paper on a language called logo. in which he said thatlearning to program teaches students a numberof fantastic things,

and he explicitlycalled out four things he believes studentswould learn. one of them was algebra. and since then we've tried allkinds of programming languages. either explicitly to teach math. so now we have ina lot of states that if you take acomputer science class you get a math credit,so students are literally told this is math.

or it's implicit. we, sort of, imply tokids, oh, if you like math, well, then you'll begood at programming. and if you like programmingyou'll be good at math. and then we sort of pray to thegods of computational thinking and say it's all the sameand we have this idea that programming will help. and now, fast forward to2016, we have tens of millions of kids in this country whoare coming to high school

having already learned to code. and as a result every singleone of those 10 million kids is doing great in algebra,and we can end the talk because problem solved, right? not really. in fact, thatdidn't materialize. the literature and the evidencethat linked programming to success in algebrahas been largely absent for the last 46 years.

and this is wherewe have to talk about a dirty, dirty secret. the world ofcomputer programming is vast, multi-faceted,and rich. and it turns out that there'slots of different programming languages out there. lots of them are good forcertain things and lots of them are good for other things. and depending on whatyou're trying to do

you want to use theright tool for the job. what if our job was helpingstudents in algebra? well, it turns out that most ofthe programming languages that are very popularnowadays for k-12 not only have nothingto do with math but there are infact math hostile, and i'll give you some examples. so for the math folks onthe call if i were to say, 1 over 3 times 3 equals x.

what is x? chances are you would say 1. 1 over 3 times 3 should be 1. but if we're talking aboutjava that's not true. if we're talking aboutjava it's actually 0. and in fact, it'll be 0, well,maybe if it's not 1 over 3, if it's 2 over 3 times 3, wellthen it'll be something else. and in fact for many languageslike scratch, javascript, python, if i change that 3 to bea really, really big number, 1

over, i don't know, 90million times 90 million, the answer isn'tgoing to be 1 either. it will be 0.999. now any fifthgrader can tell you that one third times 3is 1, and all of a sudden we found that some of the mostpopular programming languages out there behavevery differently. why? well, because these areprogramming languages

don't actually have numbers. they have these partialrepresentations of numbers. we can talk about ints,doubles, and floats, and longs, and so on. and if you're in aprogramming class that's a really goodconversation to have. but if you're in a mathclass and your fifth grader discovers that 1over 3 times 3 is 0 that's not a good discussion.

that's a problem becausethese languages don't actually have numbers. here, let me give youa programming example. so folks on the callyou can do this. audience participatory. so this is two linesof very simple code. you can type in theanswer down below. the first line of codeassigns a value 10 to x. in the second line of codeadds 2 to x and then stores

it back into x. so if i run the program,feel free to type this in, what is the final value of xwhen the program terminates? i see andria and vicki. yep, a lot of youpeople voting for 12. so genie, 12. exactly, exactly,you're all 100% correct. and if this were aprogramming class i would say a-plus, gold star,welcome to intro programming.

of course this is 12. of course. but if you're a mathteacher why does this example make you furious? the x can't equal x plus 2. in fact if we subtract x fromboth sides, boom, ben's got it, 0 equals 2. we've just proventhat 0 equals 2. so in this second examplewe've taken something that

is so obvious in programming,it's just so obviously 12, but in a math contextthis is like instant iep. like, go to theprincipal's office. something is really wrong here. so what's the problem? well the problem isthat in programming we use the wordvariable to describe things that are actually notmathematical variables at all. instead they're sortof buckets of memory.

and we use the equalsign not to denote a quality but todenote assignment, and assignment doesn'texist at all in math. gail knows whati'm talking about. this is your worstnightmare, she says. yeah, absolutely. mine too. so we don't have numbers,we don't have variables, and guess what, we don'thave functions either.

so here's some javascript code. the first linesays foo equals 0. so we are initializing avariable called foo to be 0. and in the next three lines ofcode define a function f of x. well that soundsreally math-like. so f of x takes ina value, ignores it, and instead it incrementsthe value of foo and returns a new value. or i guess it's post-increment.

so it will returnthe value of foo and then it will increment it. so what that meansis when i start the program foo is set to 0and then every time i call the function f, foo changes. it goes up by 1. so it starts at 0, and thenext time i call it it's 1, the next time i call it it's 2,the next time i call it it's 3, and so far this soundspretty good, right?

the problem is if ievaluate f of 5 five times i'm going to get five differentanswers because i'm violating the vertical line test. and any high schoolstudent can tell you that if violates thevertical line test f must not be a function. and yet, right therein the language it says function f of x. so what is this saying?

this is saying that inthese languages that are very popular right nowthey don't have real numbers. they have things they callvariables that aren't variable and they have thingsthey call functions that aren't functions. so look i don't want anybodyto leave here saying, emmanuel just told methat programming is bad. that's not whati'm saying at all. i think java is afantastic language.

i think python isa great language. i think every kid shouldlearn javascript and scratch and these fantastic languages. all i'm saying is if yourlearning goal is transfer into improvedperformance in math, then you shouldn'tget your hopes up in languages like this. so the good news is there arelots of languages out there that do have numbers,and do have variables,

and do havefunctions, and behave exactly the way that theywould in a math class. the problem is not a lot ofpeople teach them in k-12. we do. so now i'm going to talk aboutwhy bootstrap is a little bit different. first of all, we use analgebraic programming language and what that means is thatour numbers are numbers, our variables are variables,and our functions are functions.

secondly, we teach a structuredapproach to problem solving. so what do i mean by that? i mean that in thecomputer science world we often foolourselves into thinking that we teach kids problemsolving simply because we give them problems to solve. the research says that'sactually not how it works. you want to give students astructured approach to problem solving, you have tobe explicit about it.

and so we have an approach tosolving programming challenges that looks like this. we focus on multiplerepresentations of functions. we build up fromconcrete examples to generalized abstractions. we embrace nationaland state standard best practices forteaching algebra. and every single thing inthis structured approach applies equally to bothprogramming and math.

so if you're a programmingteacher believe me it's a lot of funto teach problem solving when you have astructure to fall back on. and if you're a mathteacher our structure is going to lookextremely natural to you. in fact, it'sdesigned on purpose so that math teachers whotake our pd can look at this and go, oh my god. this is exactly what ialready do with my students

for problems. so it's very natural. third, it's great whenyou have an algebra that applies over real numbersbut the nice thing about a programminglanguage is that we can use rich data types. so we're doingalgebra composition not just on numbers buton strings, and images, and booleans.

and in fact, in bootstrap,kids build a video game of their own design out ofpurely algebraic concepts. and finally, we take teacherneeds very seriously. and what i mean by thatis that our curriculum is more than just areally neat software tool plus a couple of activities. when we say curriculumwe're talking about the kind of curriculumthat a math teacher might see. and that means everythingfrom lesson plans,

to standards alignment, towarm up activities, exit slips, full featuredhomework assignments, and an integratedstudent workbook. and a lot of teachersalso work with slides so we provide that too. all of these are things thata working teacher needs. and if you're giving a teachera curriculum that lacks those, you're making an assumptionabout how much free time they have to build it themselves.

and at bootstrap we knowthat teachers are busy. what does the mapping betweenalgebra and programming look like? we teach domain andrange in a math class. that's a reallyimportant concept. it's like the basis of theintro to function machine. in a math class we havekids write simple examples. so if you have a wordproblem about sally selling lemonade for $1 aglass and having

to spend a nickelon lemons and sugar, well, a math teacher won't jumpinto defining the function. instead a math teacher willsay, let's do some examples. let's talk about what happenswhen sally has a really bad day and sells noglasses of lemonade. what about when she sells oneglass, two glasses, 10 glasses? and then a teacherasks to generalize into the final definition, andthat's what we do here as well. and then finally,in a math class

it's really goodto have students present solutions andtalk about their solutions to other students. but what does this haveto do with programming? what do we as a computerscience teachers have to benefit from this? well, domain andrange, that's what we call a typespecification, so you're thinking about your input andoutput types of your function.

that's what math teachers havetheir students do all the time. test cases, unit tests,an example driven design, these are softwareengineering concepts that are commonly taught notin the k-12 reading region but in upper level softwareengineering classes in college. right, becausewriting unit tests is very important if youwant to be a professional. it's just that writing testcases hard for young kids. well, it turns out if you'rein a mathematical programming

language testingis easy which means we get unit tests forfree in our curriculum. and instead of havingto wait until kids are juniors andseniors in college we can do it with sixthgraders in middle school because that's whatmath teachers already have their kids do. defining functions? well, guess what wedo in programming?

we define functions too, sothat transfers perfectly. and presenting solutions isjust as important in math as it is in programming. so it's very common at again,the college and professional level, that you stand in frontof a room full of your peers and you do a code review. you have to explain yourcode and answer questions from other engineersor skeptical testers to make sure you've thoughtthrough the problem.

we do the samething in bootstrap. what do thesematerials look like? well, we have somesoftware, if you have a computer at your schooland that computer has a web browser, congratulationsyou're already set up to use bootstrap. we live in thecloud and it's free. all of our lesson plansare incredibly detailed, as well as do now's, exit slips,student handouts, workbooks,

and supplemental activities. all of them are freely availableon www.bootstrapworld.org right now for anyone whowants to take a look. all of our standards are alignedto national and state standards for mathematics. and that's important becauseif you're a superintendent and you're reallyconcerned about equity and you want to get computerscience into the school, here's the problem.

if you want to have acomputer science elective or after school programfor everyone in the country there's a lot ofchallenges at stake. first, you have to hirethousands of computer science teachers and that's goingto be a problem that takes 10 years to solve. second, you need to find roomin the schedule for a computer science class. and third, untilit's a requirement

you need to convince allof your students to sign up for something optional. and until all threeproblems are solved computer science becomes justa self-selective activity. and the kids whoself-select into that class may not be the diverse groupof students you really want. but if you're a superintendentand you have a curriculum that aligns with math, well,all of a sudden you have an infrastructure of tensof thousands of math teachers

across the countrywho can integrate this starting tomorrowinto their math classes. and once you do thatsuddenly computing doesn't become somethingthat you have to opt into. suddenly it's somethingthat everybody takes because everyone takes math. and finally, we offer supportto schools and school districts. there's an onlinediscussion group. it's a fantasticgroup of teachers.

you should totally check it out. again it's linkedfrom our website. the discussion aboutpedagogy is remarkable. it's wonderful tobe a part of it. we also for schoolsand districts that want support will offerconference calls and site visits in personwith their teachers. so what does the curriculumlook like at 10,000 feet? the very first thing studentsdo is brainstorm a simple video

game. so hypothetically, let's say benand gail are working together here and theydecide they're going to make an awesome gameinvolving, i don't know, a shark traveling throughthe ocean trying to get candy and trying toavoid, i don't know, a nickelback cd that'sfloating through the ocean. so gail and ben go home thatday excited because they have created a game in their heads.

it's concrete, theyhave ownership over it, and it's really engaging. and so we cash inon that engagement by introducing something calledthe circles of evaluation, and that's this littlecircle on the left here. the circles of evaluationare a visual spatial metaphor for order of operations. it's literally sentencediagramming for arithmetic. you can see how thefunction composition work.

and if you replace thedivision and multiplication symbols with letters fand g this same activity, the circles of evaluation,transitions smoothly into function composition. so that's what we teachkids in the very first unit. second unit, weextend these circles to cover not just functions overnumbers but over different data types. so instead of 9 dividedby 2 times 3 maybe

we're taking a solid red starand rotating it 45 degrees and then scaling it by 16. maybe you're finding animage of a shark on the web, flipping it horizontally,and scaling it down to the right size. so students are starting tobuild the images for their game and now they havedifferent data types. so we have to keep track ofall these different functions. what their inputsand outputs are.

and that's where weintroduce domain and range. next, we have students definefunctions of their own, and we do this usinga word problem. a rocket blasts off travelingat seven meters per second. describe its heightas a function of time. and here on the righthand side you've got the name, domain, andrange of this function. it's called height. we have students create a tableof discrete inputs and outputs.

then we ask themwhat's the rule? and they generalize that intoan abstract function definition. and then that functionwhen they type it into a computerthey get to actually see the rocket blast off. by the way if this looksexactly like the kind of thing you would do in analgebra class it's because that's a realalgebra question taken off of a standardized test.

so now ben and gail aresitting there going, all right, this rocket is coolbut what about our shark game? what about our game? we can here to makea video game, right? and we say, great. here's another word problem thatdescribes the candy floating through the ocean ordescribes the nickelback cd floating across the ocean. and ben and gailwork together using

the same structuredapproach to problem solving to solve thatword problem using multiple representations. and once they type intheir answer, boom. the nickelback cd goesacross the screen, the candy goes acrossthe screen as well, and when they go off theedge they never come back. and so gail stands up andsays, hey, wait a second. i played video games.

this whole programmingalgebra thing is new to me. i play enough video games. i know for a fact thatmy candy when it goes off the edge of the screen shouldcome back on the other side. and ben backs her up. he says, that's right. i know from experiencehow this should work. once they go too farthey should regenerate. and we say, youguys, it's great.

when should thesecharacters regenerate? and ben and gail talkabout it and they come back and they say, well, wheneverthe x-coordinate of my candy is less than zero. if it goes off the edgethen it should come back the other side. we say, let's talk aboutinequalities in the plane. and so we do this activityusing compound inequalities where students have to trap abutterfly in his mom's yard.

anyone who's taughtmath, this is going to look very familiar to you. this is just compoundinequalities in the plane. and then the exactsame word problem with slightly tweaked numbersbecomes the word problem you need to solve toimplement boundary detection in your video game. so now this is cool, the candy'sfloating across the screen, and coming backon the other side.

the nickelback album isfloating across the screen but now we haveanother question. now, the students are saying,well, what about my shark? i want my shark to goup when i hit the up key and down when ihit the down key. how do i do that? how can a function havedifferent behaviors? well, you havedifferent behaviors if you know whatkey was pressed.

in fact, this is exactlywhat we teach in algebra 2 when we introduce apiecewise functions. and so here is thealgebra 2 representation of that function. it's a function withdifferent behaviors over different subdomains. and here's the code for it. and if they lookvery similar it's because they aremathematically equivalent.

so now we've got theshark moving up and down, the candy's goingacross the screen, everything'slooking good but now when the shark hits thecandy, nothing happens. they just pass rightthrough each other. and once again, thestudents protest. the students say, wait a second. something should happenwhen they touch each other. i should get points,they should blow up,

something should happen. when should something happen? and they say, well, whenthe coordinates are close enough that they're touching. and we say, aha,well, how do you know the distance betweentwo points in the plane? and this is just thepythagorean theorem. and so we have studentsdo a geometric proof of the theorem usingpaper and pencil cut outs.

and when students haveproven the theorem themselves we say, all right, as ademonstration of mastery here's another word problem. if you understandthe theorem, program it yourself into the game. and then when studentsare done with that they have a fullyworking video game. and a lot of teachers do avideo game release party. it's basically a sciencefair for the math department.

and all of a suddenyou've got students showing off their game,hacking code in real time, making customizedtweaks for people, showing off the workthat they've done, showing off everything they'vebuilt in their math class. i want to point outhere is that as you go through this curriculum we'reteaching linear functions, word problems, inequalitiesin the plane, pythagorean theorem, piecewisefunctions, all of this.

but the math that'sbeing taught is-- oh, did i lose audio again here? melissa's typing. hopefully, you guys can hear me. i'm fine. ok, great. ok, so the point here is thatthe math that's being taught is being taught not justbecause oh, we were on chapter 6 and now we'reteaching chapter 7.

the math is beingtaught as an answer to a question thestudent cares about. the kid wants somethingto happen in their game and the math becomesa means to an end. it's directly applied. and here's some photosof a real party. this is a videogame release party, that the studenton the left, he's standing in front of his code.

he has to defend his decisions. this is a student at a middleschool in east palo alto. we actually convincedfacebook to let us host the launch party there. he's defending hiscode not just in front of his peers and his parents. he's defending it in frontof engineers from facebook who were shocked not only thekids were learning to code but that we had them do thesame kind of code reviews

that they have to do asprofessional engineers. the two youngladies on the right are describing howthey use the distance formula along with inequalityto do collision detection. it's a really exciting moment. and as a former mathteacher myself i gotta say, i was always really jealousof the science teachers because every yearthey got to show off all the stuff their kids built.when parents came into my room

for parent teachernight they didn't always have a sense for whatstudents were doing. in this situation,finally, i can show off and say algebra is great becauseit's the moment where kids get to build their ownmath and by the way it looks like anawesome video game. so here are two simple games. the one on the top iscalled shopping sensation. i guess it's a shoppertraveling through a mall

trying to get money and tryingto avoid the plant from little shop of horrors. down below is a banana outwandering through the desert trying to avoid the sun. and it's hard to seein the video conference but in the background thereis a suntan lotion tree that he's tryingto get to, to help protect him from the sun's rays. so are these gameslike super awesome

3d virtual reality,like, integrated things? no, they're incrediblysimple games. but you know what's awesome? students engagement comesnot from the sexiness of the graphics but fromthe fact that the kids feel ownership and mastery thatthey've built something that they can fix, and change,and customize on the fly. and any of you whohave young children, if you've got a six-year-oldwho just learned to make

scrambled eggs,that six-year-old knows that scrambledeggs aren't fancy. but you know whathe or she knows? he knows that theeggs are something he or she knows how to make. and that kid isgoing to want to make scrambled eggs for you all daylong, even if it's just toast. the same is true here. our benchmark forengagement is whether kids

feel confident they'vemastered the algebra. so that's whatbootstrap 1 looks like. and i say bootstrap one becausethis curriculum is in fact only our introductory course. and i've got a question here. it says, the games look great. how do i get toteaching challenges in code.org code studio togoogle cs first to bootstrap? great question, jenny.

there's actually a lot ofdifferent sequencing options you can do. bootstrap one, thisalgebra aligned curriculum, is designed as a 20to 25 hour module. so if you're aprogramming teacher you can slop that in afterstudents have outgrown code.org or after they'veoutgrown cs first. basically, when studentsare tired of blocks that's a great chance.

that's exactly themoment you want to introduce them to bootstrap. if you're an algebra teacher,or someone in your school is an algebra teacher, the 20hours i've just talked about, 15 of those hours are the hoursthat math teacher is already spending on the same concept. we want 20 hours of your time. if you're a math teacher wedon't want 20, we want five. the other 15 hours arehours are already spending

teaching the same darn stuff. so what does thislook like in schools? there are lots ofschool districts that use bootstrapas a great way to get every kid programmingwithout having to find room in the budget for acomputer science teacher or room in the schedule fora computer science class. they integrate it directlyinto the math class because for them it's a greatway to get coding for free.

but there are otherdistricts, they don't care about the coding. they view bootstrap strictlyas a math intervention. and we've found over thelast 10 years of research we've been able to showstatistically significant gains in specific pencil andpaper algebra tasks. and you can findthem on our website bootstrapworld.org/impact. so it can be considered as botha math intervention or a cs

intervention if you like. and hey, if you teach at aschool that's fortunate enough to have a full time csteacher, well, bootstrap is a great way to give allthe students in that school a double dose of algebra whilealso learning rigorous computer science. but what happens when kidsare done with bootstrap 1? well, we have an intermediatecurriculum called bootstrap 2. bootstrap 2 builds oneverything students

have learned in bootstrap1 and most importantly everything the teacher haslearned teaching bootstrap 1. and both the teacherand the students can leverage that and adddata structures, model view controller architecture,and a python-like syntax. it's the perfect bridgeclass if you want to go on to python or java. we're also building aap cs principles course, so teachers that are interestedin this sort of thing

stay tuned. we'll have somethingwe're really excited to announce atthe end of the year. and finally, bootstrap itselfinherits from a college level course called program by design. this is a universitylevel curriculum. there's a textbook for it. it's exactly whatfreshman cs majors take at schools likenorthwestern, wpi,

northeastern, andbrown university. so this is collegelevel material that we've brought downinto the middle school. and because we have programby design as our roadmap we know that this thing can gobroad and it can also go deep. what does this look likeat the district level? so we offer packagesfor school districts where we'll provide in-personprofessional development for 50 teachers every year.

we provide the studentworkbooks as well. we include the software andtech support, all the server fees, everything. we do teacher support. we fly back outto those districts to do two additionalfollow up days where we bring the teachersback during the school year and debrief what's gone welland what the pain points are. in addition, our staff hangsout for a week in the district

visiting the school, sittingin on the classrooms, and seeing what the realchallenges are on the ground. and hey, we alsooffer tech support. as a former teachermyself i know that if something breaksand i don't have someone that i can call in thatmoment and yell at, i'm hesitant about using it. and so indeed, aschool district, if you're a teacher in oneof our partner districts

we have complete teacherand tech support for you. so if you want to findout more what do you do? first, i highlyrecommend checking out bootstrapworld.org. we give all of ourmaterials away for free. we also have a bunchof workshops coming up. march 17 throughthe 19th, our team is going to be insunnyvale, california. thanks to linkedinand palantir, we'll

be doing a three day trainingfor anyone who's interested. there's about fourseats left available. and again, you cansign up on our website, bootstrapworld.org/workshops. if you can't makethat, in may we're going to be doing a workshopin dallas, texas may 14 and then i believe the16th and 17th as well. we, just literally 10minutes before i jumped up, oh, it's the sameweek as [inaudible].

darn it, well,don't worry genie. there's other workshops as well. i, just 10 minutesbefore starting the call, we just scheduled anotherworkshop in los angeles. we're being hosted bythe brentwood school. that's going to bejune 20 to the 22nd. and then july 18to the 22nd we are honored to be a foundingpartner of the cspdweek. bootstrap has teamed up withexploring computer science, ap

cs principles, and the nationalcenter for women in technology to offer the singlelargest cross-curricular pd event in cs education history. we're grateful to the supportof the infosys foundation, ncwit, and the nationalscience foundation who provided the support tomake this available all five days of pd. travel, room, board,everything for all teachers for absolutely free.

you need to sign up nowbecause the applications are due in the next couple of weeks. the first 80 teachers who signup for each of these tracks are eligible toreceive full funding. the strength of the applicationis based on things like, are you teaching in ahigh poverty school? because again, equity is at thebasis of all of our mission. do you have a principalwho's willing to write a letter of support.

so if you havethese things and you want five days ofamazing free pd please come join us at cspd week. it's going to be amazing. and again, the detailsfor all of these are available on ourwebsite/workshop. so that's everything. happy to open up to questions. thank you guys so muchfor listening to me yammer

on for the last 40 minutes. and of course you can followus on social media as well, and please stay in touch. melissa rasberry: thankyou so much, emmanuel. that was terrific. as he mentioned, he's more thanhappy to answer any questions that you may have so if wouldanyone like you chime in via audio and ask emmanuelfor some follow up or you're welcome todo via chat as well.

but if you areconnected by phone it would be greatto hear your voice. gail: this is gail. i'll ask a question. emmanuel schanzer: hey gail. gail: hi. i'm curious toknow, emmanuel, how you would explain to adistrict that was interested in bootstrap csprinciples and ecs,

how they would all fittogether in an integrated way. emmanuel schanzer: that'sa really good question. i mean gail, isuspect you're going to have your ownanswer to this as well. so i think ap cs principlesand ap computer science i would of used thoseas really great goals that we want to get our studentsto perhaps by the end of four years. if we have students takingtheir ap courses junior

and senior year, that's great. but obviously we can'tmandate an ap cs class for every child in a schoolunless students all really view themselves as being bothinterested, confident, competent in viewingcomputer science as relevant. so personally, i viewecs and bootstrap as being extremelycomplimentary. for bootstrap, our focusis very much around making sure this algebraconnection is there.

and i know thatgail's team with ecs does an unbelievablejob dealing with issues of identity, culturalrelevance, and confidence. and these are issues that thisisn't something that bootstrap focuses on at all. so students can learnprogramming in ecs and get a sense forjust how important, how much of theirlives and worlds are changed by computerscience, and identify

that computerscience is something deeply important to them. at the same timein their math class they may be exposed tobootstrap as a great way of solving word problemsand doing better in math. and taken together, i thinkif they work in concert, to build both the confidenceand the competence for every student thatcomputer science is something that they can do andit's important to them.

and at that point,i think that's where it becomes really valuable totalk about ap cs principles. but gail, i would actually loveto hear your answer for this as well. gail: well, it'sinteresting because i did put you on thespot there on purpose but i was struck by the slideyou had about problem solving essentially, andthe focus on being able to presentyour work, and being

able to talk about therange of possible solutions. and these were allthings that i did both in math classeswhen i taught them and in programming classeswhen i taught them. and i'd like to thinkthat kind of trickled over into ecs but with allof the features that go along with the ecs that make it amuch better course than anything i ever taught backin the old days. but it's that, to me,having reinforcement

of those kinds of skillsin multiple classes is as important asany particular content that we might ever teach becausei think that just doesn't happen in schools at all. to me they are notconflicting and i think some people tend to seethese things because we've never had multiple coursesto choose from before. i think folks tendto say things like, well, what if they learnedscratch in eighth grade?

well, you know, whatif i learned algebra for when i wastwo does that mean i'm not suppose to takeany more math classes? i mean it's that notionthat these things reinforce each other. and the more that we cando to support students, you know, the varietyof different ways in their learning,i think, the better. anyways, i'm just curious.

emmanuel schanzer:i totally agree and i think it'sworth pointing out that there's beena lot of friction over the last coupledecades between the math community and the computerscience community. i think that math teachersjumped into logo with open arms and then were a littlebit disappointed by the lack of results. and since then there's beena lot of mutual frustration

where the computer scienceworld says, why aren't the math teachers buying in? and the mathteachers are saying, why are the computerscience people trying to take over what we do? and so there's been thisanimosity in the past. where i totally agreewith gail on here is that we can bury thishatchet rather than mask being the obstacle tocomputer science or computer

science being the foil to math. when we view them asworking in concert we can do things that noneof us can do individually. gail, i wish i had theeloquence of the answer you just gave when i gave you my answerto that question because i think you're spot on. so other questions that i seehave popped up in the text chat here. britney, i have heard of elixir.

it is a functionalprogramming language so it definitely fits alongsort of the algebra line but it's not designed forsort of educational context. it's definitely orientedtowards building highly scalable professional applications. i would also add thatsort of with bootstrap we built the wholewidget so not only do we design theprogramming language and have influenceover the features.

but we also design theprogramming tools students are using and thecurriculum which means we have opportunitiesto make sure that the pedagogy we recommendis reinforced by the software, is reinforced bythe language, and is reinforced even bythe error messages. so i'll have to checkout more about elixir but it seems extremelycool and it's great to know and great to seethat functional programming is

no longer just this weird thingthat no one else has heard of so thank you for chimingin with another functional programming recommendation. genie, i see youasking if bootstrap is accessible tomiddle school students. absolutely. the sweet spot forbootstrap 1, we would say, is eighth or ninth graders. and that's and that'sthe sweet spot.

there's tons ofmiddle schools that use bootstrap withseventh graders as a way of gettingthem prepared for their rigorous algebra 1. it's also usedwith sixth graders. in fact, there's a schooldistrict in maryland, a number of theirschools use bootstrap with their giftedfifth graders as a way of priming the pumpfor rigorous algebra

they're going totake in sixth grade. likewise, bootstrap is usedas a remediation program. let's all be honest. we know juniors and seniorsout there who cognitively could totally do algebra but they'vebeen burned so many times before that the momentthey hear a train leaving chicago they freak out. so bootstrap can be usedin multiple contexts and you could just tellthose older kids, hey, forget

about math, thisisn't a math class. we're all here tomake a video game. and then with a nod anda wink you get started. so it's designed tobe flexible for both, i would say 50% of ourstudents are in middle school, 50% are in high school, give ortake maybe 5% or 10% of error. yeah it does take alittle bit of time. i think somethingthat math teachers are very quick to jump on is thatthe pedagogy is so important.

i think a lot of folkswho come to bootstrap from the programming worldthey focus so heavily on the programming thatthey view the pedagogy as a sort ofheavyweight, weird thing on the side they can skip over. all i can say is it's totallyworth the time and i cannot recommend coming to pd enough. pd is really, really fun. we model the entire curriculum.

and after each sectionwe take a break and ask why did the teachersthink we did it this way, how might we change it, howmight we differentiate it? the training isreally, really fun and we work hard to makesure it's affordable. oh you were in, of course,digital educator day. well genie, don't worry. if you can join us atthe brentwood school on june 20th, the 22nd wewould love to have you.

and if you can't make that, cspd week is gonna be a blast, come hang out with myself, withgail, with owen, with joanna. it's going to bereally, really fun. anne asks, what would yourecommend for 11th graders who don't need remediation? should they startwith bootstrap 1 and go fast toget to bootstrap 2 or is bootstrap notappropriate for 11th graders? ah, interesting question.

so i would basically saystart with bootstrap 1 and go fast becausewhat students are going to learnin bootstrap 1 that they haven't seeneven if they're perfectly comfortable with algebrais both the programming language and the structuredapproach to problem solving. and both of those bootstrap2 takes for granted. bootstrap 2 assumes kidsare masters of both of them. so if students are alreadysuper solid with the algebra

i would say they canblast through bootstrap 1 in a significantlyshorter amount of time. i believe that it's quitepossible that an 11th grade teacher could knitthe two of them together, teachbootstrap 1 very quickly and then go deep inbootstrap 2, and build a semester long programmingclass out of it if they chose. interesting, yes. so genie, i'll be honesti haven't been to a c-stem

training so i can't speak fromexperience but my understanding is that c-stem is very muchfocused on doing math-like things in a c++ environment. and so c++ is a really powerfulprogramming language that isn't designed around the mathconnection so it for example it doesn't have numbers, itdoesn't have variables, it doesn't have functions atleast not in the sense that a math student will beencountering in a math class. so i think that if your end goalis that students have to learn

c++, and you want to makesure that the kinds of things they're doing with c++are as mathy as possible, i think that the c-stemmaterials that i've seen seem to have a lot ofgood stuff there. but again, having notbeen to a c-stem workshop i can't speak from experience. and gail, i totallyagree with you. for 11th graders changingthe problem context is probably a really good ideaespecially for 11th graders.

jason asks any adviceor warning for trying to do bootstrap 1 at the endof the year in algebra 1? that's a really good question. i think the advantage ofdoing bootstrap 1 at the end-- so like after the statetest, after the finals-- the advantage ofthat is it makes your planning a loteasier as a teacher because integration takes alot more up front planning. so that's one argumentfor doing that.

another argumentfor doing that is that if you're doing itat the end of the year you can do bootstrap everysingle day, just monday through fridayyou're just doing it in every consecutiveperiod, which means you can move through thematerial a whole lot faster. you're not having toworry about retention and bringing kids back towhat they did last week and so it goes very quickly.

and the third argument todo it at the end of the year is you can use itto link back to what you've shown during the year. so as they're solvingproblems in bootstrap 1, let's say a student tosaying i want my candy to come back on thescreen, you can say, hey, remember what we did withinequalities in the plane. and so it's a reallynice way, it's like a capstone projectof reminding students

just how much they'velearned during the year and why it's applicable. here's the warning. here's the downside of doingit at the end of the year. the downside is ifstudents wind up having a lot of ahamoments-- if there are certain concepts thatthey were struggling with and when they finally seeit applied in bootstrap 1 they go, oh, that's what itis-- then it may be that you're

like, oh man, i wish theyhad that experience earlier. but for a first timebootstrap teacher who's sort of dippinghis toe in the water, who wants to be conservativeand to sort of test it out, i think doing it at the end ofthe year is a fantastic idea. and if you feel good about itand if the results are positive instead you may decidethat for the following year you want to do it at thebeginning of the year, or that you want to spend yoursummer doing some planning

time to think about how tosprinkle it throughout the year so it's tightly integrated. so students are doing thesame concept in bootstrap that they're doingin their math book and they're much morelikely to draw connections. viola says, i work at acontinuation high school so books will be idealfor my 11th graders. oh fantastic, viola, youuse the word continuation school and not every stateuses that, you wouldn't happen

to be in california would you? aha, ok, the ralphe j. bunchecontinuation school in oakland has actually used bootstrap asa remediation for their 11th and 12th graders to getthem to pass algebra. and they've had a lot ofreally good success there. i would say basedon their experience, and i'm happy to connect youwith some of the teachers who have used it, i would recommendgiving yourself more than the standard 20 to 25 hours.

i might give yourself 30hours, so a little bit of a little extrawiggle room to go deeper on some of the concepts. so happy to talk more with youabout that offline but yeah, i think you might wantto be a little bit more conservative withtiming especially your first time through. melissa rasberry: last callfor any final questions. i'm sure emmanuel will behappy to connect with you

afterwards as well fora variety of means, but anything before weclose out for the evening? emmanuel schanzer: looks likea couple of folks are typing. melissa, at themiddle of the hour does this chat automaticallyend and we turn into pumpkins? melissa rasberry: we, do not. unfortunately i'm going tohave to log off pretty shortly thereafter though becausei have another call. emmanuel schanzer:all right, so looks

we've got about twominutes left on the clock. i'll answer as many questionsas i can as they get typed in. genie says, i haven'tbeen trained in c-stem either by attended atwo week alice training. alice was very tightlylinked with math. excellent, was that byany chance steve cooper's training over at stanford? in any case, yeah, there wego, he does a really nice job. if you can makeit to our training

i think it would bereally nice to bring the context of your priorexperiences into it. it'll give you a chance tomix and match and sort of see how these thingscomplement each other, and we would have a blast, andwe would love to work with you. the alice training. alice is a verycomplex environment. i mean it's gotinheritance built in. there is some prettyhigh level concepts.

again, i think it reminds mea lot of c-stem in that it's a computer science class that'sbending over backwards to bring in some math stuff. bootstrap comes from avery different angle. so our goal is it's much moreaccessible to a math teacher. it's a math class thathappens to use programming to build something kids loveand are and are excited about. so in our experiencemath teachers pick it up very quickly.

you can look atour website again you'll see that theoverwhelming majority of teachers whoare using bootstrap are actually non cs teachers. i think it's like 60% of themare algebra or pre-algebra teachers, another10% are neither math nor computing teachers, so it'sa very gentle introduction. math teachers feelright at home. so i know that we'reat the top of the hour

so i'll pass thisback to melissa. thank you all somuch for being here. gail, it was an honor tobe on the same call as you. and i'm really excited tobe at cs pd week with you. i think we're goingto have a great time. we certainly do appreciate it. just a few wrap ups, next stepswe hope that if you are not already a member ofthe cs10k community that you will consider joining.

i'll put the linkin the chat window there so you'll have thateasily accessed as well. i'm guessing that many ofyou may follow us on twitter but if you don'tjust as an fyi we do have a twitter chat on thefourth monday of each month. we moved our starttime back an hour so it's a little bit later. it's 6:00 pacific 9:00 eastern. and our next chat willbe on march the 28th.

and we have a coupleof webinars that are going to be coming up soon. march 22nd gail chapman is goingto be doing another one on ecs and broadening participation. and then end of march, ithink we almost solidifed it, on the 29th lien diazfrom the college board is going to be doingan update about csp and some of the criticalthings that she's going to be sharing with you all.

so again we hope that youwill stay connected with us and we're glad you're here. we hope to see you onanother webinar very soon. but thank you again,emmanuel and i hope everyone hasa great evening. good night.