Sean Tibor: Hello and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 139. My name is Sean Tyber. I'm a coder who teaches. Kelly Schuster Paredes: And my name is Kelly Schuster Paredes, and I'm a teacher who codes. Sean Tibor: And today we're rejoined by an old friend of the show, a person we met a long time ago at pycon and our very first pycon. We're pleased to welcome back Brianne Kaplan, the founder of Code youe Dreams. Brianne, welcome to the show. Brianne Caplan: Thank you. I'm so happy to be back. Kelly Schuster Paredes: We are too. Sean Tibor: Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. It's like catching up with teacher friends. They sit around and chat about everything that's going on, and especially when it's computer science teacher friends. I think the conversation veers definitely towards the nerdier, but it also is not just technology nerdy. Like, we really get into teaching and learning and everything. And I'm expecting we'll have a good time talking about all of that today. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Yeah. And I feel sad to say, but I'm. When we have a returning guest, especially someone like you, I'm like, oh, it's. I don't have to think so hard because everything's so natural. So I feel like, yay. Sometimes I'm learning too much during the show and I'm like, oh, my gosh, what am I going to process this? But we learn a lot from you, but I know who you are, so I'm excited to have you on the show again and to introduce you to everybody. Brianne Caplan: So much has changed since 2019. Sean Tibor: I know kind of a lot's happened. All right, before we get into all of that, why don't we start with the wins of the week? It's my favorite thing to do. And we'll just start with you, Brianne. Something fun that's happened inside or outside of the classroom. A win to share something positive. Brianne Caplan: Yeah. Something exciting from this month is at Code youe Dreams, we rang the NASDAQ bell, so it was really fun. And I joked on LinkedIn that code your dreams IPO'd like $22.5 million. And people believe me, even though the next line was just kidding. We're a non profit. Kelly Schuster Paredes: That is so cool. How did you do that? What time is it open? Brianne Caplan: Yeah, it was at like 8. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Oh, that's not open till 8. Brianne Caplan: I think we did the opening bell. There's also the closing bell, but it was fun. It was a nice reason to visit New York. Kelly Schuster Paredes: That is really cool. Sean Tibor: All right, Kelly, you can Follow that. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Mine's really, really silly, but I tend, I don't know, in the summertime. I haven't coded that much. This summer I've been working like 30 hours a week finishing up the app. So there's nothing fun that I'm almost done. But I went to Long island for the first time and I'm telling you, do I feel really dumb because I honestly thought like Long island was going to be like an extension of Manhattan. Little did I know the island is completely filled with trees and is the absolutely beautiful place. I was so pleasantly surprised. And I went to East Hampton and apparently everyone from East Hampton has a house in Boca. And I laughed. I thought about you, Sean. Sean Tibor: I've been to Long island many times because my wife grew up there. Not in East Hampton, she would say in the less fancy part. But we now live in Boca, so we've got it halfway right. Kelly Schuster Paredes: I was just, I felt really dumb. It was like 80 something miles and 54 miles and it's just this gorgeous state parks everywhere. I went to as many as I could in three days and it was great. That was a huge win. Sean Tibor: Especially out on the east side of the island. There's some really pretty areas out there. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Yeah. So that was a non coding win for me. Sean Tibor: Very nice, very nice. So many updates. I had two of my former interns start as full time employees today on my team. I'm very excited for them to come back. My current batch of summer interns, we've, you know, doubled in size this summer from previous summers. They're entering their last week next week, so they're all wrapping up their projects and working on presentations and it's been really exciting to see all that come together. We actually did a VR meeting with all of them. So we had VR headsets and we met in a meta space and I was calling in from Bratislava, Slovakia for the meeting because I was there for work and I have to say, I did not like it at all. I thought it was a terrible experience. It was very silly and it was very fun. But the uncanny valley of the avatars and just no, I, I, it's not there yet. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Were you like in their space and smacking them in the head or anything? Sean Tibor: The room that we were in had markers and magnifying glasses and all these things you could pick up. And of course then they'd get thrown across the room or picked up and zoomed into giant size and we all turned into kids again. It was fun, but it was, also, that part wasn't bad. It was Just the fact that the avatars for me were not okay. Because I think when I thought about it afterwards, it's kind of like being a puppeteer. You have where the hands are from the controllers and where you have where the head is and where you're looking. And then the software is trying to figure out what bodies should do with those three points of reference. The software was not good. There were a lot of very awkward positions. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Did they lock you into your chairs? Sean Tibor: That helped a lot. To be locked into the chair. Kelly Schuster Paredes: That's funny. I can't wait to see this in action with kids. Sean Tibor: And this is with things I don't like. Even worse, impulse control. Kelly Schuster Paredes: It'll be interesting. We have such a great guest. We have to get started. Sean Tibor: So we first met Brianne in 2019. And at that time, Brianne, you were making the move from being a full time data scientist and technologist into this world that it was certainly more than a hobby for you. I would definitely say it was like in that passion project area where you were working on Code your Dreams at the time. And as I remember it back then, code your dreams was designed to help young people, especially women, learn how to code and learn how to create things using code. Encouraging, positive, challenging and thoughtful. And it was designed primarily as an after school program, if I remember correctly. Since then, I believe you've evolved it considerably, which I can't wait to hear about. And you've also become involved with coder heroes as well, and I'd love to hear more about that too. So catch us up from 2019 to now since the last time we spoke. Just five years and five minutes. Right. Brianne Caplan: Well, there was a global pandemic. Sean Tibor: I remember that. I was there. Brianne Caplan: That was great. That changed a lot of things. So yeah, when we met, I was still working as a data scientist and there were many progressions there from it being all of my time during evenings, to all of my mornings and evenings, to basically all of my time and then trying to figure out how do I get my day job done. Covid really changed everything because it just, I think, created flexibility for a lot of people and it definitely created flexibility for myself and our students and volunteers. So we started in the after school space for kids. We've continued in the after school school also summers as well as we do elective classes within schools. We've started doing a lot of hackathons as well. Then for adults, we work synchronously inside a few different prisons, asynchronously in a few hundred prisons and correctional facilities. And then do after work trainings for adults as well as hackathons for adults. And actually most of our hackathons include both kids and adults innovating together. So there's been a lot of change in just figuring out exactly who we're serving, what we're doing. Technology has changed a lot. So we've moved from just teaching app development to having over 13 different curricula and program tracks. So it's just been a journey. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Wow, that's crazy. What 13 tracks? If you don't mind sharing. Yeah. Brianne Caplan: So we have, so we start in kindergarten. So we have intro to coding, we. And then we have code and play, both different. I'm a child, so I, I teach a lot of our kindergarten classes. Actually once we get to middle school we start app development and then high school we. For students without a computer science background are we like to start with app development and then choices because we know choices are important for so many reasons for both kids and adults. So after app development we have web development, data science, entrepreneurship, UI ux. We have something called Dance Tech Fusion, which is where students both engineer encode a robot to dance alongside real dance teams. What am I missing? Kelly Schuster Paredes: Was that all of them? But that's so awesome. I love all these choices and it's great to make that connection. This has been like a ongoing theme. I think one of our ongoing themes, we have many of them and the philosophy of coding, how can you hook kids and get them to stay? And I love that. Sean Tibor: And I think the other thing that we found too is that what works for kids can often work for adults. Right. This idea of combining play and learning is really important and really powerful. I was having this moment last week or the week before. It's a really busy crunch time right now at work and things are just. There's so many things going on. And I was talking with my boss and he's feeling the same way. And I said about a third of the time, this should be fun, right? I can't expect it to be fun all of the time because there's things you gotta do. And I love my team and I love the work we're doing with it. But when everything has to be done yesterday and it's all fixing this and, you know, designing that and everything, sometimes it becomes less fun. And we tend to overlook. For adults, we forget that this is supposed to be fun and that making things and building things and playing is powerful. When it comes to learning. We just switch that part off of our design brain when we're thinking about how Do I design for adults? Brianne Caplan: I feel like one of the most undervalued points of education is fun and joy and students really digging into what they love. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Yeah, it's that love of learning. Right. I think about this with my own son, and he's not a coder yet. If I can find a way to get him maybe a hook with fishing or something, because he's a learner with that, if I can just find that way to mutate that love with technology, I think he would see the fun in it. That's the job that most of us as educators really spend most of our time trying to do. Find that way to hook them and get them excited, what have you. I was thinking about going from where you were before and now, like, you're correct me if I'm wrong. Your intention was always about making the community better. How has that evolved since 2019 to now? Brianne Caplan: Yeah, actually, that's one thing that has really stayed the same is that idea of community and grassroots innovation where no matter which track students are a part of, it's really all about students innovating for their communities and thinking just really intentionally about the different communities that we're a part of, both local and global, and how we. Whether I'm an adult halfway through my career or I am a child in middle school, how can I be a change maker for my own community? In traditional education, a lot of times we don't value as much that youth voice. And so a lot of times when I try to describe what we do at Coach youh Dreams, we really are just an incubator of those diverse voices and ideas and technologies that come out of the teaching that we do. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Can you help us? I love that philosophy. And I always try to get Sean and I were we would start things like demonstration of learning, pick a passion, do something, make something, do something that you love. But as an educator, it's sometimes difficult to try to really get those individual voices. Do you have some certain magic recipes that maybe two, three, anything you can share for us as educators? What some of the ways, like you get them to really the kids to really express their voices? Brianne Caplan: Yeah, I think we're really lucky to mostly be during the out of school time where there's just more flexibility in what we're able to teach and how we can teach it. So we focus on, in the beginning, more of the design thinking process where students are doing a lot of group sharing. They do individual work. Thinking about, okay, what am I passionate about? Which groups am I a part of? What are my Identities, what's important to me? And just being able to ask themselves lots and lots of different questions and then hear those answers from everyone else that's in their group to be able to figure out, okay, what really is important to me, who am I truly as a person? What about me and my identity is important. I feel like a lot of times we aren't given the space to think about those really important questions, and I don't think I thought about that until I was an adult. So we just have that time and space to do all of that reflection. And students get really excited because they learn I'm different. But also I have similarities to all of the other students that are part of this group. So I think a lot of it is just during out of school time. We have so much time to experiment and discuss and really get that aspect figured out so that once students start thinking about the technology piece, they're already motivated because they know, this is who I want to impact. This is the problem I want to solve. I've already started doing user research. I've talked to people in my community. Kelly Schuster Paredes: I love that it's that whole child, right? Whole child hold, whole adult, whole social, emotional learning. That's one of the things like we say we want to do in schools, but it's definitely a hard thing to do. Can you share some of your projects? Share what a kindergartner is? Brianne Caplan: We could spend all of this time talking about kindergarten, because that is probably the class that I personally teach the most. One of my favorite is. So we had a first grader. She built an app. It was actually. She won. It was the 2021 Chicago Student Convention Invention Competition, which is one of Chicago's biggest innovation competitions. And she built a mindfulness app. And her app was all about, sometimes I get mad. How can we stop getting mad together? And so she created this mindfulness app where you got these, like, daily affirmations and it would put you through breathing exerc sizes. And just like such a brilliant app coming from first grade students, I have another student, she created my Dragon book, and it's a mobile app. And so she wrote all of these different dragon books that you can select from, and then you can write your own Dragon book. It's amazing databases. So that's actually really impressive and advanced for an elementary school student. Kelly Schuster Paredes: That's what I love about young kids. That's why I really do like sixth grade. I really love sixth graders. They're still very creative and they still have that little honesty about themselves where they really Let the Passion Show. How about an adult? Let's go full spectrum, put you under the spot. Sean Tibor: Also a Dragon book. Brianne Caplan: Same features. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Lights. It's more lightsaber. I can see Sean. Here's this lightsaber. Star wars trinket. Sean Tibor: Well, you know, it's funny, I ran into someone the other day. We were in a big group and they were all talking about Star wars and I was letting them have the conversation. And one of the women that was there was like, yeah, I never really got into Star Wars. Never really watched them and everything. Like, oh, okay, you know, that happens. And she's like, but I'm a huge Potter head. I love Harry Potter. And the entire conversation just like, like right over to Harry Potter without skipping a beat. And everybody was into it and it was just. It was fun for me because that's the great thing about adult learners, right? Like, they can have something that they're equally passionate about and bring it to their projects. Brianne Caplan: It is, it is really interesting. I mean, all students just seeing what they're passionate about, being the heart of what they build. And so one of my favorites is we had a ninth grade student, a student, Jillian. She created an app called Politea, which means the rights of citizens. And so her story was, she's in the ninth grade, learning to drive. That should be really exciting. But also a time where we're hearing about all of the police brutality happening. And so she built her app for when people are being pulled over by the police. It's an app where you click a button, it automatically starts recording. The aim is to create transparency between both police and civilians alike and creates a database of encounters to try to drive transparency for these encounters. So there's a rating system and she did some really cool data analytics. This is something that doesn't exist. She was talking to her friends about Black Lives Matter, how can I get involved? And this was just the perfect way for her to make an impact and explore the ways that she can make our community safer. Sean Tibor: That's fascinating because for years there's been tremendous amounts of police data that's been captured decades now of here's a record of all of the police reports that have happened in an area or where certain crimes have appeared. And it's always being used for more effective policing. To flip that and think about now, how do we actually look at more affecting police, more effective policing from a community driven side instead of from the police side, I think is a really powerful way of trying to drive that transparency. Because what if you had that ability to spot Trends in policing efforts and policing approaches. Right. The ability to identify outliers and maybe police officers who are doing a really great job or others that are not doing a great job. And it could be really amazing to see that kind of data, but from a completely different perspective and gathered in a different way that's more crowdsourced instead of centralized. Brianne Caplan: I completely agree. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Yeah. And just to be able to talk about that stuff with sometimes does not get talked about in school because we have to do our math, you have to do your English, we have to do this, and you have to memorize that and be able to bring out that topic that's clearly on this student's mind is something that probably could help her excel in the school time. Because she's already gotten that part satisfied. And now I can go back and focus in on other things that matter to the school, not to her. Possibly. Sean Tibor: I'm curious to know if that student saw other benefits from it or learned other things beyond just the coding and the technology. We've talked a lot about creating the project or having the project. The goal that's outside of the technology. Something that you really want and you're using technology to get there helps you learn in a much more powerful way. Like the elementary student learning about databases, because that's the best way for them to solve the problem of the Dragon book. You could see the same thing for other subjects as well. I have this community project. I think it's really important. I need to learn how to write better in order to be more persuasive. So can I go to an English teacher and get help with my persuasive writing to convince other people to use my app or to get a grant for it? What's the real thing you're trying to accomplish? It doesn't have to be math or science or English or computer science. It could be ands across all of those. Brianne Caplan: Absolutely. I think that she definitely learned so much more than just how to create an app. It was learning about law and policy, thinking about what she wanted her own career to look like, what she wanted her own impact to look like. And it's just. It's amazing to see students grow, grow just so much during a program. The other example I was going to give is we had a student inside a Massachusetts correctional facility, and she was a woman who had a big family. So was always. When she was at home, she was always thinking about cooking. And then inside this correctional facility figured out, wow, there are so many things that you can cook in a microwave. And there's a lot of cost savings with that. They actually can. You can teach a lot of healthy habits with meals inside a microwave. So she created an entire website dedicated to training people on cooking inside a microwave. That's why it's so important that everyone has the chance to become an innovator. Because if there's all of these innovations and solutions we can put out there, if everyone's just given the opportunity to. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Do so, I feel like that target audience would be really good for first time college students. Let's go back to design thinking and let's put a Persona image of who that really could work for. I want to do a big switch because it's on the minds of every educator out there. And I've been asked for to be on another webinar because this question goes, and I've been asking everybody, how do you see this future of coding? Having heard your answers, I think I know your response. But I want you to say, how do you see the future of code coding education evolving with this generative AI and has it really been brought into code? Your dreams? What's your take? What's your opinion? Brianne Caplan: Yeah, that's a big question. Everybody's mind, everyone's thinking about AI now. Gen AI. We were talking about csta. Half of the CSTA sessions were on AI. And as a community of educators, the first thing that we think about are like the harms and biases that exist before, like the potential. It's interesting how quickly it made it into all of our different programs from kindergarten through adults, because these are solutions that anyone has access to. So it's really important that all of our students know how to safely access these different solutions and what to be careful of. This past spring I taught a kindergarten class and I asked, who here knows what AI is? And so many of our students shouted chat GPT. I was just amazed that all of these students knew what it was. Many had tried it, but no one could say, why could this be bad? So that's really the first thing that we start with is are those harms and biases? I think there's a lot of positives, of course, that can come from these technologies. It's really just the harms that we've been. We did start last year an AI and chatbot development program track that has been really interesting. We're seeing really interesting applications from that. There's some really great opportunities to create more accessible curriculum, more accessible programs, personalization for students. But again, it's like it's all so new to us. So we're just trying to take things pretty slowly. Sean Tibor: I was going to ask, and this is more just a kind of a curiosity. So access across each of your different populations, for lack of a better word, both just your different audiences and your different stakeholders could probably wildly vary. Right. Like, you probably are not giving kindergartners access to chat CPT to ask them questions about coding. Do people who are in correctional facilities have access to generative AI to be able to ask questions about coding or other things like is access equitable and fair also and age appropriate, or is it still unevenly distributed? Brianne Caplan: Definitely unevenly distributed. That's also an important thing to think about. We know even college professors are having trouble with students, just all using some form of chatgpt, writing essays, answering questions. We can lock a tab so you can't go to another tab. The student has another device inside correctional facilities. None of our students have access access to chat GPT, but we will screen share and show how it works just so they know the types of technologies that exist and are out there. It's just not something that for various safety and other reasons we're able to give students access to. Sean Tibor: Sure. And I think what indicates for me as well is there are valid reasons for that. Like, they're all good reasons, but it ultimately contributes to inequity in learning as well. So maybe the unintended consequence or the unavoidable consequence here is that you might have two adult learners, both trying to learn how to make their project happen, and one of them is incarcerated and the other one is not. The one who's not has easy access to generative AI and maybe can make faster progress. The one who's incarcerated doesn't have access to that. And at the same time, knowing what we've seen from the way people learn and the way that the struggle to learn sometimes leads to better learning and better outcomes. Maybe sometimes having that access could lead to deeper, richer understanding eventually. So I don't know. I'd be curious to know what the outcomes look like between those two different populations who are trying to achieve similar goals but have wildly different tools available to them. Brianne Caplan: Yeah, that is interesting. Even a student who has access to ChatGPT+ versus the student who has just the basic version. I'm sure there are some differences there. Thinking about our students and the way that they're able to access our programs and learn, it's just very, very different from someone who's on the outside. And it really varies correctional facility to facility, as well as even what tier you are within the facility or what has your previous record looked like? We have some students who are able to have access to some form of tablet device even in their own cell, where they're able to learn and continue to work on projects in their free time, versus some of our students. They might only have access to a computer, maybe four hours or six hours a week. And so their ability to learn and grow and contribute to the projects that they're building is just going to be at a different speed than that other student. Kelly Schuster Paredes: There's just so much to take away. I'm trying to process it all. It's just amazing as a facilitator and educator being able to differentiate with that class those levels. That's just really. I don't even have a question for that. Oh, I'm just impressed by everything that you've done with code, your dreams. I do want to switch a question on you because one, I think it's just amazing starting a business, a nonprofit. We talk about entrepreneurship, we talk about design thinking, and sometimes kids get in and want to build something. What advice would you give maybe young people or even older people if they were interested in starting something? Because I'm. Besides the lot of work and sweat and tears that you've probably put in, what's the way to go? And passion. Brianne Caplan: That's a great question. Just do what you love. I think that's the only reason why I've been successful so far and I've not given up is that I just love what I'm doing every single day. I love to be in the classroom. I love teachers. And so all of the work that I get to do is just filled with so much joy. Same with entrepreneurship, like you really do. At least for me, I have to love it so much that I'm okay with the feeling of I might fail. And I left this great data science career with this great salary and I still might fail. So I think that passion is really important. Then the second thing I think of is community. That's with doing anything. But for me, having a community of people that I relate to and are doing the same sort of thing, it helps me just continue. It allows me to then have people that I can learn from and that are going through similar struggles. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Very cool. Sean Tibor: One of the things that I see a lot, and this drives a lot of anxiety and uncertainty, is we focus on that future potential failure a lot. It's always out there. It's always lurking that I could fail at this, I could fail in the future. It also prevents a lot of People from starting both in the learning process, the entrepreneurial process, the life process. Because that fear of that unknown that's out there that might be holding you back is powerful enough that it prevents you from even taking the risk and starting. One thing that I see is, and this is the really nice benefit of coming back to your story after five years, is you can also look back and say, you haven't failed yet. So there have been many, probably lots of little failures along the way, but you're still running your nonprofit. You have made the transition from that tech career to a nonprofit lifestyle, and you've achieved success with it. If you look back on the last five years, there's been a lot of successes along the way, and you haven't failed yet. Brianne Caplan: Yeah, I think giving people the opportunity to fail is really important. Thinking about how I grew up, we were taught, don't do something if you're gonna fail. If you're in a class and it's the beginning and you can tell that you're maybe at the bottom of the class, drop that class. Don't let it impact your gpa. I'm seeing the younger generations have a lot more opportunities. Being comfortable with failure, that's something that's important, but also recognizing that there's a lot of privilege in being able to start your own thing. So for me, I had a lot of privilege, and I worked in the tech industry for many years. I was a data scientist, which came with a great salary. So I could take that chance and know if it doesn't work out, I can always go back and do something else. Perhaps it's also giving people who don't have that privilege the opportunity to be an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur within their own company, within an organization, to be a leader and create something new. Sean Tibor: Yeah, that's a really good point too, that having the ability to make that jump requires a certain amount of security to be able to take a risk. If you have no security, it's impossible to take a risk. If you're not secure in your own job and feeling that what you're doing as your core responsibility is stable and solid and secure, how could you possibly make that risk to go do something as an intrapreneur within the company and have it pay off. So creating that sense of safety or a starting point for people to get ahead and jump into that risky area is really important as well. Sometimes it just takes a mentor or a boss or someone who's willing to make the risk with you and say, I'm going to lend you Some of my security to make this happen. Yeah. Kelly Schuster Paredes: I was trying to think about this in terms of students and that ability to take that risk. It can be, and it probably is for that person that's going to make it internal. But it has to be that external support for a kid to say, oh, I can take that opportunity to fail, or I can try something and know right now is the time to do it, because I have nothing to lose. That's one of the things with an education that we sometimes miss out on. Right. The kids are in school, they're super creative, and they have to be here. And why aren't we letting them take those risks? I think about this all the time. And my ideal world would be into these at home, those micro schools and micro learning. Here's your opportunity. Make it happen. That's what Sean and I are so fond about with code your dreams. Because literally, here's your opportunity. Sean Tibor: Still a great movie. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Still a great movie. But that's a good thing for teachers to think about, like dreams, hopes and dreams. Brianne Caplan: Yeah. And I think especially for women and girls, a lot of us grow up being taught to be perfectionists. And so even for me, like, I've really had to work on myself so much and not getting so upset and anxious on those failures, because whenever you lead an organization, there's failures that happen every day and there's always going to be someone who's upset. For me, it's been just a lot of growth and learning to be okay with just the failures that happen every day within an organization. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Yeah. Sean Tibor: I'm going to sign off a little bit early and I'm going to let you continue the conversation. I have a young man who happens to be my son who is calling home from sleepaway camp, and I'm going to go talk to him and make sure that he's okay. But my takeaway question for you to continue is we've talked a lot about lives that you've changed and things that you've changed along the way and communities that you've changed. How has this changed you over the last five years? When you think back on all of the different journey that you've gone through, I'm going to drop on that one and let you guys talk about it so I can be surprised when I listen to it later. Kelly Schuster Paredes: That's a good question. To finish it off. Go, go talk to yourself. Sean Tibor: Thank you so much. Brianne Caplan: Wow. That is a really good question. The change in myself. I just think I've learned so much. Whether it's been from our Teachers, our partners, our students. I know I've become a better person and just a more well rounded person by just being with constantly with different classrooms and groups of people. I think in general I'm a happier person than I was five years ago just because I now get to do this full time and not have to worry about having another job and balancing that while also serving the organization. So I think probably the biggest change is just my happiness level is definitely greater than it was in 2019. Kelly Schuster Paredes: I love that and I think that shows and that's what's important. Love what you do. Hey, quick question and this is just me thinking about things like what editors are you using for your kids at levels if you want, if you can share or if there's like say there's what do you put them on for adults? Because if they don't have access to certain things, anything that you recommend for, even if it's not Python, it could be anything. Brianne Caplan: We use a wide range of things and we also let our educators choose what they're most comfortable with things. We use a lot of Google Colab for our data science programs. We use a lot of pycharm. And then there's another one. It's a Microsoft one. It's not Intellij, although I used that in industry and loved it. There's another one. The thing I will say about these five years is I've become much less tech savvy as I've hired so many tech savvy people to do most of the things. So somehow I can't remember what that last one is called. Kelly Schuster Paredes: No worries. That's how I am with my science. I taught science for 18 years and now ask me mitochondria, something like that. Someone asked me, didn't you teach science? I'm like, yeah, it's gone. Forget it. Forget about it so really quick because we're coming up on the mark. But I do want to hear a little bit about csta. Some other takeaways be AI. You went computer. Tell us about CSTA in the conference and what you did and who you talked to and what some big takeaways were besides AI. Brianne Caplan: Oh yeah, no, CSTA was incredible as always. It is just an amazing opportunity to meet so many other educators. My takeaway is that our educators are learning faster than ever and they are pivoting really, really quickly. A lot of educators are creating their own solutions and it sounds like still figuring out what is the most viable platforms that are also safe for students. I was very happy to know that educators were really on the same wavelength. And we were in like, really putting safety first before just like quickly embracing what the new new is. We've had to learn so much in such a short period of time. One of the keynotes was like, you know, it was the metaverse, then blockchain, then AI. And we're constantly figuring out what's the new new. And so to be able to take some time and just think about this, the learning space, keeping it safe and accessible, I think was really refreshing. Educators need more support now more than ever because there are so many different changes. But luckily we have the smartest minds in the classroom. So that's the best part. Kelly Schuster Paredes: So while you're talking, I thought, got a suggestion, recommendation or idea generator for you? Code your dreams teachers. Can you imagine the stuff that they could come up with? You could do a whole thing like, what are you going to do to make the classroom better? Or here's what you could do for the community to make it better. There you go. Brianne Caplan: Need to find funding because we need. Kelly Schuster Paredes: How cool is that? Brianne Caplan: Anyone that's listening want to fund this initiative? Kelly Schuster Paredes: If I had the money, I would, but I think that's a great idea. I think there's a lot of teachers like, oh, I wish there was a. And they're so busy with what they're doing. But what if this made your life easier? If I did this or if I did that or how can I get this student? Or that would be a really fun pd. I don't know how long your classes are, but make it happen. Brianne. I think you have it. I always come with these great ideas and like, there they go. So I like to share them on the show. We're coming up toward the end of the show and I just want you to give a chance for you to like, share how people can reach you and if make a plug for whatever you want. Here's your time. Brianne Caplan: Thank you to everyone who's listening. We want you to join Code your Dreams. Whether you're an educator, a student looking to learn, a supporter who's interested in supporting our mission, we want you to be a part of the Code youe Dreams family. We also have a new announcement coming this summer where we're launching the CYD Hub, where anyone can bring Code youe Dreams to your community. So if you're a teacher looking for new curricula, if you're a tech professional that wants to start an after school school program, if you're a librarian looking to bring something new to the library, we'll be Launching it in the next six weeks. So definitely get on the Coach your Dreams newsletter by visiting www.coachyourdreams.org. Kelly Schuster Paredes: That'S awesome. What kind of tools, resources would someone need? Internet, computers. Brianne Caplan: Internet and computer. So it's all browser based. Kelly Schuster Paredes: If they're doing coding, it's in the browser as well. Brianne Caplan: It's actually for educators, so it's all of the teaching materials from interactive slides, lesson plans, tutorials, videos. We have a teacher certification program that's all on demand and asynchronous. There are guides for how to find a venue to teach if you don't have one, how to recruit volunteers, fundraising, all those good things that come into teaching. Some sort of out of school coding program. Kelly Schuster Paredes: I love it. Well, it has been an awesome time and I wish we could talk longer, but I'm so glad that we had you back on this show. I wish we saw each other at pycon. We missed you. Hopefully next time you come to the Education Summit. I mean, it's back in Pittsburgh. It's not that far from Chicago, right? Yeah. Brianne Caplan: No, that's a 90 minute flight. Kelly Schuster Paredes: Yeah. See, there you go. Come in and spread some dreams in the Education Summit next year. We'd love to have you. You are an inspiration. You just have such a positive vibe and sometimes. This is why I was excited that this episode was so close to August is that at this time of the year, we're like, oh, summer's over. But you've got that passion that helps us to really get excited about going back in the classroom and helping the kids learn to code and maybe help to do some dreaming there too. I appreciate you and what you do. Brianne Caplan: Oh, thank you, Kelly. And I appreciate you both so much. I'm so glad we got to discuss and hopefully we can find more time to catch up. Kelly Schuster Paredes: 100% nothing on the news. Going back to school soon. Hopefully still continuing our Monday nights. We'll see how that goes once we get back there. But for teaching Python, this is Kelly by herself signing off.