Sean Tibor: Foreign. Hello, and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 153, the 2025 Holiday Gift Guide. This is Shawn Tyber. I'm a coder who teaches. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And I'm Kelly Schuster Paredes, and I'm a teacher who codes. I almost forgot my name. Sean Tibor: Well, you're on vacation, Kelly. It happens. And we're joined with a very special guest and a very good friend of the show. Julian Sequeira is joining us all the way from very, very hot Australia at this time of year to talk through his picks for holiday gift Guide. Welcome, Julian. Julian Sequeira: Nice. Hey, Sean. Hey, Kel. Thanks for having me here. I'm very excited to be on the show. I think we were on years ago, right at the very start, the sequence of Teaching Python, and now here I am, 150. What did you say? Episode 153? Sean Tibor: Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Was that the last time? Is that the last time you were on, like, a lot? Julian Sequeira: I think it was right at the start, like episode five or something. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's crazy. Sean Tibor: No, he's frantic. You're frantically searching the website. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I was going to search that up because I was like, oh, I went on Pie Bites with Bob and I was trying to think. I was like, we see, we talk all the time. So it's like, oh, that's funny. I'm searching. Okay, we're going to start. Go explain first, Sean, while I look. Julian Sequeira: All right, well, what are we doing here? Sean Tibor: Yeah. Let's start with Wins of the Week. That's a great place to start every week. Julian, we're going to have you go first since you're our guest. Julian Sequeira: Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. Well, we do wins on the podcast as well. So I'm. This is no stranger to me on our podcast, but if I was to think of a win, look, there's internal stuff at Pybytes that has just been, I think, the focus of working on the one thing has really been a win for myself and for Bob as well. We were discussing. There have been some big tasks that have deadlines and just implementing all those things, like the Parkinson's Law and all those things to try and help you be productive and get things done. That's been the win. But I do have a 3D printing win. I printed a nice little thing for my stencil for my local cafe. Cause they're really nice people. And so when you put it over the top of the cappuccino, shake the chocolate over the top, it puts the logo on top of the coffee. And they loved it. They were over the moon. So there you go. Sean Tibor: That's awesome. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very cute. I love it. Sean Tibor: Kelly, you're up, please. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm up. Mine's short and sweet. I'm on vacation. We drove up a hill today, and we were spinning in clay, so I got to introduce my car to the orange clay of North Carolina, and we managed to get out without going off the side of the cliff. So it was a win. Win today. Julian Sequeira: That's a big win. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It was a big win, but it was quite funny. The kids are like, what are you doing taking off your shoes? I'm, like, trying to step down with my tennis shoes and sliding everywhere like mud. So I was, like, barefoot in 50 degrees. And it was a fun. It was a good win. It was fun. Sean Tibor: We had a laugh sometimes. Just surviving is winning. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Every day as a teacher just surviving. All right, your win. Sean Tibor: Honestly, the win this week has been a lot of tinkering and doing some hands on stuff that I've been missing for a while. So I did some 3D printing this week. I had a bracket on our screen door that was like. I've drilled so many holes in the frame of the screen door now that it's just Swiss cheese. It won't fit anymore. It won't. Hold on. So I redesigned the bracket for it, made it so it was into fresh metal, and it works beautifully. Closes the door like it's supposed to. It's great. And I made the bracket for it and I designed it all in Fusion360, printed it, and put it out there. It was awesome. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Awesome. That's very cool. Julian Sequeira: The satisfying feeling of seeing it actually work and fit the dimensions. Sean Tibor: Ah, it's so good. It's so good. There's something to be said for downloading and printing a 3D object, but having it come from your mind like you imagine, like, this is what it needs to be or this is what it could be. You design it, you print it, and then you get to hold it in your hands. That is a really satisfying moment. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That reminds me of your microbit trace of measuring. That took forever. But those little measuring. What is it called? The. Sean Tibor: The calipers. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, that was funny. All right, I digress. Let's get to the winds of the week, because I'm really excited. Not wins of the week. The holiday gift. Oh, you have one, too. Julian Sequeira: Got my calipers, right? Sean Tibor: Yeah, mine's over there. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's not putting you guys in the same podcast ever again. Episode 12. That's why you were. That's why you were in episode 12. Julian Sequeira: It's been 120 episodes for a reason. Sean Tibor: We'll see you on. We'll see you on episode 283. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: All right, who's going first? I love this episode, actually. This is one of my favorites. Sean Tibor: Well, let's let Julian go first with his first one, okay? Julian Sequeira: Oh, okay. All right, so look, this is the Teaching Python podcast. So I'm gonna do nothing to do with teaching for this one. This is based on my experience. For all you listening, I have three kids ranging from teenage down to toddlerish stage. So this year, one of the things I am pushing for is a hoverboard. And not like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, but the neighbors got one and it's this two wheel thing and you stand on it and you balance it. Probably sound like a really old person saying it like this, but it's very cool. And I saw the kid playing with it and I had a go and I'm like, this is amazing. So my gift idea this year is to get your kid one of those. Especially right now. The Australian site that you get it from is called hoveroo.com. so if you're in the States or wherever, that's not going to work. But it's only around 299 bucks or something Australian, which is like US$5 at the moment based on the exchange rate. So I think at this point they. Sean Tibor: Pay you to take the hoverboard, right? Julian Sequeira: Exactly. For me, there might be a bit of me living through the children with this one, because I wish I had something like this as a kid, especially because now you can get a go kart attachment to it so that you can sit on it and it puts a third wheel in front in that trike shape, and then you just lean back and go for it. I was like, this is cool. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That is pretty cool. Sean Tibor: Yeah. Julian, I have bad news for you. It's really fun. They're really fast. They're really fun. Julian Sequeira: It'll be a family of five riding these things down the street. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Helmets and knee pads and elbow pads. Don't forget those. Julian Sequeira: Yes, absolutely. Already got that for the many other things that they do that are dangerous. But, yeah, there's my first pick. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's a good one. Am I next? Sean Tibor: Yep. Yes. Over to you, Kelly. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: All right, so since we're going on the sport theme, my wonderful colleague and my desk mate, my office mate, miss Jacoby, she got this for the kids at this soccer bot and it's really cute. It's this indoor kind of soccer game and. And it works I've heard some bad reviews about it being on grass and on carpet, but we've only used it on the flooring and the tile, and it works great. And what it does is it has these discs around, so you have this triangle game and then the ball, you're trying to do the goalie without or without the little bot coming and getting the ball. And so you're working on footwork and it's just really cute. And it's a robot, so soccer bottom, that's my pick. And it's like. I don't know, I think it was like 20 bucks, 30 bucks, nothing crazy. Let me get the exact price since. Oh, I'm sorry, I lied. 59.99. But it, you know, kids are playing, they're moving around, and it's fun. Julian Sequeira: So that's cool. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I know. See, everybody's checking it out now. You're like, oh, that's another Christmas gift. Julian Sequeira: Yeah. Now my mortgage is going to go unpaid, so thank you. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I don't know how much that is. Julian Sequeira: In Australia, but it's gonna 60 USD roughly. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: All right, Sean, you're next. Sean Tibor: All right, so I'm going on the inexpensive side and the maker side. I have discovered these little LED pucks that you can get, and they're called like an LED 001 kit. Bambu Labs started these with their bamboo printers and they, they sell them, I think for like 13 or $13 or so on their site. But I also went on Amazon and there's a bunch of really cheap knockoffs that are totally fine and I'm sure won't set my kids rooms on fire or anything, but they are amazing. And there's all of these really cool 3D designs that are made for these. I made a 3D printed Jupiter lamp, like a globe for my kids. It's the actual NASA map of Jupiter on a globe that you print on your 3D printer. And it has this little base that you snap the puck into, click it onto the bottom, and you turn it on. And they've got this really cool glowing planet globe in their bedroom at night. And they both love them. So I have a Jupiter one and I've got a moon one. And these pucks just have a little LED thing in them. And you can get either a like warm white, cool white, medium tone white puck, or you can get ones that are RGB and they change colors and flow and everything like that. And they're like $6 each. You can probably even get them cheaper on AliExpress or something like that. They're also really easy to design into your own models because they're basically a round disc that's about 5 or 6 millimeters thick and maybe 60 millimeters in diameter. So it's super easy to design into your projects and add some light and color to it. And I think they're just really awesome. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very cool. Julian Sequeira: That's so cool. Are they hardwired? What are they? Sean Tibor: Yeah, it's just a USB plug and the RGB one has a little like credit card style remote that comes with it that you can change all the colors and settings and everything. And I'm sure there's a way to hook this up to a ESP32 or a circuit playground or something like that and code it with some python. Julian Sequeira: This is cool. All right, so there's. That's in my shopping cart already. Sean Tibor: There you go. Julian Sequeira: Got the Bamboo Lab Australia store open right now. Sean Tibor: Nice. Very nice. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This is why this episode's very dangerous. Julian Sequeira: It is. I'm never, I'm never coming back. I'm not going to be allowed to come back. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You're up next. Julian Sequeira: All right, so I'm back. What do I have next? All right, so I'm going to go down the more Cody route now. So this one, I want to give a shout out to Faye Shaw in our community, who is the Boston Pie ladies, one of the organizers of that. And she gave this recommendation to me which is a book series called Secret Coders. And I'm sure you can buy it mainly in the us, Amazon and wherever you buy books over there. But it's essentially they wrap coding puzzles, coding concepts into a story, like a really cool mystery. And it's meant for around kids. I'd say ages 8 through 13, 15 around that. I think you call it middle school age, like grade six, seven, eight, that kind of thing. And it's the problem for me is that I haven't been able to find them here in Australia and I'd have to get them shipped from the States, which costs an arm and a leg. So there's a gift from you two if you would like to send Pycon. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, I'll give it to you. Julian Sequeira: Oh yeah, Pycon. I'll just go shopping in LA for that. But it seems really good. And Faye was telling me she's reading through these with her son and it's just really inspired and got the brain thinking and getting them thinking in a coder's mindset. So pretty cool book series. I think there's six of them. They're about 10 to 20 US dollars each, so pretty good. Sean Tibor: I think. Julian Sequeira: A good gift for people. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, I like that. I like that. It reminds me of. There's a couple series, the. There's like a math one that I had for my kids. I'll try to see if it's similar and I'll put the link on there. But it's the same kind of concept, so that's really cool. I like that. My kids love books. I'm a big book person, so I'm gonna share my book after your share. So my favorite book that I'm really recommending, and I've said this a couple of times, is the Worlds I see about Dr. Fei Fei Li. It's an amazing book and it's one of the few books I've actually read front to back. This goes into the whole story of her coming with her family to the US and her story as an immigrant into the US and her struggle with poverty and growing up as a teenager and then just working really hard and getting her way through into college and of course discovering imagenet and being the. I don't know, was it grandmother? Mother, the founder of pretty much image recognition. She's such a remarkable, brilliant woman and her story is phenomenal. And then I saw her the other day on a video with all the top godfathers of AI and then Jansen Young. So just a role model for every woman out there. And the book is really a good read, so I recommend that. It just came out, I think, in this year, sometime earlier this year, so it's quite new. Yeah, it's worth it, too. It's worth the shipping. If you can't get it in Australia. Julian Sequeira: No, I just found it on Amazon. Australia. I'm going to try and buy it local first, but I've added it to my wish list. That's cool. Sean Tibor: All right. I've got a throwback holiday gift, something that I haven't actually seen in a while, but I'm bringing it back because I realize there's something magical about these. The Humble daily desk calendar. Remember those where you, like, get the little tear off sheet of paper and you get like a cartoon or trivia or something like that every day. I'm bringing that back because I don't know where this even came from, but I was thinking about how great those are to have something every day that you look at, that you look forward to, that you anticipate, and it has something useful to you. So as a teacher, as a coder, I'm either looking for something to distract me, make me laugh, a Little bit or something that helps me giggle a bit. So you know the Far side calendar? There's one called they Can Talk, which looks really great. There's daily puzzles, daily trivia. But in a world where we have access to so much information and everything is searchable, I think there's something magical about going back to that daily desk calendar and having something that you can look forward to every day or you miss a weekend or your way and you can go through five of them at a time. It satisfies something kind of unspoken in our modern times right now. Julian Sequeira: I like that. It's. It's nice as well, because it keeps you off a screen. It's not a notification on your phone. Here's your daily dose of goodness. So it's. It's funny you mentioned that, because I was looking at this the other day, and I'm holding this up for our camera, not for the listeners, but nice. I've got my daily desk calendar for the how to win friends and influence people. Someone gave me this. They must have thought I didn't have any friends. And again, why I haven't been on the podcast in two years. But it was really cool. And the one thing is, Sean, I will say is I couldn't bear to rip the page off, so I just gently folded it back. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's the thing with those is like, I. And then. Or if it was a good quote or a cool place. I used to have the ones with the travel, and then I had, like, a bucket list, and I couldn't throw anything away. And then I'm such a hoarder. And so I don't know, that pick I'm gonna have to say no to because I'll probably like it, and then I won't be able to throw things away. Sean Tibor: I mean, to be honest, Kelly, if I was in the classroom, I'd probably be tearing these off and sharing them every day with the class, too, as a way to start conversations, do stuff. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And, you know, I'm selling the product. I like that. We should have a vote at the end. We should do a vote when. After they listen to the podcast. Who has Best holiday gift. I lost that pitch. Well, then I'm not a marketer or a people person. Sean Tibor: The stakes have changed. Let's go. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: All right, Juliet, your turn. Sean Tibor: Oh, I'm back. Julian Sequeira: All right, back to me. The next one I have is actually same vein that you were mentioning before, Sean. The 3D printer amazes me about 3D printers and not printing in general is just how much they've Actually dropped in price. I remember eight years ago, seven or eight years ago, a mate of mine was talking about their 3D printer and I remember it costing well over a thousand dollars just for a basic open one. It's not even enclosed or anything. But now you can get those kinds of starter model 3D printers for in USD a couple hundred bucks. You know my one, I got it last year and it was only 300 Australian dollars on sale. Right. So if you're smart about it and you do your research, you can get a pretty decent one. So I think a lot of people talk about the bamboo A1 mini as a good starting one. I went for the Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro because I just don't listen to people and I actually really like it. And at the end of the day it does the job. There's a couple of features you really want to have like auto bed leveling and if you can have multiple colors in your spool for at once. And that's gonna be a lifesaver as you do more printing. But if you wanna explore this or have your kids explore it, just go the most basic with that feature and you almost can't go wrong. All of them are pretty good these days. And as long as you get the software installed and then as you were saying, Sean, just download other people's models from Printables or make a world or something and just start spitting out stuff. It really builds that curiosity and then you move into the hmm. I might install Fusion 360 or Blender or something and have a play with crafting my own designs. So that would be a great gift idea, I reckon for anyone who's got a kid that likes to tinker or just anyone in general. I love it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yep, I know Sean loves that stuff. Sean Tibor: It's a really good deep learning exercise too because you're going to end up solving a lot of problems along the way. Even with the good printers. How do I set it up? Is it important to have the printer level? How do I feed the filament? Just a really good practical hands on learning experience. I think they're great. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Ever since Sean left the room. We still have a 3D printer. We got a new one, so we always have one in our classroom. So. Sean Tibor: And you still haven't given me the password yet. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Nope, not at all. Remote login, it's body. Julian Sequeira: Well, you could just start printing Pokemon like this one. I've got a nice for the listeners. I've got a Gengar Pokemon here for my kids. Well, for my kids. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: But it's for me with your Pokemon mug. We saw that. Julian Sequeira: Oh, yeah, I've been drinking out of a Pokemon coffee Pokeball coffee mug. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, gosh, they're twinsing now. Sean Tibor: This is my other. Julian Sequeira: You have a self destruct button. Sean Tibor: This is also one of the reasons why I love 3D printers. I made this in four hours to do a last minute Halloween costume as Dr. Doofenshmirtz. So I like glued this to a random cardboard box and now I have my self destruct button. It's amazing. It took no time to design. I could print it. It looked great. Kids loved it. It was fun. Julian Sequeira: That's cool. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's funny. All right. Well, it wouldn't be a holiday gift guide if I didn't throw in a Lego. And I was trying to find the one that we bought for the students. It's this cute little, almost like a gumball machine where you have the Lego figurines. But I couldn't find it on Amazon. So I don't know if it got discontinued or if it got sold out. But in my search to find the link for that, I found my next one. That's going to be. It's a retro radio building set. It's supposed to be for adults, but check this out. You build it. It's a 1970s radio, very retro. You could put your phone inside and then it has a working radio with music and you can turn the power and the dials and it makes a crackle of radio signals. I don't know how I have to look into this, but how cool is it? It is. I'm like getting it for the classroom so the kids can see first and foremost this retro 1970s radio. Remember when we found the tape deck in our classroom? We were so excited. I'm gonna put that. I don't even. He took the. Sean Tibor: It's on the shelf. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: He was like, I'm taking this with me. Julian Sequeira: It's awesome. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: But I am so excited about this and the fact that we could put our phone in there. And I'm just. I can't wait. I can't wait. So this is my next one and it's 99 bucks, so that's really not bad for a LEGO set. Most of the LEGO sets we pull for the kids are up there. Sean Tibor: So yeah, we could probably do an entire episode. Just about awesome Legos. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, my gosh. Julian Sequeira: Oh, yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: The Pac Man I had last year for the kids. It has a little crank and the Pac man go around the ma. Julian Sequeira: Oh, cool. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I could do a whole holiday guide. Of all. There it goes. His Game Boy. I don't know, something Legos I like. I'll nerd out with you guys on Legos. 3D printing, not my jam, but Lego building. I'm on it. Julian Sequeira: Nice. Nice. But that's such a cool idea. This retro radio. I'm looking at it now. So you said it was like 90 USD? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. Julian Sequeira: Okay, 170 Australian dollars. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So there you go again. I'll put that in the shopping basket when we go to Pycon. Julian Sequeira: What did you do over there? Just bought stuff. No, but this is so cool. I love it. And you know what? I'll save this commentary for a Lego episode. Thank you for that. Go on, Sean. Sean Tibor: All right, so my next one is. I don't know, Julian, you may have heard of this. There's this thing called pybytes and they have this. It's pretty cool. I've used it for a few years, but the coding platform. So I've gone back. Actually, Julian, I don't think I've told you this. I've gone back to the coding platform a few times over the years just because I want something to stimulate my coding brain. If I've been looking at spreadsheets too long or had too many meetings with finance, I will go back and just try to solve some pie bytes on the coding platform and see if I can sharpen those skills back up again and just feel that challenge. If you're learning to code, if you just need that break, if you're trying to think differently and challenge yourself. I keep going back to it because they really are just that bite sized bit of challenge that I'm looking for. Sometimes I'll solve one, sometimes it won't even solve one. Maybe it'll just melt my brain a little bit. Just that idea of trying something in that bite sized chunk to get a little bit better to learn something. It's really cool. You've got so many different, like, pricing options that are beyond the subscriptions. You can buy some tokens if I remember correctly, and do things different ways. It's been really cool to have that kind of available to me when I need a break from my day job and I want something that's techy and challenging and fun. So that's on my gift guide as well. Julian Sequeira: Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Bob's gonna build all these bites that I keep telling him that I want and he's like, I don't know how I'm gonna do that on this site. I'm like, you'll find a way I was like, I need some bite size for how to use GitHub and pull request and can you show me some terminal. He's like, kelly. And I just kept spewing him all kinds of like, you can do it. I gotcha. Got some ideas for you. Julian Sequeira: This is the thing, right? I mean, it's a. We built this coding platform from the ground up, and people use it for all sorts of things now for. Yeah, and this isn't a sales pitch, actually. This could be the best pitch of the episode. People use it like you, Kelly, use it in the classroom. Sean, use it for work. We have teams using it to challenge each other and skill up and do hackathons and all that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, it's just Bob and I behind the scenes who built it. So there's almost no bureaucracy around the direction. There's no kind of. We're owned by a big conglomerate, so we can do what we want, craft it and customize it. And indeed, we're doing things for some of the schools around the world that are using it just to customize it for them. Kelly, you helped us shape the entire school tier with what teachers can see and how you manage students. So, yeah, we. We actually are seriously looking at how would we teach terminal and command line basic Linux through this? How would we do git training through it? So stay tuned, we'll figure it out. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Figure it out. I'm waiting. That'll be great. Julian Sequeira: Just don't hold your breath. Okay. Sean Tibor: Counting down the moments. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: All right, after your sip, you're up. Julian Sequeira: Yeah, I'm almost finished drinking this coffee, so that means the episode's almost over. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. Julian Sequeira: All right, so my last one, and forgive me, everyone, I know the pain of introducing this into your life, but Duolingo is my thing and I know the stereotype that bird from Duolingo will just harass you every day until you do your practice. So first and foremost, I use it every day if I'm learning Korean, but forget the language stuff. And I know everyone's going to say, oh, you could use ChatGPT to teach languages now, and all that stuff. So whatever. But they've just introduced a couple of months ago, chess into the platform, and it's really good. I've hit pause on my Korean learning because I'm just playing chess every day with this thing, and I've learned so many techniques and even just things that have labels within chess, like a double checkmate and all this kind of stuff that I didn't know existed. So I'm learning the formal side or the theory behind chess, including tactics and how you think three moves ahead. And the challenges are wonderful and it's really, really good. I cannot recommend it enough to anyone. I've actually. And my kids have started using it. We have a family plan. And so my two sons have started playing chess on it. One of them challenged me to a game of my Lego Harry Potter chess set and I whipped him. It was fantastic. I just absolutely demolished him. No, no. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Was that your 4 year old? No. Your youngest? Julian Sequeira: No. Yeah. She just destroyed my pieces. Like she took them apart. No, this was the 10 year old. So it was. And it was cool. It was a great, great game and I've really enjoyed it. So if you do, it's about 13 bucks a month, I think for duolingo, if you do have the extra cash. And I don't want to promote subscription overload with people, but if you already have Joelingo, this one's a no brainer. Give it a crack. It's really good. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: They should do Korean and the chess in Korean and then you can do double. Julian Sequeira: I'll never learn how to play. Jeez. Mix the two. It's a great idea. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Are we. Let me think. Are we doing four or are you guys gonna let me do five? Because I have to pick. I'll do the one that we have in the classroom. My next holiday gift guide. This one's expensive, but this is a classroom buy as well. Like everything of mine is a classroom buy, unfortunately. But this is the spider Loco hex robot. And we saw this at iste. We met this company. The people at this company are great. They actually had the patoy, the little dog that we had. Sean Tibor: Oh, yeah, yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And because I was like, oh, we have that one, we have that one, we have that one. And I don't have this one. It's this gigantic. I don't know how many. What is that? Like almost two feet across. Spider. And this one that we got was red, not the green one that's on the website. And it codes in Python. Super cool Python. And it also codes in block. We have this sixth grader never coded in python. And it's got like the opposite walk and then it jumps up and has the. Almost looks like it's fangs. It is so cool. And then it can go higher. It's got lidar and it's got this. The cameras, supposedly AI based mapping, haven't gotten to that yet. We just have the movement with python and she's learning python through this spider it's so big. So we have the spider and the dog walking around in the classroom now. It's insane. I know. Sean Tibor: And they're best friends. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: They're best friends. Sean Tibor: They're best friends. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yes. And once I figure out the lidar with the dog and the spider, we're just kind of roaming across the campus. We're going to program to just go crazy. And both code and python. It's great. I love it. Julian Sequeira: So that's super nice. I can imagine nothing more horrifying than that. As an Australian with spiders, this thing's. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Big, especially when it does the dance with the two legs up so it looks like it's coming at you like a big thing, like a tarantula. Julian Sequeira: I would, at my risk. Can you send me a picture of that when you get a chance? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm gonna actually try to find the picture of the girl with her spider and I will show you. I'll put a little happy face over her face so that we can send it out. But it is brilliant. It honestly is pretty cool. I know I have it somewhere, but I'll find it if Sean does his next one. Julian Sequeira: All right. Sean Tibor: Mine is actually fairly simple. It's actually calipers. I got a new set of calipers this year. I know they're simple and basic, but learning how to use them has been really rewarding. And learning how to think about how would I measure this or how would I reproduce this digitally from the real world is a very interesting problem to have. What I'm liking about it also is that I can see connections between the math that my kids are doing in school when they're learning geometry, when they're learning about logic and proofs and everything. Being able to make it hands on and make it tangible is really important, as we know, to make it real and make it connect. I'm finding a lot of satisfaction in it when I go to create things and make things myself, because there are things that are hard to measure, like curves. How would you measure a curve? How would you get the radii of something? If something's at an angle and it intersects another angle that's not 90 degrees, how do you measure that and represent it and reproduce it? And so I got a pair of calipers off of Amazon. I think I splurged a little bit. And they're maybe $40 or $50, and they're USB rechargeable, and they've got a big display and. And they just hold up really well. There are other tools that fit in this Category, some really nice measurement tools. There's laser scanners. There's all these things that you can do to, like, really take your measurement to the next level. But a humble pair of calipers seems to go a long way. And then when you get it, there's more to your calipers than just measuring the outer dimension of something. You can measure the inner dimension of holes. There's a depth measure with the plunger. There's all of these things that you can do. And so watching YouTube videos about crazy caliper tricks is strangely satisfying. Julian Sequeira: I have not looked into that, and I'm very intrigued. And there goes my productivity for the rest of the day. Sean Tibor: There you go. Julian Sequeira: That's actually really cool. I really. Yeah, there's the plunge. Okay, sorry, I'm looking at my calipers now as you're talking about it. No, but you're right. And to me, it just. It opens up this world of possibility. You're like, there's no more guessing. And the experimentation of, okay, if this is the width of whatever I have to say, a hole for the opening of a cup, if I need to put something in it, I have to also factor in the layer height and width of the printing that I'm going to be doing. So what size is the insert? And different things like that. It's just. It's really cool. I appreciate that, Sean. That's a good one. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Very cool. You got. Are you. Is that it? Are you guys on four? Do you have. Not anyone left? Julian Sequeira: I have no money left. Sean Tibor: The other. I have one more 3D printing tool that I didn't know existed before. But these are really cool. Okay, this is a deburring tool. Julian Sequeira: Yep. Sean Tibor: If you've ever seen one of these, it's a little. It's a sharp blade, so, you know, not for kids, but it's got this little, like, curved blade that swivels around when you drag it along the edge of a print where there might be some extra plastic or a brim or something like that. It just slices it off super neatly and follows the edge of the print. So you get these really clean corners and things like that. And I think I got it for 10 bucks or something. It's aluminum. It works really well. It's all these little things that are quality of life or conveniences when it comes to making stuff. I just keep adding to my stockpile, like plastic spudgers for prying things open. And it just makes it so that if you're tinkering with things, if you're messing with things you've got like a nice little set of tools that you can keep adding to that help make the actual tinkering a little bit easier and a little less destructive in nature. Julian Sequeira: Yep. Instead of just getting a knife, you. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Guys are just gonna have a holiday gift guide on 3D printing, I think. Julian Sequeira: And here's the kind of filament you should buy. Yeah, one more actually, if you have a minute. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, yeah, I have one more. After you. So we'll finish. We'll finish off with a grape. A grapes. A grape guide gift. Julian Sequeira: Well, mine is actually. So I'm not a fan of Roblox and forgive me if anyone out there is everything but having three kids and two of them really loving that get that platform. It's reminded me of my childhood with video games and stuff where the games that I played actually really encouraged problem solving and the resilience of getting your butt kicked in a game and you couldn't just win the first time over. Whereas Roblox is very dopamine heavy. So my recommendation is if you have children and they do enjoy video games, anything that will help get them off of Roblox and into a game. Like one of the games I saw a huge difference in. One of my kids was Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom on the Nintendo Switch. Seeing him get demolished by the bosses in that game taught it was one. It was satisfying because I'm like, see, this is what it means to play a video game. Seeing him just work die 500 times before he beat that boss and then beat it and then drop the controllers of the Switch on the floor and just be like I got it, just so excited. So anything. If you are looking at video games, look at some of these deep, rich, story driven games. Encourages reading, problem solving. I love the Legend of Zelda series. Even Pokemon to some extent is just is super fun because if you don't get the type matchups, you're going to get your butt kicked. Yeah, anything like that that promotes a bit of thinking in video games better than Roblox, get them off it. Sean Tibor: It's an interesting point because there's a lot of studies that were made about kids that grew up in the 90s and 2000s with that style of video games where you really had to develop a lot of persistence and resilience and picking yourself back up again and trying again and trying again and trying again and how that corresponded into success later in life because those traits that they built as gamers seem to be well suited for the time of the 2010s and the 2020s and like the way that the world works. I'm really curious to see what happens with the Roblox generations and the dopamine heavy generations, the YouTube generation. Are they developing the same persistence and resilience and fortitude that a lot of those video games taught kids that may not have picked it up otherwise? Julian Sequeira: That's another episode in itself. Speaking my language, buddy. Sean Tibor: What video games can teach us. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I was more of a Pac man person. I don't want to go into the science behind that. So Pac man and Asteroids don't go there. Sean Tibor: That explains so much. Kelly. You're just always chasing that next yellow pellet. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's it. All right, my last item and I don't even know if I should even share this, but I've been waiting on it since the summer since I've seen it was going to come out. It's the Richie Mini from Hugging Face. I put an order in. I got both. I got the 299 one that uses your computer and then the 449 one that is self contained. And what Hugging Face did is they put the models on there and these tiny, adorable little desk and you're supposed to be able to train the model through the many. The one that's self standing or whatever. I don't even think. I can't remember what it was. If it's like a Raspberry PI board, I don't know. I have been waiting for it but it's so cute. I don't know how to explain. It's got this like little white body with no arms and it reminds me of. Sean Tibor: It's Eve, right From. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: From Wally. Right? Yes. And it's so adorable. And I keep waiting for it. It hasn't shipped yet and it says it's starting in September for the cheap one and was supposed to be in November. So maybe they're going to come out together. But I guess they had such a huge calling for them. They weren't able to produce enough yet. But I put my order in June, July. As soon as I sold them out, I was like, I want. This is my next kind of thing. Because I had emojis and Emo was sitting on our. On my computer on our desk. And Emo, now all he does is type because that's all I do. I don't talk to it enough. So it just goes just like I need to talk to it more. So it has more social. But this one's Swiss recall. I'm waiting for it to come and scare all the kids away. Sean Tibor: Nice, nice. Julian Sequeira: Cool, Nice. Very cool. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'll let you know if it ever arrives, but hopefully. So we'll have to tell them. That's it. Sean Tibor: That's it. Everybody's got. Everybody's done. We got all of our gift ideas. I love it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That was cool. Sean Tibor: This is a good one. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. Normally only give 10 when we've had them. So now we've got 15 items too many. Too many. Julian Sequeira: So send all your invoices to Kelly. Sean Tibor: The PO number is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Julian Sequeira: That's my credit card number. Sean Tibor: The combination for my luggage. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I have to edit all the laughter just. That's funny. Julian Sequeira: Yeah. All right. This episode will be five minutes shorter. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: All right, Very cool. Any news to share? Nothing. Pycons in California. Proposals are there. Educational summit after the holidays. I think we always start after the holidays. Sean Tibor: We started in January, should be done by March, April for submissions, I think. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yes. Right before the week before the summit. Don't ask if you're coming. If you put a proposal on, we'll put you up somewhere on a lightning round or something. So submit your proposals when the website goes out and that's it. Julian Sequeira: Cool. I'll try and be there. I really want to get over there, but. Yeah, flight from here to la. But if we can make it work, I'm going to get there and maybe I can help you guys with the summit. That'd be nice. Sean Tibor: That'd be amazing. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That'd be nice. That'd be great. All right, well, let's close this out because it's 8:30 and it's my holiday time. Sean Tibor: Yeah, exactly. Julian Sequeira: It's lunchtime and pool time here, so. All right, well, thank you guys for having me. I really, really enjoyed being on here. Hopefully I'll see you again soon. Less than 100 episodes away, so we'll. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: See how that goes. All right. Sean Tibor: All right. Thank you, Julian. Much appreciated to have you here and hopefully we will get you on sooner than 130 episodes from now. Julian Sequeira: Pleasure. Absolute pleasure. I'm happy to be here. Sean Tibor: Excellent. Well, for teaching Python, this is Sean. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And this is Kelly signing off. Sa.