The poetry of programming | Linda Liukas | TEDxCERN

Summary

The speaker emphasizes the importance of making technology accessible and engaging for diverse groups, particularly young girls. She shares her personal journey into coding, which began with building a website out of teenage admiration for Al Gore. Through playful teaching methods, she demonstrates how programming can be fun, imaginative, and creative. The talk advocates for fostering a generation of creators, not just consumers, and envisions a future where technology is built by people from all backgrounds, leading to a more colorful and innovative world.

Takeaways

• 🎸 In past decades, cultural movements were driven by things like punk music and money; today, software is the interface to our imagination and world.
• 👩‍💻 There's a need for a more diverse group of people to see computers as something they can tinker with, not something magical or boring.
• 🖥️ The speaker's journey into programming began at 14 when she created a website to express her teenage crush on Al Gore, showing that coding is a form of self-expression.
• 👧 Little girls are naturally curious and good at problem-solving, but societal perceptions often steer them away from computers.
• 🧠 Parents view computer science as mysterious and complex, but in reality, it's not magic—it's just been made foreign to us over time.
• 🎨 Programming is a creative discipline, comparable to art forms like poetry, music, or knitting—each of these involves pattern recognition and logic.
• 👾 Ruby, a fictional six-year-old girl, teaches the speaker that programming can be learned through play, emphasizing the importance of creativity and imagination in technology education.
• 🔄 Kids should be taught to build with computers, not just use them—like how loops can be taught through playful activities.
• 🌐 The future belongs to those who understand that technology can make the world more ready, and it’s essential to raise creators, not just consumers.
• 🌍 Inclusivity in technology will make the world more colorful and diverse, and disruption starts with people who have a vision, not just the technology itself.

Q & A

What does the speaker mean by 'Code is the next universal language'?

The speaker suggests that coding will become as fundamental as spoken or written languages, serving as a primary tool for communication and creation in our digital world.

How did the speaker's journey into programming begin?

The speaker started programming at the age of 14, driven by a desire to express her feelings for then-Vice President Al Gore by building a website dedicated to him.

Why does the speaker believe more diverse people should learn to build technology?

The speaker believes that a broader range of voices is needed to create technology that reflects the diversity of human experiences and ensures that computers are not seen as intimidating or mechanical but as accessible tools for creativity.

What analogy does the speaker use to describe learning computer science, and why?

The speaker compares learning computer science to learning languages, like French irregular verbs or knitting patterns, emphasizing that it's a skill of recognizing patterns, following sequences, and solving problems, rather than something inherently difficult or boring.

What misconception do parents have about computers, according to the speaker?

Parents often believe that computer science is an esoteric, complex discipline far removed from everyday life, much like nuclear physics. This discourages children from engaging with technology.

How does the speaker use the character Ruby to teach programming concepts?

Ruby, a six-year-old girl, is used to explain programming concepts through imaginative play, like teaching loops using dance moves or learning algorithms through cupcake recipes. Ruby represents a playful approach to learning technology.

What example does the speaker give to explain how kids can understand technology differently?

The speaker shares a story of a little girl who imagined that if her bicycle lamp were a computer, it could change colors and project movies, showing how kids can think creatively about integrating technology into everyday objects.

What does the speaker mean by 'we are raising only consumers instead of creators'?

The speaker argues that unless children are given the tools to build and create with computers, they will grow up as passive consumers of technology rather than active creators who shape the digital world.

How does the speaker envision a more inclusive world of technology?

The speaker imagines a world where technology is shaped not just by Silicon Valley engineers but by diverse people from different backgrounds, such as Kenyan schoolgirls or Norwegian librarians, contributing to a richer and more colorful technological landscape.

Why does the speaker compare programming to poetry?

The speaker sees programming as a form of creative expression, where logic and rules can be used to build worlds, much like poetry uses language to create meaning. This highlights the artistry and imagination involved in coding.

Outlines

00:00

💻 The Language of Technology and Self-Expression

The speaker discusses how coding has become a universal language for their generation, much like punk music and money in previous eras. For them, programming became a tool for self-expression, starting with a teenage crush that led them to build a website for Al Gore. Through learning to code, the speaker realized that programming is not just technical but a creative outlet. They highlight that girls, like everyone else, have the potential to thrive in coding but are often discouraged by societal perceptions.

05:03

🦸‍♀️ Ruby and Learning Through Play

The speaker introduces Ruby, a fictional character created to teach programming concepts through playful stories. Ruby, imaginative and fearless, helps the speaker simplify complex topics like object-oriented design and garbage collection by explaining them in childlike terms. Ruby has quirky friends like a Snow Leopard, robots, and Linux the penguin, representing different aspects of technology. Through Ruby's world, the speaker emphasizes the importance of learning technology through play, using fun examples like dance moves to teach loops and cupcakes to explain algorithms.

10:07

🧠 Exploring Computers Through Childlike Curiosity

The speaker describes playtesting sessions with children to help them understand computers. Initially, the kids don't recognize everyday objects like cars and grocery stores as computers, but they learn that many things around them contain computers. The children are encouraged to imagine turning ordinary objects into computers, like transforming a bicycle lamp into a movie projector. The speaker highlights the importance of fostering creativity in children, so they see themselves as creators, not just consumers, of technology.

🌍 A New View on Technology and the Future

The speaker recounts how kids are learning to interact with technology differently than previous generations, through building computers and designing their own applications. One child’s project, an intergalactic planetary navigation system, reflects how kids today will have a profoundly different view of the world and technology. The speaker emphasizes that making technology more inclusive will lead to a brighter, more diverse future, where everyone, from Kenyan schoolgirls to Norwegian librarians, can contribute to technological innovation. They conclude by celebrating the humanity at the core of computer science.

🌟 A Whimsical, Optimistic World of Technology

The speaker reflects on their childhood desire to be a storyteller, drawing inspiration from make-believe worlds like Narnia and Tatooine. They describe how programming has allowed them to continue creating worlds, now using code instead of words. Programming gives them the ability to build entire universes governed by logic and rules, making them feel like a poet. They conclude by highlighting the imaginative, playful, and whimsical potential of technology, calling for a more diverse and creative approach to building the future.

Keywords

💡Code

Code refers to the instructions and commands written by programmers to communicate with computers. In the video, coding is depicted as a universal language that allows individuals to create, express themselves, and shape technology. The speaker shares how she learned to code to build a website, emphasizing that coding can be a form of personal expression, much like art or writing.

💡Diversity

Diversity refers to the inclusion of a wide range of different types of people in programming and technology. The speaker advocates for a more diverse set of people involved in building software, arguing that this diversity is essential to creating more inclusive and imaginative products. She emphasizes that the tech world should not only include 'Silicon Valley boys' but also Kenyan schoolgirls and Norwegian librarians.

💡Creativity

Creativity is the act of using imagination to create something new, and in the context of the video, it refers to how coding can be a medium for creative expression. The speaker illustrates this by sharing her personal journey, where she used coding as a way to express her admiration for Al Gore and later realized that programming is a way to build imaginative worlds, much like writing or storytelling.

💡Pattern recognition

Pattern recognition involves identifying regularities or patterns in data. In the video, the speaker relates this skill to activities like conjugating French verbs and knitting, suggesting that many everyday tasks help develop the ability to recognize patterns—an important skill in programming. She argues that people often don’t realize how these experiences contribute to their ability to understand and engage with computers.

💡Algorithms

Algorithms are step-by-step procedures or formulas for solving problems. In the video, the speaker explains algorithms in simple terms, comparing them to cupcake recipes that follow a series of steps to achieve a result. The speaker uses playful metaphors to explain how children can learn complex concepts like algorithms through activities such as Ruby's dance moves or solving problems in Ruby’s fictional world.

💡Imagination

Imagination is the ability to form new ideas, images, or concepts in the mind. The speaker believes that imagination is central to both programming and how children can engage with technology. She shares stories of children using their imagination to think of innovative ways to make objects like a bicycle lamp more interactive and multifunctional, showing that technology and creativity go hand in hand.

💡Empowerment

Empowerment in this context refers to giving people, especially children, the tools and confidence to create with technology. The speaker stresses the importance of teaching kids not just to use technology but to build with it. She believes that empowering young minds with programming skills will enable them to see the world differently and take an active role in shaping the future through technology.

💡Programming as self-expression

Programming as self-expression highlights how coding can be a way to express thoughts, feelings, and creativity. The speaker uses her own experience of building a website for Al Gore as an example, showing that programming began for her as a form of self-expression. She draws a parallel between writing code and other creative pursuits, such as painting or playing music.

💡Human-computer interaction

Human-computer interaction refers to the way people engage with computers. The speaker criticizes how computers have become so abstracted from humans that we no longer understand how they work. She argues for a more approachable and playful interaction with computers, especially for children, suggesting that the tools we build should allow users to experiment, create, and feel in control of technology.

💡Inclusivity

Inclusivity refers to creating an environment where everyone, regardless of background, can participate. The speaker emphasizes the need to make technology accessible to a broader range of people. She argues that the world of programming and computer science should be inclusive, ensuring that everyone, from young girls to people in different parts of the world, feels welcome in the field of technology.

Highlights

Code is becoming the next universal language, replacing previous generational drivers like punk music and money.

Software serves as an interface to our imagination, requiring a more diverse group of people to build products that are engaging and relevant.

The speaker's personal journey into programming started at age 14, driven by a teenage crush on then Vice President Al Gore, leading her to build a website.

In 2001, without platforms like Tumblr, Facebook, or Pinterest, the speaker had to learn coding as a form of self-expression.

Despite her early interest in programming, the speaker later drifted away due to societal notions that computers are boring, technical, and lonely.

Little girls don't know they aren't supposed to like computers; it's the parents who believe computer science is a strange, technical field only for experts.

Society teaches children about the human body and space exploration but fails to demystify computers and programming.

The speaker emphasizes the need for tools that help kids transition from being passive consumers to active creators of technology.

The speaker created 'Ruby', a fictional six-year-old girl, to help explain complex programming concepts like object-oriented design and algorithms.

The playful and imaginative teaching approach of Ruby introduces children to technology through fun, relatable metaphors, such as learning loops through dance moves.

Through storytelling, the speaker conveys that programming is not about finding the perfect code but fostering creativity and imaginative problem-solving.

Children of today, who interact with technology through tapping and swiping, need to be empowered to build with computers, not just use them.

The future of computing lies in the hands of today's children, who will live in a world where everything—from bicycle lamps to milk bottles—could be computers.

Technology education should be inclusive and diverse, encouraging visions beyond Silicon Valley, such as Kenyan schoolgirls or Norwegian librarians.

Programming, for the speaker, is about creating worlds, where the boundaries of logic, creativity, and storytelling merge—making coding a form of poetry.

Transcripts

Translator: Cynthia Betubiza Reviewer: Ivana Korom

Code is the next universal language.

In the seventies, it was punk music that drove the whole generation.

In the eighties, it was probably money.

But for my generation of people,

software is the interface to our imagination and our world.

And that means that we need

a radically, radically more diverse set of people

to build those products,

to not see computers as mechanical and lonely and boring and magic,

to see them as things that they can tinker

and turn around and twist, and so forth.

My personal journey into the world of programming and technology

started at the tender age of 14.

I had this mad teenage crush on an older man,

and the older man in question just happened to be

the then Vice President of the United States, Mr. Al Gore.

And I did what every single teenage girl would want to do.

I wanted to somehow express all of this love,

so I built him a website, it's over here.

And in 2001, there was no Tumblr,

there was no Facebook, there was no Pinterest.

So I needed to learn to code

in order to express all of this longing and loving.

And that is how programming started for me.

It started as a means of self-expression.

Just like when I was smaller, I would use crayons and legos.

And when I was older, I would use guitar lessons and theater plays.

But then, there were other boys, other things to get excited about,

like poetry and knitting socks

and conjugating French irregular verbs

and coming up with make-believe worlds

and Bertrand Russell and his philosophy.

And I started to be one of those people

who felt that computers are boring and technical and lonely.

Here's what I think today.

Little girls don't know that they are not supposed to like computers.

Little girls are amazing.

They are really, really good at concentrating on things

and being exact and they ask amazing questions like,

"What?" and "Why?" and "How?" and "What if?"

And they don't know that they are not supposed to like computers.

It's the parents who do.

It's us parents who feel

like computer science is this esoteric, weird science discipline

that only belongs to the mystery makers.

That it's almost as far removed from everyday life

as, say, nuclear physics.

And they are partly right about that.

There's a lot of syntax and controls and data structures

and algorithms and practices,

protocols and paradigms in programming.

And we as a community, we've made computers smaller and smaller.

We've built layers and layers of abstraction on top of each other

between the man and the machine

to the point that we no longer have any idea how computers work

or how to talk to them.

And we do teach our kids how the human body works,

we teach them how the combustion engine functions

and we even tell them that if you want to really be an astronaut

you can become one.

But when the kid comes to us and asks,

"So, what is a bubble sort algorithm?"

Or, "How does the computer know what happens when I press 'play,'

how does it know which video to show?"

Or, "Linda, is Internet a place?"

We adults, we grow oddly silent.

"It's magic," some of us say.

'It's too complicated," the others say.

Well, it's neither.

It's not magic and it's not complicated.

It all just happened really, really, really fast.

Computer scientists built these amazing, beautiful machines,

but they made them very, very foreign to us,

and also the language we speak to the computers

so that we don't know how to speak to the computers anymore

without our fancy user interfaces.

And that's why no one recognized

that when I was conjugating French irregular verbs,

I was actually practicing my pattern recognition skills.

And when I was excited about knitting,

I actually was following a sequence of symbolic commands

that included loops inside of them.

And that Bertrand Russell's lifelong quest

to find an exact language between English and mathematics

found its home inside of a computer.

I was a programmer, but no one knew it.

The kids of today, they tap, swipe and pinch their way through the world.

But unless we give them tools to build with computers,

we are raising only consumers instead of creators.

And I believe that, if JavaScript is the new lingua franca,

instead of grammar lessons, we should be teaching poetry classes.

This whole quest led me to this little girl.

Her name is Ruby, she is six years old.

She is completely fearless, imaginative and a little bit bossy.

And every time I would run into a problem

in trying to teach myself programming like,

"What is object-oriented design or what is garbage collection?",

I would try to imagine how a six-year-old little girl would explain the problem.

And I wrote a book about her and I illustrated it

and the things Ruby taught me go like this.

Ruby taught me that you're not supposed to be afraid

of the bugs under your bed.

And even the biggest of the problems

are a group of tiny problems stuck together.

And Ruby also introduced me to her friends,

the colorful side of the Internet culture.

She has friends like the Snow Leopard,

who is beautiful but doesn't want to play with the other kids.

And she has friends like the green robots that are really friendly but super messy.

And she has friends like Linux the penguin

who's really ruthlessly efficient, but somewhat hard to understand.

And idealistic foxes, and so on.

In Ruby's world, you learn technology through play.

And, for instance, computers are really good at repeating stuff,

so the way Ruby would teach loops goes like this.

This is Ruby's favorite dance move, it goes, "Clap, clap, stomp, stomp

clap, clap and jump."

And you learn counter loops by repeating that four times.

And you learn while loops by repeating that sequence

while I'm standing on one leg.

And you learn until loops by repeating that sequence

until mom gets really mad.

(Laughter)

You learn decomposition skills by problem solving flow charts

and seeing what went wrong in Ruby's friends' practicalities.

You learn that algorithms are much like cupcake recipes.

And most of all, you learn that there are no ready answers.

When coming up with the curriculum for Ruby's world,

I needed to really ask the kids how they see the world

and what kind of questions they have

and I would organize play testing sessions.

I have three little stories for you from those play testing sessions.

I would start by showing the kids these four pictures.

I would show them a picture of a car,

a grocery store, a dog and a toilet.

And I would ask, "Which one of these do you think is a computer?"

And the kids would be very conservative and go,

"None of these is a computer.

I know what a computer is:

it's that glowing box

in front of which mom or dad spends way too much time."

But then we would talk

and we would discover that actually, a car is a computer,

it has a navigation system inside of it.

And a dog - a dog might not be a computer,

but it has a collar

and the collar might have a computer inside of it.

And grocery stores, they have so many different kinds of computers,

like the cashier system and the burglar alarms.

And kids, you know what?

In Japan, toilets are computers

and there's even hackers who hack them.

(Laughter)

And we go further

and I give them these little stickers with an on/off button on them.

And I tell the kids, "Today you have this magic ability

to make anything in this room into a computer."

And again, the kids go,

"Sounds really hard, I don't know the right answer for this."

But I tell them, "Don't worry,

your parents don't know the right answer, either.

They've just started to hear about this thing

called The Internet of Things.

But you kids, you are going to be the ones

who are really going to live up in a world where everything is a computer."

Your washing machine, toothbrush, even your milk bottle.

And that you're the last generation that will remember the computer

as a glowing box.

And then I had this little girl who came to me

and took a bicycle lamp

and she said, "This bicycle lamp, if it were a computer,

it would change colors."

And I said, "That's a really good idea, what else could it do?"

And she thinks and she thinks,

and she goes, "If this bicycle lamp were a computer,

we could go on a biking trip with my father

and we would sleep in a tent

and this biking lamp could also be a movie projector."

And that's the moment I'm looking for,

not the moment when the kid writes the prefect Ruby array,

the moment when the kid realizes

that the world is definitely not ready yet,

that a really awesome way of making the world more ready

is by building technology

and that each one of us can be a part of that change.

Final story, we also built a computer,

the glowing box, the archaic glowing box.

And we got to know the bossy CPU and the helpful RAM and ROM

that help it remember things.

And after we've assembled our computer together,

we also design an application for it.

And my favorite story is this little boy,

he's six years old

and his favorite thing in the world is to be an astronaut.

And the boy, he has these huge headphones on

and he's completely immersed in his tiny paper computer

because you see, he's built his own

intergalactic planetary navigation application.

And his father, the lone astronaut in the Martian orbit,

is on the other side of the room

and the boy's important mission

is to bring the father safely back to earth.

And these kids are going to have a profoundly different view of the world

and the way we build it with technology.

Finally, the more approachable, the more inclusive,

and the more diverse we make the world of technology,

the more colorful and better the world will look like.

Because disruption doesn't start with technology.

Disruption starts with the people with a vision.

And computer science, and programming and technology

the very DNA of all of these things is humanity.

Computers, after all, they used to be humans

who were really, really good at calculating things.

And still today, programmers don't write the code

only for the machine to execute.

They write the code for other programmers to read and build upon.

So, imagine with me, for a moment,

a world where the stories we tell

about how things get made don't only include

the twentysomething-year-old Silicon Valley boys,

but also Kenyan schoolgirls and Norwegian librarians.

Imagine a world where the little Ada Lovelaces of tomorrow,

who live in a permanent reality of 1s and 0s,

they grow up to be very optimistic and brave about technology.

They embrace the powers and the opportunities

and the limitations of the world.

A world of technology that is wonderful, whimsical

and a tiny bit weird.

When I was a girl,

I wanted to be a storyteller.

I loved make-believe worlds

and my favorite thing to do

was to wake up in the mornings in Moominvalley.

In the afternoons, I would roam around the Tatooines.

And in the evenings, I would go to sleep in Narnia.

And programming turned out to be the perfect profession for me.

I still create worlds.

Instead of stories, I do them with code.

Programming gives me this amazing power

to build my whole little universe

with its own rules and paradigms and practices.

Create something out of nothing with the pure power of logic.

And that probably makes me a poet.

Thank you.

(Applause)