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Something as simple as just seeing a green check mark on there and says, way to go. You solve the bite. The kids get a tremendous amount of satisfaction out of that, especially if they can do chain that together, like, one every few minutes. Keeps them going, and they get this sense of momentum, and they just want to keep going. And we've had some students that have gone through all 25 newbie bites in the first, like, seven days of the course. And so we say, good news. There's 300 other bites that you can learn from. So let's get you going on those. Hello, and welcome to the Pibytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Valdebos. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. All right, everyone, welcome to the episode. We have a very special episode for you today. This is a crossover episode, so I'm not just here with Bob, but we also have Sean from the teaching Python podcast. Welcome, everyone. Hello. Hi. Great to have you on here. I know this is fun. We had you on our podcast way back at the beginning of our run of episodes, and it's a lot of fun. We've done some pretty cool stuff since then together with you, and it's really nice to get back on the air with the two of you. Yeah, this is super exciting. I love that we've been able to get the time zones crossed over yet again without too much pain from anyone in particular. So last time, the transatlantic episode. Yeah. Sean and I have probably the best time zone. Not too late, not too early. We're like the baby goatilocks

incident here. Yeah. 07: 1:39

00 a.m.. Here. So I'll take the pain. So, the point of this episode, everyone, is that we wanted to pick Sean and Kelly's brains when it comes to teaching Python in general. And I'll get into the topics in a second. But the first thing I wanted to cover off is, why doesn't everyone just do a quick five to ten second roundtable and just go through? Tell us a bit about yourself, Shaun. Do you want to get started? Sure. So my intro is pretty simple. I'm a coder who started teaching about three years ago, and I work at Pinecrest School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I teach 7th and 8th grade computer science, and my kids are learning Python, and they're really doing an amazing job of it. Today we were talking about reinforcement learning and AWS deepracers. They're having a ton of fun trying to learn this stuff and figure out how do these things actually work. And we don't get as deep into the code as maybe a professional developer, but they get the idea of reinforcement learning and how it could work and what they could do with it. We're going to set up our racing league here shortly. I get to have fun every day playing with stuff like this and watching kids get into it and get excited about it and hopefully setting them off on a journey of learning and development over the course of their life. That's such a cool job. All right, so mine intro is just about the same as Shawn, except for I'm the one, like, maintaining the too much fun factor. I'm like, slow down, calm down. This is school. It's supposed to be boring. Give them a test or something. But I am a teacher who codes and actually just got on as an orange ninja belt today on the pivots website. And so proud of myself, finally, I know I solved a four pointer, a reg x. Those are my new friends. They actually get more points on it so I can go higher up the scale. So I was really excited. And, yeah, that's pretty much it. I code with 6th and 7th grade students and sometimes watch with 8th grade and help Shawn do some basics in 8th grade. And that's about all I do. Nothing else. I don't race cars with AWS. I just scream in the background going too fast. One of my favorite things, though, is watching the journey that Kelly's gone on over the last three years about learning how to code. When she got that four pointer pie bite, she's like, yes. Like her arms up in the air. I'm like, hey, Kelly, Kelly, I'm trying to teach a class here. Keep it down. That happened today, right? Yeah, just now. It was a not very pretty code, but it worked. I always do that. I always show Sean's kids, like, he's up there going, and, yes, we can do this with a slicing of the index and a for loop and nested in with the list comprehension. I'm like, but you can also do it with if lfls 20 times, and it still doesn't. It still works. And it still works. So, yes, it wasn't pretty. It wasn't pretty, but it passed the test, so I'm proud. That's awesome. I got the grade. All right, so into the meat of this and a lot of the fun stuff now. So, Sean and Kelly, I'm going to let you choose who gets to go first on this one? But one of the things we wanted to cover off is that you two are actually using our coding platform code challenges to teach your students python. And this is super exciting for us. It's one of the proudest moments of 2020 for us. We were very excited that you were doing this, but would you be able to tell us a bit about how you're using that platform to teach python? Sure. So we started, I guess we started using it when we met you guys for ourselves by saying, sean, we'll have to correct me on that. And we started talking about how the process of going through and solving these bytes were helping me a lot. And, Shawn, I think you grew a lot doing them as well. And we played around with the. I played around with the newbie bites because I was still a newbie back then. And the concept of using the pie bytes platform as a student platform came into fruition when we were just like, this platform that we're using is not meeting the needs, the ones that we were using before. And, yeah, we just started talking about how cool would it be if we could introduce the newbie bytes to the kids, the way that they're laid out with all kinds of information and interweave them into our curriculum. You guys were up to date with the three point whatever version, I think 3.8 was when we came in with the classroom. So it's modern python. It's like the same stuff that you would use in a regular project. And it also incorporates a lot of other things that we love, like this concept of code testing. And when we were looking at all the different options and all the different platforms out there, the thing that kept coming back to my mind was that students don't need cute examples. They might be ten years old, twelve years old, something like that. They don't need cute examples. They need clear examples. They need things that are understandable and relevant, and they can work with it. And that was one of the things that we really liked about the platform, was that where everyone else was like, we're going to make games and it's going to be fun, and we're going to have these silly examples that they can learn python with. It was like, that's nice, but you're losing the clarity of it. You're losing this idea of, can they build a concept or understand the concept from the challenge that they're on and then actually use that and integrate that knowledge? So that was a big selling point for us, was the clarity of the examples, the way that the concepts were presented. And what we're finding with our students is that belief is paying off, that those, the students are now saying, this is so much easier to understand than what we were doing last year. Like, we get it. Yeah. And thinking back to the previous platforms and all the ones that we've seen in the past, I personally, even coming from a newbie, a newbie python coder, didn't comprehend what an object was, what a method was, and how that plays out in code. So you would see the sprite forward method, and, okay, I know it'll make it go forward. That's great. I can make the little sprite move through the maze, but I didn't really understand how that applied to other aspects in coding. And I think that's how the py bytes has changed the way that the kids are learning python, getting concepts that they can now put into other codes versus the sprites going forward. Great. So that's our two cent together. That's really awesome and happy to hear that. But then if the students go from nice toy games to maybe some drier newbie bites with some text to digest and down the earth Python, what were some of the challenges then that you had teaching the students python, be it platform or otherwise? So the thing is, you have to put into the mindset of a middle school teacher and a high school teacher. We're not just teaching the content. So one of the things, even though it may appear dry or a lot of text or a lot of information, this skill that the kids are developing with being able to read text slowly in order to search out the question or search out what they have to do for the problem is a huge skill. It's like the number one skill for Sean and I in our class, besides grit and all the other ones. But a number one skill is reading comprehension and literacy. We often talk about how do we develop the information literacy with informational text? And that's a skill that's not often done in schools as much unless you're studying government or humanities or something like that. A lot of english classes go into fiction, and the kids know how to understand a fiction, understand the theme or main idea of a story, but in order to pull out information from text that they don't know the words, that's a huge skill. And so that's one of the things that I think pibytes is helping with over the games. The only thing I was going to add to that is the way to balance that is if you put up a big wall of text and you put up a lot of information, they get lost. So this atomic nature of the challenge, where it is not, especially in the newbie bites, is not a huge amount of information. It's a singular concept that builds on other things that they may have learned. They're reading a digestible amount of text. They're getting key concepts out of that. It's very focused, it's very clear, and then they can take that information and apply it right away and get that immediate feedback of, I tried this. I tried to apply it. Did it work? Did it pass the test? And it's something as simple as just seeing a green check mark on there and says, way to go. You solved the bite. The kids get a tremendous amount of satisfaction out of that, especially if they can chain that together like, one every few minutes. Keeps them going, and they get this sense of momentum, and they just want to keep going. And we've had some students that have gone through all 25 newbie bites in the first, like, seven days of the course. And so we say, good news. There's 300 other bytes that you can learn from. So let's get you going on. Those parents didn't complain. When you say, like, the instant feedback, what was the reaction to the testing system like, that? We run PI test against the code. Is that confusing? Yeah. Yes. And I say, okay, just open up the pytest output or don't look at the test things yet. Look, open up the PI test output. Scroll all the way to the bottom till you see a word that you can read. And let's be honest, these are ten, 1112, maybe 13 year old kids and trace backs and tests and all that other stuff that you developers put in there, pretty crazy. So being able to just give them the confidence that, yeah, you're not going to know what's in there, but scroll down till you see something like name error or whatever. And the kids always say, what's eof error? And I'm like, I don't know, it's wrong. Do something else. A search in error? Yeah, you didn't do it right. Just put return. You'll figure it out later. Yeah. Their first reaction is definitely, what is this thing? Red text, black background. What am I looking at? How does it work? And so they are. That initial reaction is, it's a little bit overwhelming to see all of that report come back. But the good news is, when they're first doing it, it's relatively simple things that they're trying to test, and so there's not a lot of different moving parts that they have to diagnose. So we start getting them looking at skills like how do you read an error report? How do you read this test log and see what happened? And what are the different types of errors that you have? And when they say assertion error, what does that mean? We break that apart into all these pieces and by the end of it, the kids are like, they know. Let me see the PI test output. What is it doing? How does this work? So it's one of those things where I can't wait to show Brian Aachen at some point. Look, ten year old's reading pytest, and this is really cool. Yeah, he's going to get a kick out of that. I love it. All right, so hang on. So I've got a quick, actually, one comment to make quickly. The newbie exercises that we're talking about are a series of 25 exercises that each exercise is very fine tuned to teach one specific concept without rolling over. Don't forget. Sorry to interrupting you for a second. Don't forget five more exercises and the newbie bites about classes that you're making this year, by the way, soon to be 30, I guess, is what Kelly's asking for, putting up the spot. Gotta add more exercises to this just for you guys. All right, fine. Listen to the accountability. Yeah. So anyways, newbie bites. Yes, one through 30? Yes, one through 30. Sorry. No. They teach a very specific concept, and that's what I think the kids are relating with the most, which is pretty cool. Okay, I've got a question that I didn't ask you in advance of this, but when I was in school, in high school specifically. So in Australia, that's grade seven to grade twelve, we didn't have a dedicated software design type coding course until. Or class, I should say, until we were in grade eleven. So you're telling me that there are kids. The students are ten. 1112. So what course is it that or what class is it that you're teaching? And how is it that you've managed to choose python for that over, say, c or visual basic or whatever else? Have you tried those other languages? Because it was a pretty clear choice. Okay. All right. Human being. All of our students, PK twelve, have computer science. All of them. And in the lower levels, the computer science teachers come into the little classrooms and they teach them. My seven year old's working and doing all the levels of codables. That's that little fuzzy ball that goes through and goes, gets coded through a maze. And then in the lower school they go and they learn scratch, scratch junior. So we picked Python three years ago, and it wasn't really picked, it was given to us because I think the hardware, the micro bit, the just popularity of the program, the language was there. And the high school AP teacher, she was like, yeah, Python's gonna be great. It'll work well in good preparation for my JavaScript class, which I didn't understand. But hey, she says our kids are doing great in her class, so that's all that matters. So I think that's why they chose it. And just to give them another language before they went into high school and completed the AP program, which I guess is a little bit harder to do with JavaScript. That's what I was told. Anything else? Yeah, just in terms of structure. We teach nine week courses throughout the school year. Each of our middle school students will have nine weeks of computer science. They move on to another subject, we get a fresh batch of students, so they're not getting like a full year long course, but they are getting nine weeks of every day, or this year, every other day doing computer science, so that they are really able to dig a little bit deeper into it. And then from here, our students go on into upper school courses, where they're taking a more traditional full year type course, where they're learning in a more college style computer science framework. One of the things that's really great about this is that there's been this recognition at our school, and this isn't commonplace in America, it's becoming more widespread. But the idea is that computer science, the discipline, is really not about the specific language and syntax, it's about the concepts, it's about the ideas, it's about the way of thinking, the mindset, the way to break down problems, all of those durable skills that persist across languages. That's what computer science is really about. My son, who's in kindergarten right now, he's five years old, he is going through and learning about algorithmic, sequential processes and everything by navigating mazes and creating, here's my little algorithm that will navigate the maze. But it really just helps him break down and start to realize that logical framework of thinking through how to solve a problem in a way that's appropriate to his age. And then next year he'll have a little bit more and a little bit more so that by the time our seniors are graduating from our upper school, at 18 or 19 years old, some of them are going on and taking artificial intelligence and machine learning courses, and they've taken a data structures and algorithms course, so they're taking fairly advanced coding courses before they get to college. But the only way that we can really make that work is if they've had this progression of that computer science. Computational thinking skills. Ask any teacher across the world. Computational thinking skills. Yep. That's what we're really shooting for here, the language. While Python is very convenient for us to teach, it's a great language to learn in. It's very scalable to more advanced problems. The most important thing is that way of thinking and the way of conceptualizing and abstracting the information. That's part of the computational thinking approach. That's amazing. I didn't realize the curriculum was so advanced compared to when I was in school not that long ago. I should. No, it's pretty. Go back in time. Australia has a lot of great, great websites and stuff like Grok learning comes from Australia, so they've got a lot of things now. I think you're just old and you never. Yeah, that's probably. Thanks. Thanks, kel. I'm not allowed to edit that out. Damn. No, actually, it's a good call as well, I think, for those of us with kids. So my kids are eight and five going into school and eight year olds are already in school, but I'm not sure what sort of computer style skills that they're learning in school, so I should probably pay more attention. So there's a lesson for me take away. Yeah. So you'd wake up call. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you both. All right, so the next question is a funny one, and I was really excited for this question. So do you have any stories or anecdotes about individual students or performers that are using the platform? Anything interesting to tell us? You can be critical. You want the good, the critical one. I can tell when they cheat. Here's the thing. And I don't want. And I don't want to lead anyone down the dark, gloomy path that. And I'm not saying that this is because or not because of the pie bites. You can't just give them a bunch of kids and say, here, go solve these and go away. The curriculum's done. Because any 1011 1213 year old is not going to have the motivation or desire. Unless it's that Sean Tybur, Bob Belderos kind of person who has been coding forever, who likes to sit at home and just click on their. No, just kidding. Sorry. That's what I see Sean doing, just clicking on his keyboards. But most of the kids don't want to do computer programming right away, so sometimes it's a little bit of that child that cheats. And you can tell when they do that because all of a sudden they've solved, like, three bites and two minutes because they asked their friend. But let me think of a really good story. They don't understand transformers, by the way, which is funny because they always put deception instead of Decepticon. And I'm like, dancing around going robots in disguise, and they go, oh, so that was more for you than the kids. Oh, man, that's upsetting that they didn't know Decepticons. I know. There were, like, Michael Bay movies and everything, and nothing. Just, whoosh. Let's not talk about those. What else? You see a lot of spelling errors in which they're like, these guys are really nitpicky. And I always tell them the story. Bob and Julian, these guys are real people, and they like things to be a particular way. If you don't put a space in between the period and the quotation mark, they're going to fail you on this bite. I consider that a lesson for when you're writing code and you leave out some quote marks and you have an extra long comment or something. I always tell them that's going to help you really well when you're in your english class. So just remember that. I had one today. That was funny. We were giving a class coding challenge. So in addition to their own self paced newbie bites, I'll give them a time challenge. Like, here's a problem. You've got 20 minutes to figure it out. Go. And I won't give them a lot of information. They can use any resources they want, except for each other. And so they're like, can we use the Internet? Yes. Can we use YouTube? Sure. Can we look at, online at the textbooks and things like that that you've uploaded? Sure. And so I'm sitting there listening to them work, and they're trying to figure it out, and they're working hard at it. And this one girl under her breath goes, thank you, newbie bites. She figured it out from one of the newbie bites. I know that there was a newbie bite about this. She went back and found it, and I just heard her quietly say to herself, thank you, newbie bites. Oh, that's amazing. That's right, my day. It's just cool. So you get some of the kids. I have one student right now who he's, I've known him now since he was in fourth grade, and he's in 7th, so going on three years, and he's been coding in fourth grade. He's just one of these kids that likes it. He's always giving me some random facts that I have no idea what he's talking about. I'm like, that's really cool. Yeah, go talk to Mister Tybur. But he was coding along and he skipped over the newbie bites. And we were talking the other day, and I was like, can you help me with number 318? And he's like, oh, you mean the base 64? And I'm like, how do you even know this crap? And he. When you go into the ASCII? And I was like, yeah, just go away. So, yes. That's crazy. Yeah, this kid's. He thinks he knows a lot at 7th grade, which he does, but he hasn't solved through 18. I got further than him. So just putting it out there, Kelly's playing her own version of are you smarter than a 7th grader right now? I tell them all the time, in two years time, they're going to be better coders than me because I'm still teaching the basics. So, I mean, it's just factual. I can teach the best for loops and the best conditional statements anywhere in this world. I can guarantee it. But take me further than 8th grade python, then we might have a little bit of trouble. I love that. That's so amazing story. Yeah. So onto the next question, then. We often tell kids how learning to code will help them in the future. And what do your kids think about that? What python will do for them as they get older? About that. I love asking them this question, so I asked them this question at the beginning of every class, why are we learning this? And about half the students say, because you told me to, mister Typer. Like, this is a required class. I'm here because you told me to be here. But a bunch of other kids will say it's almost straight off of the back of a brochure or some marketing materials that say, because computers are the future, and in the future, I need to know how to use computers in order to be successful in whatever career I have. And I say, yes, but look around you. This is the future. There are computers everywhere. You are using computers every day. So wouldn't it be great if you could start being better at computers right now so that you don't have to wait about ten years from now, when you're in the future, in some future career, that when you're in your science class next period, if you see a problem that you can solve with code, solve it with code. If you see a math problem that you might understand better if you frame it as a python problem. Or next year when you're doing government class or world history, if you have some set of data that you can analyze or a website that you can make. Now you're solving things with code, and you've got one more tool in your arsenal, one more thing that you can do right away. Instead of waiting until you've graduated from a computer science program somewhere before you're allowed to start using code, use it today. Why wait until this mythical future? The future is here. What's their quote? The future is here, but it's just not evenly distributed. Be part of that distributed like section where you are in the future and you can use this skill that you're building right away because that's the only way that you're going to have it be useful for you in the future. I think, like, at the lower level, at first, I didn't, I didn't think I was gonna like teaching the 6th graders. It's a really energetic. The things that I do in class, it's amazing. And how I repeat myself 400 times is pretty incredible. I think I should start counting and the mental images that I'm always developing. But there's something about that, kids, especially when I'm teaching this week, the first two weeks of 6th grade computer science is awesome because you're teaching them inputs and objects and you're manipulating things, so they're having conversations. Name equals input. What is your name? Hi, my name's Kelly. Oh, how are you, Kelly? Oh, hello, world. How are you, world? Oh, the world just said hi to me, and they're having this full on conversation with it. And then I go, how you log into your computer or you log into that website, that's the input and checking to see if it's correct. And they're like, oh, and it's that thing that they do where they finally make that connection that they just coded the same thing that other people do in order to get into a program. And I think for me, that is when they realize why it's important. It's not necessarily that they're going to code, but they can make that connection. And maybe they don't necessarily say, yeah, this is important to learn computer science, but now they get it. Now they get where it's coming from. That's like how it is, I think, at the lower level to connect it to the real world. Yeah, totally. Inputs, outputs. Here. I'm going to tell Alexa to do something. Oh, they get it. Here's this? If I tell Alexa to do something, she's going to do it kind of idea. And they get that connection. Yeah, because if you think back at school when I was less motivated, it was because I had to memorize facts that were not relevant in life at all. So, yeah, we don't teach memorization. I said we say it all the time. Every good programmer knows how to Google first, so they get used to the fact that you can't talk to me, you can't talk to a student, but you can ask anything. You can. Even if you want to speak up and ask Google, you can do it. So let's go on. And I think that's something that they're not used to in this agency of being able to code whatever they want. I may be sitting up there typing name equals input. What is your name? But they're over there having their own little story and they're doing which way books while I'm coding. What's your favorite meal today? So that agency that computer science allows them to have is pretty cool, too. That's good advice. I really like that because my kids, I'm trying to teach them to code as well and trying to get them motivated and interested in it, and I try to link it to the real world a little bit, but I think I need to make more of an effort. So he's really big into Pokemon cards at the moment, so I should probably try and link it to that. Today, we made a list of the worst meals at school and we rated them and then we listed them out according to their ratings. The kids were like, oh, yeah, those Chris, those meatless hamburgers. Those are the words. Meatless hamburgers. Yeah. Ok, I forget that you have a cafeteria at school. We don't do that here. That's cool. All right, so last question from us. Based on your experiences to date, how do you see the future of teaching python? How do you think it feels it's going to go moving forward? Finger? Yeah. Fingers crossed. I'm hoping it stays for a while. You mean just teaching Python for us? What do we want to do or what the world wants to do? Yeah, with both of you, but also the technology as it's advancing. Are there any cool things that you want to see that you expect to come with the way you teach python? We keep asking for more time. Hopefully one day we'll have a longer lesson. Having nine weeks, the kids get through 6th grade, they get through up to functions here. I'm going to make a basic function. I can put one or two parameters, and I understand a little bit what's going on. By the end of 8th grade, we're dabbling in a lot of things because there's so much we want to do, so we always ask for more time because I just started diving into, what is this book? Real world python by Levon. Have you seen that one yet? I'm really getting hooked on the fact that I can open up different things. I can scrape the web, and why can't a 6th grader, 7th grader learn how to do that? They don't have time right now. So I was scraping. In preparation for MLK day on Monday, I was scraping the web with his chapter two on the I have a dream speech, which I think is great. And then I'm going to strip away some of the sentences so that we get a better understanding of the speech. Why can't kids do that now? I know a 6th grader could easily do that if you've given them enough time to teach them what that is. So the sky's the limit. We just need more time. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think if we have 18 weeks instead of nine weeks, the things that we can do, the depth to which we can go, and the more choices we can give to our students, because we have to keep everything reasonably well aligned in that first nine weeks so that everyone gets some foundational knowledge going. But then from there, why not have a track that here's all about web development, or here's something that's all about data science, or graphing and visualizing data? Here's another track that's all about game design and game development. And here's one that's all about AI and machine learning, or robotics or what. Kids have more choices and where they want to take their coding because it really is all about relevancy. What's the most relevant thing for them? What's that thing that they make a connection with and they go, wow, this is really cool. I had one student last quarter who figured out that there was a library where you can code sheet music, so you can write notes in python code, and it will create sheet music as the output that you could print out and you could give to an orchestra or whatever. So now she's got half of that equation. She's got the part that goes from code to sheet music. How does she get something else into code? Can she make hook something up to a microphone where she could get sound samples and turn sounds directly into music? Could she do something where the computer is composing the music, run some sort of AI or machine learning model on it and create music from code and then print it out to sheet music. But we just run out of time. So I think what we'll start to see is, especially as more of our students come through that have had more time in computer science education each year, we're still getting a little bit better with the incoming students because they've had more and more introductory experience before they get here. They're able to go further and further. And so we're gonna have to keep designing more advanced, more interesting, more diverse opportunities for them to learn with more of those opportunities for connection to the concepts and the materials. Yeah, agreed. Sky's the limit, man. And to be honest, I've been reflecting a lot on this whole process and how I have changed in the way that I think, and I actually talk a lot about that to the students. Three years ago, I tell them I didn't know how to code. I couldn't remember anything. The poorest 6th graders who I taught three years ago, I feel so bad for them because their python was. It was wretched. I was like, looking in the book, typing. I was like, yeah, okay. Yeah. And I know I don't know how to do that. We're not talking about that because I don't know how to do that. But I challenge any teacher who wants to learn. You can do it, like, fully, even if you don't want to teach computer science. You should pick up Python and start playing around with it, because just the changes that happen to your brain as you're learning something completely new, it's remarkable. So that's my little learning styles theory kind of thing. We talked to our students, too, about the kind of the neuroscience behind learning. We talk a lot about metacognitive approaches, thinking about thinking, how do you learn things? How do you process stuff? And one of the things I told them was like, look, you recognize, you should recognize that when you're doing an exercise on pie bites, when you're doing a code challenge and you get it right, you get this little reward chemical in your brain, you get a dopamine hit that says, wow, that was cool. I did that and I said that we've decided, or like, we found based on the data, that it's better to have frequently successes because you get that constant reinforcement that you're on the right track, that you're learning something that's valuable, that you're getting it. It's much better to have every day two or three of those experiences where things are working really well, and you're getting those dopamine rewards than it is to have four weeks of studying for the big test. And then you get the test, and then you're stressed out about it, and you got cortisone chemicals, which are making you, like, stressed and angry and everything. And then if you get a good grade, you get a dopamine reward, but you get one of those every four weeks instead of four of those every coding session that you have. So we talk a lot about that neuroscience, that there is a way to also hack your brain. And so even if you're studying for that exam, that's the big one, that you have an AP test or something like that. You have to find ways to reward yourself for your learning along the way so that your brain gets trained to look for that reward. And it's not like, it's not a food reward. We're not talking pavlovian responses, we're talking about that. I don't know. It works really well with Sean. I just give him some espresso, chocolate beans and stuff. Well done, Sean. You did really well today. That's really just like that. Yet I'm like, chocolate always works. Yeah. I'm like the wildlife trainer on the talk shows at night where she's like, handing me a treat when I get something right. But we teach them, like, you have to hack your own learning. You have to think about this as, how do you trick your brain in a positive way towards learning more effectively? And if you're not getting it from the structure of whatever course you're in or whatever thing you're trying to learn, create it for yourself so that your outcome of learning is much more successful. Yeah, that's super important. I think, like the python and the development skills, the technical skills is just one thing, but there's the whole mindset and persistence and motivation that if you don't get that, then it doesn't really matter. I had one of my former students who I had last year in computer science. She's since moved on to the upper school, and she's not necessarily someone that I think we would have expected to go on to computer science in the upper school. But she's doing it, she's taking the course, and she's struggling a bit. And so she asked for my help. I happened to see her as I was walking across campus. Mister Tybur, can you help me figure this out? I'm really struggling. I'm trying to learn this, and the concepts just aren't making sense. So I gave her some things like I gave her, here's a book about learning, because she's learning JavaScript now. Here's some JavaScript for kids. Here's JavaScript tutor, so you can put your code into a website and step through it and see how it works and everything. But the most important thing for her, and the reason why I know she'll be successful, is not because she was a fantastic coder in my class. She was good, but she wasn't like it didn't come naturally to her. The best thing that she has going for is that she's tenacious. She's not going to give up. She's not going to say, oh, that's it, I'm not doing computer science anymore. She's going to find a way to be successful because she wants that. She wants that goal, she wants to learn it, she signed up for it, she's not going to quit. And that's something that is, you can't really teach that. You can only nourish it and encourage it and help make it come out rather than trying to teach it. 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