WEBVTT

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Code is the next universal language.

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

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In the eighties, it was probably money.

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But for my generation of people,

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software is the interface
to our imagination and our world.

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And that means that we need

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a radically, radically
more diverse set of people

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to build those products,

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

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to see them as things
that they can tinker

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and turn around and twist,
and so forth.

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My personal journey into the world
of programming and technology

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started at the tender age of 14.

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I had this mad teenage crush
on an older man,

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and the older man in question
just happened to be

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

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

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I wanted to somehow
express all of this love,

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

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And in 2001, there was no Tumblr,

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there was no Facebook,
there was no Pinterest.

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So I needed to learn to code

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in order to express
all of this longing and loving.

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And that is how programming
started for me.

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It started as a means of self-expression.

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

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

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

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like poetry and knitting socks

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and conjugating French irregular verbs

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and coming up with make-believe worlds

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and Bertrand Russell and his philosophy.

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And I started to be one of those people

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who felt that computers
are boring and technical and lonely.

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Here's what I think today.

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

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Little girls are amazing.

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They are really, really good
at concentrating on things

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and being exact and they ask
amazing questions like,

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

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

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It's the parents who do.

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It's us parents who feel

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like computer science
is this esoteric, weird science discipline

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that only belongs to the mystery makers.

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That it's almost as far removed
from everyday life

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as, say, nuclear physics.

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And they are partly right about that.

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

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and algorithms and practices,

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protocols and paradigms in programming.

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

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

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between the man and the machine

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

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or how to talk to them.

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

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we teach them how
the combustion engine functions

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

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you can become one.

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But when the kid comes to us and asks,

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"So, what is a bubble sort algorithm?"

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

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how does it know which video to show?"

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Or, "Linda, is Internet a place?"

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We adults, we grow oddly silent.

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

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

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Well, it's neither.

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

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It all just happened
really, really, really fast.

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Computer scientists built
these amazing, beautiful machines,

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but they made them
very, very foreign to us,

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and also the language we speak
to the computers

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

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without our fancy user interfaces.

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And that's why no one recognized

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that when I was conjugating
French irregular verbs,

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I was actually practicing
my pattern recognition skills.

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And when I was excited about knitting,

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I actually was following
a sequence of symbolic commands

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that included loops inside of them.

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And that Bertrand Russell's lifelong quest

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to find an exact language
between English and mathematics

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found its home inside of a computer.

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I was a programmer, but no one knew it.

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

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But unless we give them tools
to build with computers,

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we are raising only consumers
instead of creators.

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

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

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This whole quest
led me to this little girl.

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Her name is Ruby, she is six years old.

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

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And every time
I would run into a problem

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in trying to teach
myself programming like,

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

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

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And I wrote a book about her
and I illustrated it

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and the things
Ruby taught me go like this.

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

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of the bugs under your bed.

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And even the biggest of the problems

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are a group of tiny problems
stuck together.

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And Ruby also introduced
me to her friends,

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the colorful side of the Internet culture.

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She has friends like the Snow Leopard,

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

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

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And she has friends like Linux the penguin

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

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And idealistic foxes, and so on.

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

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

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so the way Ruby would teach
loops goes like this.

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

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clap, clap and jump."

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And you learn counter loops
by repeating that four times.

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And you learn while loops
by repeating that sequence

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while I'm standing on one leg.

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And you learn until loops
by repeating that sequence

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until mom gets really mad.

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(Laughter)

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You learn decomposition skills
by problem solving flow charts

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

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You learn that algorithms
are much like cupcake recipes.

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

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

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

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and what kind of questions they have

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and I would organize
play testing sessions.

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

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I would start by showing the kids
these four pictures.

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I would show them a picture of a car,

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a grocery store, a dog and a toilet.

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

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And the kids would be
very conservative and go,

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"None of these is a computer.

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I know what a computer is:

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it's that glowing box

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

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But then we would talk

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

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it has a navigation system inside of it.

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

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but it has a collar

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and the collar might have
a computer inside of it.

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

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like the cashier system
and the burglar alarms.

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And kids, you know what?

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In Japan, toilets are computers

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and there's even hackers who hack them.

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(Laughter)

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And we go further

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

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

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to make anything in this room
into a computer."

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And again, the kids go,

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

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But I tell them, "Don't worry,

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

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They've just started
to hear about this thing

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called The Internet of Things.

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But you kids,
you are going to be the ones

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

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Your washing machine, toothbrush,
even your milk bottle.

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

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as a glowing box.

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And then I had this little girl
who came to me

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and took a bicycle lamp

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

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it would change colors."

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

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And she thinks and she thinks,

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

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we could go on a biking trip
with my father

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and we would sleep in a tent

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

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

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

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the moment when the kid realizes

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that the world
is definitely not ready yet,

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that a really awesome way
of making the world more ready

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is by building technology

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

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Final story, we also built a computer,

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the glowing box,
the archaic glowing box.

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

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that help it remember things.

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And after we've assembled
our computer together,

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we also design an application for it.

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And my favorite story is this little boy,

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he's six years old

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

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And the boy, he has
these huge headphones on

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and he's completely immersed
in his tiny paper computer

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because you see, he's built his own

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intergalactic planetary
navigation application.

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

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is on the other side of the room

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and the boy's important mission

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is to bring the father
safely back to earth.

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

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and the way we build it with technology.

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Finally, the more approachable,
the more inclusive,

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and the more diverse
we make the world of technology,

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the more colorful and better
the world will look like.

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Because disruption
doesn't start with technology.

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Disruption starts
with the people with a vision.

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And computer science, and programming
and technology

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the very DNA of all of these things
is humanity.

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Computers, after all,
they used to be humans

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who were really, really good
at calculating things.

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And still today, programmers
don't write the code

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only for the machine to execute.

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

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So, imagine with me, for a moment,

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a world where the stories we tell

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about how things get made
don't only include

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the twentysomething-year-old
Silicon Valley boys,

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but also Kenyan schoolgirls
and Norwegian librarians.

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Imagine a world where
the little Ada Lovelaces of tomorrow,

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

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

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They embrace the powers
and the opportunities

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and the limitations of the world.

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A world of technology
that is wonderful, whimsical

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and a tiny bit weird.

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When I was a girl,

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I wanted to be a storyteller.

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I loved make-believe worlds

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and my favorite thing to do

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was to wake up in the mornings
in Moominvalley.

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In the afternoons,
I would roam around the Tatooines.

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

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

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I still create worlds.

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Instead of stories, I do them with code.

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Programming gives me this amazing power

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to build my whole little universe

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with its own rules
and paradigms and practices.

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

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And that probably makes me a poet.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)