A delightful way to teach kids about computers | Linda Liukas | TEDxCERN

Code is the next universal language.

In the 70s, it was punk music that drove the whole generation

In the 80s, it was probably money.

But for my generation of people,

software is the interface you are imagination in our world.

And that means we need a radically radically more diverse set of people to build those products.

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

to see them as things that they can tinker and turn around and twist themself of

My personal journey to the world of 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 enquestioned just happen to be

then the vice president of United States, Mr. Algore.

And I did what every single teenage girl would wanna do

I wanted to somehow express all of this love.

So I built him a ??/ over here.

And in 2001, there was no tumblr

there was no facebook

there was no pinterest.

So I needed to launch? a code to express all of this longing and loving.

And that is how programming started for me.

It started as a mean 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 theatre places.

But then there were other boys.

There were other things to get excited about like poetry

and ??/ and conjugating french irregular verbs

and coming up maple leaf worlds?? and burner dressar's 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 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, werid science discipline that only belongs to the mystery maker

that is almost as far removed from every day life as say not clear physics/

And they are partly right about that.

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

and practices and proctocols'? and paradimes in programming.

And we as a community we made computers smaller and smaller

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

between the man and the machine to the point

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 case comes to SNS,

So what is a bubble source algorithm or how does the computer know what happens when I press play

How does it know which video to show

Lynda, is internet a place?

We adults, we utterly grow silence.

It's magic some of us say.

It's too complicated the others say.

Well it's neither.