Chiin Rui Tan- From Zero to Hero | JupyterCon 2020

Key Takeaways

hi everyone welcome to this jupiter and education short talk at triptycon 2020 entitled from xero to hero using jupiter notebooks to put scientific computing on the map at girls schools so my name is chin ray tan um i'll introduce myself in a moment but let's first establish the crux of this talk up front so looking at the latest hype cycle on the left-hand side which is an imperfect but useful litmus test of the global innovation frontier you can see that scientific computing is central to most of these emerging technologies however if you compare and contrast with the right hand side which reflects what typically constitutes computing education for school-aged kids you can see that uh this landscape is dominated by physical computing visual programming game development gui programming and you know things like vb.net are still actually very popular in a lot of schools today so where is the scientific computing for school age kids to me kids are missing out on a variety of empowering outcomes so whether in terms of being prepared for entering the future workforce having tech literacy to navigate an ai driven society or just you know mental health benefits of fun stimulating hobby i also want to quickly recognize as a sort of side point that um you know digital and other kind of poverty uh is actually more commonplace and the reality is that majority of kids in the world don't actually have access to any computing education let alone scientific computing education but you know that's a much bigger topic for a different talk so for the purpose of our privileged circumstances uh where computing education is viable this talk fundamentally shows that tupeson notebooks can be an effective gateway for schools and school-aged children to discover and benefit from scientific computing i'll now quickly introduce myself to put this talk into context so i'm a tech entrepreneur with 13 years experience innovating using data science technologies coming from a social science background i've taken quite a concerted effort to upskill myself particularly computationally um and developed a parallel passion to help others up skill as you can see from this phrase of me running in r meetup that i founded in london which then became global so i later turned to this passion for outreach into a full-time job which is what i do currently um so i founded an edtech startup with a strong social mission of democratizing opportunities for school-aged children to develop modern computing literacy the school-age kids i currently specialize in working with are students in secondary girls schools around london so if you're familiar with harry potter then hermione in her first few years of hogwarts is not a bad proxy actually what i actually do at these kinds of goals is pioneer new scientific computing education initiatives so uh you know it could be things from data science experiences to homework to learning apps um but whatever it is they're all critically enabled by jupiter notebook technologies but why is scientific computing education missing in the first place and why the need for a gateway in the form of jupiter from my perspective the simple answer is that often scientific computing education cons outweigh the pros in this domain so i've distilled all of my experiences and observations of the uk education system into this instance visualization um which shows some of the reasons which i think are quite common for scientific computing's overall zero status however my experience shows that jupyter notebooks can change this balance through the aggregate effect of certain features of the technology [Music] so looking at the first novo feature listed which is open source software on the right hand side you can see that jupiter make scientific computing more affordable because the school all the student users don't have to buy any proprietary tech or licenses so that starts to swing the balance taking the next feature prototyping and exploration um jupiter basically showcases scientific computing for experimentation which is something i found is actually extremely popular with the kids i work with even if the experience is is only digital and doesn't have any sort of physical interaction um and so actually this challenges um some very popular computing pedagogies and starts to develop new pedagogies which recognize uh scientific computing's value so another feature of tubes and notebooks are the ability to accommodate diverse use cases so this really demonstrates scientific computing's versatility because it means that this technology can support cross-curricular exploration at school so you know whether that's computational economics or code art a major advantage of jupiter and scientific computing is that they are de facto tools for many tech professionals for many students and educators the fact that they are actually using the same technologies as as ai researchers or you know data scientists at nasa makes a tangible difference to their scientific computing education experience a final key feature of duplo notebooks is the fact that jupiter's high reproducibility boosts the reusability of scientific computing efforts and in an educational setting where kids you know will need to keep practicing the same code multiple times before they get it the ease of reusing and sharing scientific computing outputs is a massive bonus for both students and educators so you can see in this model how jupiter enables scientific computing pros to outweigh the cons through the aggregate effect of certain key features and now scientific computing education has hero status okay so that's how the the model works um and let's put this new scientific computing hero status into some real world context so here are examples of the scientific computing and data science education that i've successfully democratized through my startup using gypsy notebooks and of course more importantly here are example resulting impacts on students so for example girls want to continue the scientific competing school activity in their own time they ask to replicate the jupiter notebook setup at home you know the girls are disappointed at the end of the scientific computing activity and ask for more and this one is probably the most important for me actually is that girls struggling in science subjects traditional science subjects for example discover they actually have an intrinsic ability in scientific computing um which brings them new enjoyment and confidence and there are resulting impacts not just on students but also on educators so you can see on the right hand side some really great responses by key stakeholders that i've worked with um and then on the left-hand side here's an example of uh some sustainable impact of the initial scientific computing education that i brought into the school um and you can see in the text that the school is choosing to build on and in fact scale uh the the kind of learning that i delivered which you know is absolutely brilliant so some great examples of how scientific computing education becomes firmly on the map in conclusion grassroots experience at london girls schools shows jupiter networks can uniquely facilitate discovery and adoption of scientific computing and data science education which can result in empowering outcomes for students and educators so let's create more opportunities for kids to access jupiter-enabled tech education and democratize the benefits of modern computing literacy as widely as possible so thank you for listening you