[00:00.000 --> 00:16.720]  Okay, 10-20. Welcome everyone. Everyone can hear me right? Good. Welcome to my talk about
[00:16.720 --> 00:23.080]  Heady. But first of all, I promise to wave to my wife. She's watching at home. Can you
[00:23.080 --> 00:31.160]  all say hi, Susan? She never thought this would ever happen, being talked to from the
[00:31.160 --> 00:41.960]  biggest open-source conference in the world. She's at the couch with a broken ankle. Okay,
[00:41.960 --> 00:51.000]  my name is Mark Heisen. I'm a lecturer in IT at Applied University in the Netherlands.
[00:51.000 --> 00:59.960]  I'm doing, oh well, I had this wonderful new kitchen. And I'm doing this talk about Heady.
[00:59.960 --> 01:09.800]  And Heady is a gradual, multilingual programming language for teaching. Instead of all the other
[01:09.800 --> 01:17.800]  languages here, they're for learning, I think. This one's for teaching, specific. And it's
[01:17.800 --> 01:27.800]  multilingual. And why is it here? It was invented and usually mostly built by Felina
[01:27.800 --> 01:35.640]  Hermans, a professor in the Netherlands. She's a professor mainly in how do we learn programming.
[01:37.480 --> 01:44.760]  She wrote a book about it. You should definitely read it. What was it? The program is Brain.
[01:44.760 --> 01:50.360]  You become a really better programmer by just reading that. But how did she come to this?
[01:51.000 --> 01:58.440]  Somewhere in the past, for her it was 2013, for me in 2019, there was a group of children
[01:58.440 --> 02:06.040]  that wanted to learn programming. And, well, we program. So we said, I'll teach it.
[02:08.040 --> 02:13.720]  That's pretty easy. We started to think, how do you teach programming? How were we taught
[02:13.720 --> 02:25.400]  programming? Well, we weren't. We just sat in front of a computer with a cursor. And in my case,
[02:25.400 --> 02:31.480]  I started typing hexadecimal coding. I typed over from the nibble or the byte. Those are
[02:32.120 --> 02:37.960]  magazines. Some of you might know. Probably not. I see some nodding, but okay.
[02:37.960 --> 02:46.040]  And this would result in three things. It either worked. Those moments were pretty sparse.
[02:47.640 --> 02:53.800]  It wouldn't work. Or it said beep. Those were the three options I had.
[02:54.600 --> 03:01.080]  Felina was a little luckier. I was a few days or a few years later a little luckier. We did not have
[03:01.080 --> 03:10.200]  a teacher, but we had a book. In Felina's case, a book of basic program. And once you get to this,
[03:10.920 --> 03:16.520]  well, you can read it. You can read it. It's plain English. To us programmers,
[03:16.520 --> 03:24.920]  this is plain English. It even has line numbers. So if there is an error, it actually tells you
[03:24.920 --> 03:34.280]  it's on line number 120. And it even puts out some text telling you what's wrong. Wow. Compilers
[03:34.280 --> 03:43.160]  are perfect teachers. That's what we thought. This is how we learned. We never realized that 90%
[03:43.160 --> 03:50.920]  or 99% of the people didn't think this. And they quit programming. They never got anywhere
[03:50.920 --> 04:01.720]  further than beep. So most of the coding dojos or code clubs start using scratch.
[04:02.680 --> 04:10.760]  It's pretty easy. It takes a lot of the syntax away by using block programming. You can actually
[04:10.760 --> 04:17.080]  ask children to build this. And some of them will say, oh yeah. And some of them will say,
[04:17.080 --> 04:25.240]  when they're 14 or 15, scratch is for kids. If I Google code, it never looks like this.
[04:25.240 --> 04:35.560]  I want to do the real stuff. I want to do Zimzalabim. So Felina started coding with this
[04:36.600 --> 04:43.480]  sort of Python. And she said, the first thing I'd like to learn is input and output.
[04:43.480 --> 04:52.200]  She is a teacher. She knows how to teach baby steps. The first thing is input and output.
[04:52.760 --> 04:59.640]  Let's use some output. Print, hello, everyone. Enter, and voila. Hello, everyone. Children
[04:59.640 --> 05:08.040]  really like this. It's easy. Unless there's some red scribbling below, they don't care. They still
[05:08.040 --> 05:16.520]  press enter. And this lovely teacher tells them some mumble jumble and then in line five,
[05:16.520 --> 05:23.400]  name print is not defined. And the children will ask, well, I did define print. If they
[05:23.400 --> 05:32.920]  understand English, only if they understand it, mine don't. They're from eight years old and up.
[05:32.920 --> 05:38.760]  They don't know. They don't know what it is about. And they don't recognize that there's a capital
[05:38.760 --> 05:49.320]  P in there. This one's even worse. It's missing a parenthesis at the end. And your lovely compiler
[05:49.320 --> 05:58.360]  will tell you some empty lines and then unexpected EOF while parsing. This eight-year-old kid asked
[05:58.360 --> 06:09.480]  me, what is parsing? Try explain parsing while print is not even in their minds yet. It's not
[06:09.480 --> 06:17.480]  that easy. There's too much going on, too much interference in learning. This is not a way of
[06:17.480 --> 06:23.880]  learning. And there's even a better one since we're using Python. Did anybody see it shift a
[06:23.880 --> 06:33.240]  little? There's a space in there. Well, Python knows it's not supposed to be there. Unexpected
[06:33.240 --> 06:44.760]  indent. Once I was finished explaining parsing, this was my next problem. So compilers are lovely
[06:44.760 --> 06:52.360]  teachers. Okay, that was true for me. That was true for some of you. And the 99% of the others
[06:52.360 --> 07:02.920]  that didn't make it to this conference was not a lovely teacher. The next phase, if I get through
[07:02.920 --> 07:11.240]  to input and output, the next one is iteration, repetition. Four i in range, four print i.
[07:12.680 --> 07:20.520]  Well, I can explain that, I think. I have an old hour. Classes are an hour. Just one hour to
[07:20.520 --> 07:28.200]  explain repetition. Well, the kids only see colons, brackets and spaces. And they mumble,
[07:28.200 --> 07:34.360]  jumble them through each other. I can give them an example and they can press run. And they say,
[07:34.360 --> 07:41.480]  okay, okay, but it can never reproduce this, not in an hour at least, not my kids. Maybe
[07:41.480 --> 07:48.680]  some others can, but not in my class. Syntax creates too much cognitive load. They have to
[07:48.680 --> 07:53.000]  remember too much things to actually get to the stuff I want them to learn.
[07:56.200 --> 08:04.280]  This is not new to programming. This is true for any language. It's true for math. How did you do
[08:04.280 --> 08:12.520]  that? Well, we just start with small bits. If you start writing, you write an a and an i and
[08:12.520 --> 08:19.160]  an n and an e. And we would say to the kid that produced this, wow, that's a lovely a. Oh, and
[08:19.160 --> 08:26.600]  you already made a word in. They're not separated much. It's what's good. That's good. And that
[08:26.600 --> 08:33.560]  e, it's wonderful. It's even nicely on the line. Three complements, four complements,
[08:33.560 --> 08:41.560]  and a lot of learning. The next thing they know is they can create words, cat, in, tree. And once
[08:41.560 --> 08:49.160]  they grasp that, we're going to make it a little harder. We start sentence with a capital letter.
[08:50.120 --> 08:55.800]  And the capital S or T is completely different than the lower ones. So they have to learn
[08:55.800 --> 09:02.760]  a complete new set of letters. The C looks alike, but some of them are very different.
[09:02.760 --> 09:09.160]  And in some languages, almost all of them are different. After that, we teach them,
[09:09.160 --> 09:14.680]  okay, we start it with a capital, we end it with a period. And once we end it with a period,
[09:14.680 --> 09:19.720]  once they know a sentence ends with a period, they can actually spread sentences over lines.
[09:21.480 --> 09:26.600]  This is maybe sixth grade or something. I'm not sure where exactly we are now, but
[09:27.560 --> 09:35.800]  it's gradually changing. Rules are changing. It's not bad to change the rules every now and then.
[09:35.800 --> 09:42.280]  And it's good in this case. Same for math. If I have five apples and I take three,
[09:42.920 --> 09:47.800]  how much do you have left? What, two? That's, they know that. If you have three and I'm trying to
[09:47.800 --> 09:57.880]  take five, how much do you have left? Zero. Yeah. Only years later, you'll learn that there is a
[09:57.880 --> 10:05.160]  possibility you have minus two apples. Happy appetite. Dividing, same, eight divided by three,
[10:05.160 --> 10:12.440]  that's two. And then there is two remaining. I cannot divide the latter two by three anymore.
[10:12.440 --> 10:18.520]  And then there is two, two thirds, and then there's 2.6666. And that takes a long
[10:18.520 --> 10:27.320]  light. Can we actually teach code gradually? Well, yes, we can. Now,
[10:27.320 --> 10:39.480]  we can by using Heady. This is Heady. This is a program environment. And the first line of code
[10:40.120 --> 10:48.120]  you can actually run is print hello world. And it works. And you see there are no
[10:49.320 --> 10:55.160]  quotation marks, no brackets, no nothing. And there are only three commands.
[10:55.160 --> 11:05.160]  There's print for output. And then there's ask and echo. Ask for input and echo is another way
[11:05.160 --> 11:13.640]  of producing output. And it produces the word, the text behind it, and then followed by the input.
[11:13.640 --> 11:26.520]  So if I run this, what is your name? And my name is Mark. And it says hello, Mark. This is fun
[11:26.520 --> 11:32.680]  already. And if it's not fun enough, they can actually have it spoken to. It's your name.
[11:35.160 --> 11:40.440]  Hello, Mark. And imagine a classroom full of 25 kids producing
[11:40.440 --> 11:50.840]  things like this. And within a few seconds you're hearing Mark is stupid. And they're having a lot
[11:50.840 --> 12:03.160]  of fun the whole hour. With only three commands, they're having fun. As soon as they stop laughing,
[12:03.160 --> 12:10.840]  or usually the next hour, the next lesson, the next week later, we introduce variables.
[12:11.400 --> 12:18.600]  This is probably the toughest part of programming, two kids at least. At least that's what I found.
[12:19.640 --> 12:28.920]  You can label things. Name is haddy, age is 15, print name is age years old. I can run this code
[12:28.920 --> 12:36.440]  and it produces haddy is 15 years old. They can play around with this. They can create actually
[12:38.440 --> 12:45.800]  pretty nice programs. They're actually busy for another hour, sometimes two,
[12:49.800 --> 12:56.920]  until they hit a snatch. Sometimes some of the kids find out that if I ask what is your name,
[12:56.920 --> 13:04.280]  and they produce so your name is name, most programmers will probably realize now we have a
[13:04.280 --> 13:12.200]  problem. There's one name that I want to produce as text and there's one name that I want as variable.
[13:12.200 --> 13:18.440]  I can never, ever use the text anymore. This is a learning opportunity. We can actually say,
[13:18.440 --> 13:25.240]  okay, we have to make a distinction between these. If I mean text, I put quotation marks around it.
[13:25.240 --> 13:28.840]  Ah, okay, that's a smart thing. It's like they invented it themselves.
[13:32.440 --> 13:41.240]  Let them think so. So it's gradual and it's 18 levels and at the end, you're speaking fluent
[13:41.240 --> 13:53.720]  Python. That's the gradual part. It's also multilingual. Why? Well, we asked kids, do you like
[13:53.720 --> 13:59.640]  Heady? There was a small study. There's a paper about it. It's in the slide deck at the end.
[14:00.440 --> 14:07.880]  There was only 39 kids in 12 online lessons. This was Corona time. We asked them, what are the
[14:07.880 --> 14:12.040]  benefits, the challenges and the improvements? These were the kids of Fellini's classes.
[14:12.040 --> 14:22.920]  And they said, well, it's great. It's stepwise. It's level by level and I can follow on.
[14:24.600 --> 14:32.120]  The teachers that actually work with it are usually normal teachers and not programmers.
[14:32.680 --> 14:39.240]  So they teach for the first time programming. They don't even know programming. And they liked it.
[14:39.240 --> 14:46.040]  And they said, oh, well, all kids, my whole class is learning programming. Of course, there are some
[14:46.040 --> 14:52.600]  kids that are, you're going to be a programmer, but the rest is still dragging along. And some of
[14:52.600 --> 14:57.560]  the teachers said, even the kids, the girls now have the confidence to become a programmer.
[14:57.560 --> 15:04.520]  It's something they mentioned out of themselves. What do they want? They want some improvements.
[15:04.520 --> 15:13.240]  First of all, they want better error messages. And we had very good error messages. I'll show you
[15:13.240 --> 15:22.680]  one. You cannot read this, but it says, you typed comma, but that is not allowed. And we put a comma
[15:22.680 --> 15:30.920]  here as a comma between quotes. Remember, these are kids of 10 year olds. And they just learned
[15:30.920 --> 15:37.160]  that if there's a comma in the sentence, they pause. So they read, you typed, but that's not allowed.
[15:39.000 --> 15:46.760]  Why cannot I type? Okay, so we had to change that in, you typed a comma, but that's not allowed.
[15:47.720 --> 15:56.520]  And almost all of those well thought of error messages weren't well thought of after all.
[15:56.520 --> 16:03.160]  Well, now they are, and they wanted something really weird. They want a Dutch keywords.
[16:05.160 --> 16:11.080]  Well, we're in the Netherlands, so it's not weird they want Dutch, but why? Everybody's coding in
[16:11.080 --> 16:27.480]  English. Print is the same in Dutch, whatever, the echo is the same. But why? Let's look at the demo.
[16:27.480 --> 16:41.640]  Let's see a nice error message. Print, hello world with a capital P.
[16:46.600 --> 16:54.920]  It says, print is not a command in level one. Did you mean print? And the first one is a capital
[16:54.920 --> 17:06.440]  P, and the last one is a small P. And maybe it gets even better. If I put a space in front of it,
[17:08.600 --> 17:14.280]  it runs. But it gives me a warning. Oops, you started a line with a space on line one.
[17:14.840 --> 17:17.800]  Space is confused computers. Can you remove it?
[17:17.800 --> 17:24.760]  It's level one, eh? There's plenty of time to correct these ideas.
[17:27.720 --> 17:36.680]  Yeah, yeah, I don't, yeah, I should change that. And then there is translation. I'm in English now.
[17:36.680 --> 17:48.760]  I can move to 45 languages, like Dutch. Yes, I want to reload. And now this whole program,
[17:48.760 --> 17:58.280]  every text, almost everything is in Dutch, except for ask. And ask was, by the way, the main reason
[17:58.280 --> 18:06.680]  they wanted it in Dutch, because in Dutch we don't usually have the s and the k so near one
[18:06.680 --> 18:14.840]  each other. And so they write x, and it's a weird letter combination. There is a toggle
[18:15.640 --> 18:21.320]  where you can say, oh well, I want to change the commands in Dutch as well. So now everything's
[18:21.320 --> 18:29.960]  in Dutch. I can ask for the ones we do not speak Dutch. That's the same as what's your name.
[18:31.000 --> 18:40.040]  Well, it's still Mark. Hello, Mark. So it works even in Dutch. And once we had this, we realized
[18:40.040 --> 18:52.760]  that people were in India, using Hindi, Thai, Chinese, Arab, it's all, those kids are just like
[18:52.760 --> 19:01.000]  in the Netherlands. They're just learning a language. They don't know a P if they see one.
[19:02.120 --> 19:07.480]  For to us, to me, these are images. These are not letters. I cannot read this. These are,
[19:07.480 --> 19:12.120]  I can copy paste some of this, but I cannot read this. The same is true for them.
[19:12.840 --> 19:22.600]  They cannot read these letters. So they should be able to put them into Arabic as well.
[19:22.600 --> 19:37.080]  And this works, of course, I hope. I cannot check. Maybe I'm cursing now, but I guess it works.
[19:43.800 --> 19:50.120]  So that's why it's multilingual. It's for the kids. And yes, at the end in level 18,
[19:50.120 --> 19:56.920]  we do tell them, you better put it in English now. You know what it all means. But you better start
[19:56.920 --> 20:02.600]  using English now. But from now on, no more Dutch or Arabic or whatever. But they're old enough to do
[20:02.600 --> 20:17.080]  that. It's built for teaching. It's not actually, it's built for teachers as well as students.
[20:17.080 --> 20:23.000]  They like it that the levels are a step-by-step guide. There's only small thing they have to learn,
[20:23.000 --> 20:30.280]  and the rest is not even possible. The teachers that do not know programming, but are teaching
[20:30.280 --> 20:37.640]  programming using Heady, they think, oh, I can do this. This is not overwhelming. And
[20:37.640 --> 20:46.120]  well, when I was using Scratch for the first time in a Code of Dojo, I had to think of a program
[20:46.120 --> 20:53.240]  they could make. What can my students make? There's a lot of examples on the Internet. I need to do
[20:53.240 --> 21:01.960]  research. I need to find the right thing. And if I'm planning a 20-day course, oh, somewhere in
[21:01.960 --> 21:08.840]  level 18, I'm probably going to mess up something I did in level 17. It's going to take, it's going
[21:08.840 --> 21:15.080]  to cost me time to get things right. I can find this one or that one or that one. And if I'm not a
[21:15.080 --> 21:21.320]  real programmer, if I'm not very good at it myself, which one should I take? And if I choose one, I
[21:21.320 --> 21:27.160]  print it out, I hand it over to my students, and they open up Scratch, and they start looking at
[21:27.160 --> 21:34.280]  Scratch, and they start looking at the lesson again, the paper, and they look at Scratch again.
[21:34.280 --> 21:43.560]  And what was that? They have to context switch over and over again. I see the students getting a
[21:43.560 --> 21:50.920]  little distracted. I don't remember. I don't remember. What was it? And they're a very impatient
[21:50.920 --> 22:00.680]  species, children. So we invented adventures. I'll show you in the last demo because the time's
[22:00.680 --> 22:06.920]  ticking away. And then there is class management. That's the last thing I want to talk about.
[22:06.920 --> 22:14.600]  Class management has in, there's a whole different type of kids in the class. There's this type that
[22:14.600 --> 22:24.120]  actually read the paper, reproduced it in Scratch, and tells the teacher, look, I did it.
[22:24.120 --> 22:29.640]  It's just once a pattern in the bag. Yeah, it's right. In five minutes, they produce a
[22:30.680 --> 22:37.160]  mowing, running around cat. It's lovely. They did it. But the other one, and there are quite a few,
[22:37.160 --> 22:46.120]  it dragged just one thing on the screen, which they do now. Well, you could read the paper again.
[22:47.320 --> 22:55.320]  Don't get it. And then there's this type. It's probably the level of Olivier. They would produce
[22:55.320 --> 23:01.480]  something they want recognition for. And they did this in five minutes as well because they've
[23:01.480 --> 23:09.720]  been doing this for years at home. And now they want my help to get some synchronized legs at the
[23:09.720 --> 23:17.240]  bottom of this Robin Hood. And once I run, I don't even know how to do that. But no, at least I can
[23:17.240 --> 23:24.200]  call Olivier now and help me out in this block programming. But all these kids are in the same
[23:24.200 --> 23:35.080]  class. I want them to move along about the same page. What was it? Base, that's it.
[23:35.080 --> 23:55.240]  So we created something we call customization. First of all, let's put this back into English.
[23:55.240 --> 24:05.560]  And let's see me in action. This is my account. And as you have seen before, maybe there are some
[24:05.560 --> 24:12.600]  tabs on the top of this. And this is what we call adventures. There are maybe 10, 15 different
[24:12.600 --> 24:19.800]  adventures. And they come along every level, 18 levels along. They can do rock, paper, scissors.
[24:19.800 --> 24:26.120]  First of all, it's just printing. And at the end, it's deciding who won and playing against the
[24:26.120 --> 24:32.440]  computer and three players against, etc. So it's getting more progressively difficult.
[24:33.400 --> 24:40.040]  But it's still the same program. So as a teacher, I only have to know 10 programs.
[24:40.920 --> 24:47.880]  And it's all in view. I can just click on I want to do the story and I code it here.
[24:47.880 --> 24:55.240]  So for the kids, there is no context switching of paper or thing. Then there's this teacher
[24:55.880 --> 25:04.200]  that can do, oh, teacher. Is this the teacher version? Where is the teacher version?
[25:04.200 --> 25:16.360]  But I should be logged in in any of them. No, I'm not logged in in any of them now.
[25:18.440 --> 25:20.360]  Why am I no longer logged in?
[25:20.360 --> 25:31.240]  I don't know my password because that's very secure.
[25:31.240 --> 25:44.760]  So I need last pass. I can't solve everything.
[25:50.360 --> 25:50.840]  Oh, well.
[25:50.840 --> 25:59.240]  How many minutes are left?
[25:59.240 --> 26:15.640]  Okay, that will work. What am I doing now?
[26:30.200 --> 26:41.640]  Yes.
[26:49.880 --> 26:56.520]  So this is where I was. I thought I was at my page. If you're a teacher,
[26:56.520 --> 27:01.240]  you can just request to become a teacher. Even if you're only teaching your own two kids,
[27:01.240 --> 27:06.040]  you can actually become a teacher. And then there's this for teacher's page
[27:06.040 --> 27:12.120]  and there's a complete teacher manual. And there's a demo class in which I am a student.
[27:12.120 --> 27:17.960]  I can look at some statistics. How many errors did I produce? What level am I? What kind of
[27:17.960 --> 27:23.960]  errors did I produce? How many successful programs? How many errors programs? And I can
[27:23.960 --> 27:31.720]  customize the class. I can switch on and off all the levels. And what I do in real life,
[27:31.720 --> 27:38.840]  I switch them all off except for the first one. So all the class has to stay in lesson one,
[27:38.840 --> 27:46.760]  in level one. I can automatically produce a schedule, put opening dates, so they
[27:46.760 --> 27:54.840]  automatically open every week, for instance. I can hide and show quizzes and puzzles. There's
[27:54.840 --> 27:59.960]  a parse and puzzle at the end of all the adventures. And there's a quiz at the end, 10 questions.
[27:59.960 --> 28:09.000]  And I can ask or I can set this class to a minimum quiz score of 80 before they can advance to the
[28:09.000 --> 28:23.080]  next level. So if I save this and go to the other one. Oh, wow. Now it accidentally locked in.
[28:26.440 --> 28:29.480]  I think it's because I have two of the same browsers now.
[28:29.480 --> 28:44.680]  Mark and class. This one's not a secret. If I go to this now, you can see there's a lot less.
[28:48.040 --> 28:55.080]  Only two. So this class only has two adventures. It has a puzzle and a quiz.
[28:55.080 --> 29:09.320]  And they cannot go to level two unless they made the quiz until with 80 percent of points.
[29:10.760 --> 29:17.560]  Okay, that's customization. That's about it. Hetty, it's called, it's named after Hetty
[29:17.560 --> 29:26.440]  Lemar. Who knows Hetty Lemar? That's a lot of them. World famous actress and a world infamous
[29:26.440 --> 29:34.280]  inventor. We're still using a lot of her inventions. And of course, we're open source. We love your
[29:34.280 --> 29:41.640]  help. If you think, ah, this is a good idea. And I'd like to work on an innovative gradual parser.
[29:41.640 --> 29:51.400]  It's actually actually quite a feat. There's a paper about it. And it tells you a little bit
[29:51.400 --> 30:01.480]  about an EVNF extension that we can merge partial grammars. We actually want help in
[30:01.480 --> 30:07.800]  multilingual language. Like I said, we have 45 languages. And these are 45 languages. As you
[30:07.800 --> 30:14.120]  can see, English is pretty well and Dutch is pretty well. Some other languages are blue.
[30:15.000 --> 30:24.760]  We love help making all these ones as green. And of course, we want you to help teachers.
[30:25.320 --> 30:31.080]  So go to your schools in the neighborhood and tell teachers about them and maybe help them
[30:31.080 --> 30:40.680]  get along, get started. Once they get started, it's like oil, it spreads. I'm only teaching 40 kids
[30:40.680 --> 30:50.200]  now. If I was teaching 40 teachers, that would go a lot faster. There are some building videos for
[30:50.200 --> 31:01.640]  teachers. And this is where you can join. Thank you very much.