The Exchanges

Q Let's, let's talk about education more broadly in the US. Uh, I understand that just over 50% of public high schools nationwide offer over one class. My friend runs code.org, sorry, offer more than one computer science class. And, and, you know, why have we been so slow to adapt? Why are only half, you know, half the schools offering computer science, and how far behind are we?

A Well, I think it's really hard. When you look at India, India has this incredible initiative right now to get a makerspace in every single public school in the country. And they've already implemented more than 10,000 of them in the past five years. That is incredible. And we need issues like that that foster the hacker mindset here in the US. I think the reason we don't have more computer science classes in schools in this country is because it's frankly really, really hard. It's hard to find teachers. It's hard to find good curriculums. If you know how to code, you have the choice between being a public school teacher or making double or sometimes triple your salary.

AI assessment note: “reason we don't have more computer science classes in schools in this country is”

Q One of the, one of the shifts you're seeing right now in education, especially with COVID is a lot of people are going to homeschooling. A lot of people are going to hybrid learning. Is this a big shift in education? And is this, is this going to change how hack club works potentially? Do you engage with, with kids who are outside of the system?

A Yeah, there's a number of hack clubs started by teenagers who are homeschooled. And I think that's amazing. The thing I want to see in the future is I want to see more young people being the owners and the drivers of their own learning. Something that's What's incredible about the internet is you can become a subject matter expert as a thirteen-year-old without having ever met anyone who lives in that, who works in that field. And I think that we need way more pathways to support people like that. An example of this is I was talking with a hack clubber two months ago named Felix, who has learned the ins and out. They're 15. They live in San Antonio right now. They've learned the ins and outs of the networking protocol as a power of the internet. And they built as a fun hack, a chat app that uses this protocol called ARP. Which is part of how computers talk to each other. We can talk with your friends using just ARP. It went viral on Hacker News. Over 10,000 people have used it. They have over a thousand stars on GitHub. And that's the sort of thing where you could never learn that in a computer science class. That's only uniquely possible because of the internet. And I think we need to create more opportunities for young people to engage with learning in any subject like that.

AI assessment note: “there's a number of hack clubs started by teenagers who are homeschooled.”

Q days, the person was arguing or kind of like, they're not very, they're not very strong willed people because they've just done what they've told their whole lives in order to be on the right path. And so, so, so is it something, is there something to that where you're like kind of giving people the courage to explore their own path and explore who they are in different ways?

A Yeah. I mean, that's a huge part of hack club. And I think that The thing that's so hard about education is that it has a million stakeholders. Literally everyone from parents to communities to literally real estate agents have a huge stake in education. And what that means is we end up with a system that's almost like the mean of what everyone wants instead of something that's best for the learner. And I think that in Hack Club, something that we try to focus on is helping young people not just get started coding, but get super technical with their coding skills. And we take a very individualist approach to learning, and we really encourage people as individuals to take that interest very far, and we build the right support structures around that.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. I mean, that's a huge part of hack club.”

Q the side right now to try to help out. Uh, you know, we started this podcast act to push back against the cynicism And pessimism that's sweeping our country. And, you know, there are a lot of young people who are even afraid to do the future or they're afraid to have kids. They think the world's broken and heading, headed towards decline. What would you say to those people?

A Well, I mean, if you look at the experience of young people today, young people are hungry. Young people want to build a world that they want to live in. Young people want to do big things that are going to leave a legacy for themselves. And I think that if you aren't hopeful for the future, I think that you need to, well, I don't know. I mean, for me, it's hard not to be hopeful for the future when I talk with hack clubbers, because every day I meet hack clubbers who are building things, who are optimistic, who are building a better future for themselves. And I think that so many of the problems we face as humans over the next 20 years, like these are solvable. We just need people with the right problem solving mindset. We need people of leadership skills. We need people in the right networks, and we need the hacker mindset.

AI assessment note: “for me, it's hard not to be hopeful for the future when I talk with hack clubbers”

Q And, and the people you're hiring that a lot of them, they're computer scientists as well. And you're seeing what they've built and what they've done. Cause are they creating things for pack up to learn from, or what are they doing with that?

A Yeah. At this point, hack club serves between 10 and 20,000 teenagers. That's, you know, larger than many undergraduate programs at universities. And our staff is 10 and our budget smaller than second grade at an average size elementary school. And what we do as staff is we design very high leverage activities. Like we design programs, we write code, we design experiences for hack clubbers that then thousands of people can participate in. And we do it entirely open source. Something that makes hack club unique is when I was 16 and starting the organization, I decided to make our finances 100% transparent. And you can see every single penny we spend, every single donation we have. So we operate fully transparently. All the code we write is public, um, except for one repo, but we're going to open source that. And, um, and we think that more organizations should be transparent like this.

AI assessment note: “what we do as staff is we design very high leverage activities.”

Q Got it. And did you, did you, did you learn from the other people there? Was that a positive, it was a positive experience overall?

A Oh my God. I mean, the Teal Fellowship is an amazing program. I am so incredibly grateful to them for having me as part of it. I think that we, one thing you learn from programming is that there's many ways to solve any one given problem. And I think that with education, we have such a narrow view on what it means to be an educated person. You have to go to the right schools. You have to go to the right colleges. You have to take the right classes. You have to get the right grades when really with the internet, you know, there are a million ways to get educated. And I, I felt like the Teal Fellowship really, not only for me, created a different path, but showed, you know, millions of young people that there's more than one way.

AI assessment note: “the Teal Fellowship is an amazing program. I am so incredibly grateful”