At This Camp, Kids Learn Computer Science (Without Computers)

Artificial intelligence is now quite adept at crunching vast amounts of data and using it to describe conclusions.

As a consequence, humans who rely solely on procedural thinking aren't as valuable as they once were. What we need at present are abstract thinkers who are securely immersed in the Big Ideas fabricated possible through computation. But traditionally, that'south not how universities have sought out, categorized, or educated information science students.

Professor Miryung Kim, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UCLA, may have cracked this problem. But Dr. Kim didn't set out to re-think how education and industry needs to alter its approach to training the next generation of professional person geeks. She but wanted to accost gender disinterestedness issues and so her ain 4-twelvemonth-old girl, Sophia, didn't grow up thinking information science was just for boys.

So last summer, Dr. Kim invited a few of Sophia'due south friends (and their parents), to a UCLA conference room for the Mommy Information science Camp. That'southward where PCMag met Professor Kim to learn more. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.

Let's start with your day chore, earlier we go to the comp-sci army camp. Can y'all sum up your field of expertise?
My enquiry focuses on software engineering and my inquiry group here at UCLA, the Software Evolution and Analysis Laboratory, develops program analysis algorithms and development tools to improve developer productivity in evolving large scale software systems.

You also had a paper published recently about the challenges, for big companies, in hiring and retaining data scientists.
Due to the demand for analyzing large scale telemetry data, information scientists are becoming pop inside big software companies. While anybody wants to hire data scientists, there'south no accepted true definition of what a "data scientist" really does, or who they are in terms of their educational groundwork.

To re-piece of work the model of what a information scientist is (and does) yous spent time at Microsoft?
Aye, I already spent time as a visiting researcher at the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) grouping at Microsoft Research during the summertime of 2022 to study how large-scale re-architecting was carried out in Windows—instead of just ripping out legacy code. Since 2022, I worked with colleagues at Microsoft to undertake a large-scale report of almost 800 professional data scientists, and understand their educational path, trouble topics that they piece of work on, tool usages, and activities. From this study, nosotros identified 9 distinct clusters of data scientists, including polymath, preparer, shaper, analyzer, and their corresponding characteristics. Our written report should inform managers about how to rent and leverage data science workforces and should inform universities about what skill sets we demand to teach to time to come data scientists.

And then now they know who to rent to work on the data they produce?
That'due south it. Yeah. There are thousands of job hiring ads for "data scientists" but in that location are really picayune descriptions about what kinds of data scientists and skill sets that companies are looking for. These days, "data scientists" are only buzzwords. Hopefully, our research volition shed low-cal on who information scientists are, what they do, and how all-time to hire and employ data scientists inside organizations.

Let's support a fleck. When you lot started studying reckoner science, at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, then getting your PhD at University of Washington, the field was very different.
I nearly didn't study calculator science in my undergrad! In a public elementary schoolhouse in Korea, nosotros learned GW-Basic programming and I was introduced to computer science early on. I liked writing code on the screen and something would happen; it was very cool. But by high school, I started feeling insecure well-nigh doing programming...my mostly male person geek friends knew more nigh computer systems. So I switched and thought I'd do biology or chemical science, because I was in the Chemistry Olympiad order.

What inverse your mind?
In my get-go year, I wandered into the estimator lab at KAIST and someone had left their screen on. I looked at it closely—it was a problem solving and algorithm consignment. Suddenly I could run into how CS combined everything I enjoyed—mathematics, algorithms, trouble solving, design choices, and representing information in a dissimilar style. I wasn't certain I wanted to become a developer at the time, but I signed up for some figurer science classes because I idea I would enjoy learning CS. So I switched to CS as my major and finally came to the US to exercise a Masters and PhD in Computer science.

So, considering you were KAIST'due south height engineering and science pupil in 2001, receiving the Korean Ministry of Education, Scientific discipline, and Technology Accolade (the highest undergrad honor), understandably you'd be irritated if your daughter succumbed to negative gender stereotyping about your ain field?
Which is exactly why I created the Mommy Computer Science Camp, to teach the basic concepts of Computer Science to 4- to six-twelvemonth-olds. My daughter competes for attending with my computer usage then I wanted to explain to her what I do, and so she understands why I am passionate about informatics.

But you decided not to use mini-tablet devices for the v-twenty-four hour period camp?
No, I wanted to deal with concepts, in abstract, and so designed hands-on activities without using computers. We mostly used large pieces of paper, stickers, and some absurd counting sticks that I bought from Amazon.

What did you teach them?
Everything from how information moves through the internet via TCP/IP to all the useful calculator science concepts including: Big Data, Map-Reduce, groupByKey, filter, map, distributed and parallel calculating and cloud calculating.

And they understood information technology all?
Aye—well, eventually. Considering I explained it in language—generally visual—that they would understand. For instance, before we started the activities, I talked most "cloud computing" by drawing "rain clouds" with many computers. Data flow operators were like shooting fish in a barrel and intuitive to explicate to kids, since most encephalon evolution activities at the four– to v-year-former level involves sorting based on shapes or colors—groupByKey; finding objects based on backdrop—filter; transforming objects—map; and counting—reduce. Too, distributed and parallel computing is like shooting fish in a barrel to explain to kids who are working together in parallel.

Can you explicate how you taught the concept of Binary Search Trees using owls?
I started by asking Sophia and her friends: "What's your favorite tree?" They said blossom trees, fruit trees, rainbow trees, and and then on. I told Sophia and her friends that I similar many different kinds of trees, simply my favorite tree is a binary search tree and, in informatics, most trees are upside down. I put a tree poster upside downwardly with key terms such as a body, co-operative, and foliage. And so I brought owl cards which I made by putting number stickers on them. I explained that a binary search tree is a data structure designed for fast look-up and containment checking, and each node has ii children, where the left child is less than its parent and the right kid is greater than its parent. Then we started inserting owls to a binary search tree. They grasped the idea really quickly. Information technology was amazing.

Mommy Computer Science Camp binary search trees

Which lead you to the idea—mayhap this is a better way to teach information science?
Afterward I did the mommy information science camp, I became really excited near how to evangelize this to more people to alter the way people experience about figurer science every bit a field of study and employment.

Inspiring them equally young as possible?
Sophia is 4 and a half now, and has just started picking up on gendered perceptions. She says, "Spider-Man is for boys" and is choosing to play with princesses.

Let's hope your hereafter vision of computer science tin can alter things.
I do call back I've hit on a new way of teaching informatics and making it engaging. You don't need to beginning by putting upwards LCD screens in front of students to teach informatics. The field has and then much more than going for it than just the programming languages, compilers, and environs testing. I know that many more than people will go into the field if the large ideas and concepts are taught in a way that is innovative and exciting.

What'due south your side by side step with this?
Sophia is studying at the UCLA Lab School, an educationally progressive place for children 4 to 12 here on the UCLA campus. I've suggested to her teacher that maybe I could teach a class in 2022 based on what I explored in the mommy computer science army camp and have it from there.

Nosotros'll follow up with you side by side year then, to come across how it's progressing.