Jeremy Keeshin on Read Write Code: A Friendly Introduction to World of Coding

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You are listening to the Getting Smart podcast, where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host, Jessica, and today we’re talking with Jeremy Keeshing about his new book, Read, Write Code, a friendly introduction to the world of coding and why it’s the new literacy. Jeremy was an innovator from an early age and formed Code High School, an online teaching platform for helping schools teach computer science. He is an advocate for constant learning, for focusing

on emerging technologies, and for providing free access to high schoolers. Let’s listen in as he talks to Tom about the many benefits of learning to code, why it might be the new literacy, and whether or not students should still be thinking about college. Jeremy Keeshing, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Hey, Tom, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here for our conversation. I miss seeing you, man, because we usually chat every year on the conference seat.

Yeah, well, there was not a lot of travel this year. I feel like I’m at a handful of them. I think we’ve been very… I haven’t gone anywhere in a year. It’s super weird. Right, right. I think that’s true for a lot of people. So hopefully we are hopefully turning the corner sooner rather than later. Jeremy, congrats on your book, Write Code. I think it just came out. We’re going to dive

into that. We’re really excited about that contribution, but let’s go in the way back machine to high school. Did you get hooked on coding in high school? Right, good question. So I got started. I probably tried making my first website in middle school, just trying to put something kind of silly with HTML or CSS or jokes with friends. I took my first class in high school. It just really wasn’t very common to have classes or take classes. I

took a class in high school. What year was that? I took that class in 2000 and I think 2006, 2007. I took a 4-turn class in 1976 with punch cards. So that was really unusual. Right. We have to make a virtualized punch cards in CodeHS, but we don’t have that yet. Yeah, so I took my first class in high school and then that was my first class and then kind of continued from there. Did you know you went to Stanford and did you know right away

that you wanted to focus on computer science? Yeah, that’s a great question. I really don’t think I did. Going into college, I wasn’t sure. Definitely really enjoyed the class in high school and then started doing it at Stanford and got more and more into it and ended up majoring computer science and helping to teach the computer science courses there and that was how we ended up starting CodeHS. But I don’t think it was set in advance. Jeremy, were there just like several hundred

wicked smart people at Stanford CS? Right. There’s a lot of smart people all over the place. I think at the beginning maybe things can seem intimidating, but that’s so much of what I do hope to dispel with stuff with CodeHS because I think I would maybe be in some more advanced classes in college and I felt like, oh, I don’t know what’s going on. Like everyone else knows more than me. And then you realize, oh wait, I just I haven’t learned that yet. This person already knows it and you can definitely

feel that intimidation in computer science. But then when I was in the TA side and then again now just more on the teaching side with CodeHS, someone may think, oh, everyone, oh, how do people already know everyone already knows this? Everyone has to start at the beginning. Everyone has to start at square one. And I think trying to remove that intimidation factor is so important. And you could do that as a teacher, as a TA. And yeah, if someone, if you’re getting started in

K-12, for example, and someone already knows it and you didn’t and they already took a few years and you haven’t, that’s not a fair comparison. And if students are starting in middle school now, they’ll know way more than me when I started Stanford. So it’s just not a, it’s not a fair comparison. No, that’s great. I’m glad you took that angle because everybody can code, everybody ought to learn to code. You mentioned CodeHS.com. Did you start thinking about forming that

while you were in college? Yes. Did you form it in college or right after college? We started it right in college, right near the end of college. So myself, my co-founders act, we started that together. We actually started doing it in a class and kind of started working on the summer and then I’ve been doing it for almost a decade since then. But yeah, got going in, got going right in college. What should tell our, tell our audience what CodeHS is? Right. So our

company is called CodeHS, conference and platform, helping schools teach computer science, big pieces of what we do are free computer science curriculum for middle schools and high schools, over 60 courses, you know, all aligned to different national state standards. We do professional development. So, you know, in person when it’s possible, virtual online courses and then whole software platform, you know, students can code online, teachers can manage their assignments, you know, their data,

their classroom and, you know, district implementation. So that’s what we do. We’ve had millions of students on the site. We have over 25,000 classrooms who are using CodeHS every month to teach computer science. And even with, you know, with COVID and just people needing to look at how to do virtual, you know, we have a lot of, a lot of helpful resources for making that possible. So that’s what we do really just helping, helping schools, teaching computer science, helping teachers.

What’s the business model? What we do is we have a premium business model. So teachers can sign up, all the curriculum is free. So we have thousands and thousands of teachers who use CodeHS for free, you know, year-round for many years. And then the school and districts can upgrade to the pro version of our software or professional development and, you know, more of the kind of data and tracking. What else do they get in the pro version?

So it’s different for the teachers and the administrators, but the teachers will get, you know, sort of like the full grade book, a lot of the progress tracking, a lot of the different kind of customization and controls. The administrators get different tracking either by school or across the districts and then different usage, usage and reporting. So those are a few of the things.

You kind of had to offer free curriculum because you are competing with so much free curriculum, right? A lot of people have joined you in building free curriculum. Right. It’s a very interesting space that we work in and, you know, there’s a lot of great options. I think we have something that’s pretty unique. But yeah, you know, there are other free options out there. We really try and have a lot of breadth and depth to what we offer. So, you

know, you could be needing to offer a particular course that meets a specific Nevada requirement. We have that course and we have the course in Georgia and Texas and, you know, many, many places. So, you can get those exact courses that you need. But yeah, there are free options out there. So it’s an interesting space. There’s definitely bigger tech companies who want to have an education element and they go, oh yeah, we have a big tech company. We want to emphasize

tech education, computer science education. And so there’s definitely a lot of other initiatives that make it an interesting setup. But I think, yeah, I think we have a key place within kind of overall space and really leading within high school CS spaces, our focus. Yeah, you do. You provide really great tools and great professional learning. And I think those are super important. I think most high school teachers that take on a computer science class,

they’re often really nervous about being current in the content and your tools and your professional learning do a great job of really helping folks be confident about being able to deliver the top notch courses. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, that’s what we want to do. We want to make it way easier for something to be really, really great right off the bat. And I’d say, you know, we work with a lot of teachers who, yeah, maybe a lot of them are newer, but we have a lot of

teachers who have been teaching computer science for many years, a decade plus, and they use coHS just, you know, there’s like a whole power user next level where you can write your own auto graders and things like that. And then someone who’s using it for, say, their first year, their second year, their third year, you know, they get more and more advanced each year. So it really just gives them a lot of flexibility. Like our philosophy, we’re not trying to be really

prescriptive. We’re trying to give you, you know, the toolbox that you need. Jeremy, for a student that’s got a pretty strong interest in computer science, what would the ideal four year sequence look like? What courses should they take in high school? That’s a great question. So, you know, it depends where you’re starting. You know, some schools might do K-12, some might do 6-12, some might do, you’ve never taken a course and

you want to start in high school. I think a great place to start is, you know, you’re going to take an intro class. I think, you know, we have a very popular one in JavaScript, very friendly, very interactive. So that’s a good place to start. You know, as a second course, you could take something like Python. If you want to do an AP track, you know, you could do a CS principles or CSA, which is in Java. Or if you want to skip and do kind of the more advanced one,

you do CSA and then after that, you could do something like a cybersecurity or a mobile apps. So I’d say, I mean, again, we have a lot of different options, but I’d say without knowing more information, you know, maybe do JavaScript, Python, CSA and then maybe cybersecurity, mobile apps. That’s probably what I would say. Jeremy, I’m a fan of WLA, the Washington Leadership Academy, that all students take four years of computer science and all their sophomores

take AP CS principles. Is that a good course? Do you think that’s useful to have all kids take that course? What’s your take? CS principles is definitely a very solid course. I think, you know, that could be a place to start. You could do, again, there’s a lot of options to try and customize it by school. CS principles is nice because you get a survey. So you’re getting a little bit of program and a little bit of, you know, just how is the internet working, bits and bytes. So it is a really

nice survey. It is meant to say, hey, how do you bring more students into computer science? And it’s been pretty successful at that. So I think that’s a solid course as well. And we, so we have a CS principles in JavaScript and Python will actually have a one coming with a CS principle in cybersecurity. So we’re the only ones who will have like multiple CS principles like that. But I think it’s a solid course. I think it’s a solid course. I really think you

that that having, you know, taking a CS course in high school is a no brainer. Okay, here’s your good job. It was kind of an easy choice. If you had to pick a language, you’ve mentioned it a couple times. Python’s getting a little more popular with folks that want to head towards data science. Kind of an emphasis you mentioned learning both. If you had to choose one now, would you pick Python or does it depend whether you have to pick a career pathway?

No, I really, yeah, we are philosophy. My philosophy, it’s much more about like fundamentals. And if you get the fundamentals and you understand, you know, how do you break down the problem? How do you use loops? How do you, you know, do conditionals? How do you write functions? You see those in every language, Java, JavaScript and Python, you know, they it’s easier to learn one words, you know, the other. I don’t think some people are very committed, like, Oh, we need to learn this language.

We’re not, we’re not so persistent on you have to do one particular language. I do think they both can be friendly for beginners and good for professionals. So JavaScript is nice for some courses, because it’s like native to the web browser. So it just makes things like really, really easy. Python definitely has a lot of applications around, again, data, data science, modeling. But both good things to learn. Take both. Your answer sort of leads me into your

book. I read, write code, a friendly introduction to the world of coding, and why is the new literacy? Your answer sort of answers this question, but you know, is coding the new literacy or is it just a vocational skill? Right, right. I would know my answer. But I think, again, it’s a great vocational skill. But I think it’s more than a vocational skill. And I wouldn’t want to just pigeonhole like that. I think, you know, you know, and I write about this in the book, but, you know, there are

so many opportunities and growing in computing and related fields, it has connections everywhere. You know, whether you’re doing that in college, whether you’re doing that outside of college or in school, you know, there’s a lot of opportunity within computer science from a vocational perspective. From an academic and research perspective, so many graduate research programs, I’d say most people I know, they studied a field, they studied economics, they studied chemistry. And what did they do in

their graduate academic work? They needed to use coding to figure out a model, the data for their graduate research, right? As an academic, it’s vocational. But I think it’s also ultimately very, very practical. If you want to understand like the modern business world, like software is a component of everything that, you know, we’re doing. And I think, you know, the way that I kind of talk about it in the book, you know, with this idea around coding as a new literacy is, look, okay, so

reading and writing, like you expect, expect students to know how to read and write, it’s not you’re going to be a professional writer, you’re going to be a professional reader, you’re using it every day. It’s a part of being just a kind of an educated citizen. Go back 500 years, actually only a tiny fraction of people could read and write. And then I think that all changed, you know, with the printing press. And so my argument would be we’re at the sort of printing press moment

for computing, you know, with the internet, there’s a small group of people who know coding, and everyone else who doesn’t know, they don’t know what they’re missing. They don’t know what they’re missing. But I think if you follow the trends and you look, what’s going to happen over the next five, 10, 20, 50 years, technology is a part of everyday life, it’s important to understand, you know, how it works. But then you also bring it back into the conversations that, you know,

you’re just talking about, okay, how are we going to organize or decide certain things as a society? And you go, okay, I need to understand what are the impacts about my data and privacy? And what are the tradeoffs there? And I think just to give everyone that foundation to be able to speak about it and pay a school system is getting hacked, the health system is getting hacked, elections are being targeted. People don’t have the vocabulary to speak about it in an educated fashion. And I

would argue that’s just a big disservice across the board and to say, okay, what is hacking? What is phishing? How do I project myself? What are the tradeoffs with my data? When is that okay? When is it not? And it’s, it’s, there’s, you know, that’s the foundational building blocks that I try and cover in the book. It’s a survey, it’s a map. It’s not making you an expert. But I’d say, you know, having that, having that as a good starting point is super important today. Yeah, I think as you

illustrate in the book, this, it’s a great opportunity to begin this in elementary school. Because if you can begin to build those, that new literacy and elementary skill, you can enter into the conversation that we just talked about about the good and bad uses of coding. Right. Yeah, no, I think, you know, more and more school, more and more states are starting to make C.S. standards, put a requirement on the books to offer it to have it, it’s going to keep going

that way. I think it looks a lot different in elementary. That’s not where we focus, but, you know, you’re combining, you know, offline computational thinking, you know, different types of problem solving and puzzles. I think at the younger grades and even with our middle school, you know, you want to keep students excited and wanting to keep learning. That’s more important than saying, you need to get professional skills as early as possible. I don’t believe that.

I think that’s not the best, like, long-term way to teach it. But if you go, oh, wow, this was so fun. Look at what we were creating and we’re building these websites and we’re building these apps. And then you want to take another class and you take another C.S. class in high school, that’s changing the game, or you want to take it in college, or you consider it as a major. You know, I think that’s a huge success story. Like, if we can, you know, we can have that

happen for students or encourage that or support teachers with that. How has the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning in every sector of the economy has changed what we should be teaching in high school, including but not limited computer science? Right. Yeah, that’s a great question. So AI, artificial intelligence, that was my focus area in college. And, you know, I think things are developing pretty fast. Things that seemed harder

to do then are kind of getting a lot more advanced now, just whether that’s like, even computer vision is advanced a lot. Or there’s now new bots, like GPT-3, that’s like writing, and it’s a human writing. How is that going to affect education? How is that going to affect, you know, society more broadly? That’s a very hard thing to predict. But I think you’re going to go the direction of you’re going to kind of see these building blocks making it easier and easier to pull in

AI or machine learning into various applications. And that, you know, when you talk about, and in the book, I talk about this a little bit, like this kind of automation, fear of automation, or the robots kind of taking your jobs. And what does that mean? You know, that’s a very, like a lot of people are speculating on that and how fast and how much AI is getting better. You know, it’s accelerating. It’s accelerating for sure. I think in terms of how it’s changing

what we teach, I think it comes back to, can you get a foundational understanding of these topics? That’s the stuff that I think really remains. I think that once you have the foundation, you know, you can go and say, hey, like, let’s learn basic AI topics. Let’s learn about some of these trade-offs. Let’s learn about some of these risks. I really think that’s important too. You know, I talk about in the book, it’s like, you know, you may have AI on facial recognition.

Okay. And that’s really influenced by your data set and the data that you’re looking at. And many AI systems have been found to be biased against black people because of the data that they’re using for the people who are building it. And if AI is going to be making a lot of decisions behind the scenes, which it already is, and that’s going to happen more and more, some innocuous, some not so much, you know, we really, I think being educated about these systems and the trade-offs

and I mean, there are people who say like, how do you regulate AI’s? We’re probably going to be talking about that, you know, so it’s a big topic. Great, great, great example of both needing to do each coding, but also introduce AI ethics and the ways in which this is impacting our public systems. We’re big fans of school districts like Monture schools in Pittsburgh that introduced AI ethics and middle school and where they start having these conversations

really on. Jeremy, I want to dive in and talk about guidance. Computer science is moving really quickly. Every, every really sector of the economy is moving really quickly. Do you have a sense of how we can give young people good advice on what careers might be attractive to them and as a result, what they should be learning in high school? How can we help high school teachers and counselors sort of stay up to date? How do they and kids

make a decision about what to study and where to head? Right, that’s a great question. You know, I don’t think that students need to decide so early, but we do provide a lot of answers to this question when we work with schools. We have a blog called Coding in the Wild and we talk to different people who use computer science across various fields to show that it’s not, hey, you’re using coding and all you can do is make an app. Actually, here’s how you can use it in healthcare,

here’s how you can use it in media, in journalism, in finance. So I think that I really believe in connecting coding to your interests, that you may be interested in biology. You learn biology, you learn coding, you can talk about computational biology and understanding how you analyze DNA. And so I think it’s a tool in the tool set. The other thing I like to say is just learning coding closes no doors. You’re interested in the business world. If you’re interested in the business world

and you know coding, that’s a very powerful tool set. You’re interested in, again, any kind of social sector, people are finding creative ways to do it. So as it relates to early guidance for students, I think, you know, I think one, learning coding is a foundational skill, following their interests, combining coding in their interests, not closing outdoors, but I think showing connections to students early on because younger students may not even realize,

that’s what I found, they may not even realize that coding was used in a certain circumstance. So showing what’s possible, I think is important. Should kids go to college? There’s so much great coding content out there. Can and should you skip college and maybe do a boot camp and just watch YouTube videos and learn coding on your own? That’s a great question. You know, I think it’s hard to give a totally general purpose advice.

I’d say on the whole, if it makes sense in your situation, I think it’s still something good to do today, but there’s not, you know, there are considerations and, you know, what are the costs? How is that working for you? What do you want to do? But I think that viewing college from a holistic perspective is important, but that, you know, again, I talked about this in the book as well, boot camps are getting more and more popular.

It is an alternative. There are different models. There are shorter term models. There’s models for people at different kind of stages of their career. You know, I think, yeah, you’ll probably see higher ed and higher ed around coding changing a lot. It feels like the general recommendation like today is still probably easiest to go if you can, but that, you know, you have boot camps are very interesting, a very interesting area.

Right. Not to mention MOOCs. I mean, you can take great CS courses from the world’s best professors for free. Right. So, right. So all of this, I mean, and we, again, we have in millions of students who have started on CodeHS. So, you know, if you’re motivated and wanting to learn coding or anything else online, you know, the tools and resources are there to do it. Oftentimes, a lot of it are free. That’s not the only piece of the puzzle in this type of education. And for us,

it’s essential working with the teachers who are making that happen. You know, I think whatever the kind of community or supports that you have in college and university, you know, at a boot camp, some people can learn it on their own. That’s harder to do. It is doable. Jeremy Keishan is the author of a read, write code, a friendly introduction to the world of coding and why it’s the new literacy. We even get the great book for teachers, parents, students,

higher ed folks that might not be in computer science, civic leaders, nonprofit leaders. Will should read your book. Yeah, that’s a great starting point. I think if you’re, you know, if you’re looking just more generally to understand it, you know, it’s a good place to start. But yeah, it is geared towards educators primarily. But we appreciate the way you laid this out. We think all secondary teachers would really benefit from it so that they can help see the connection

between the coding class that might be offered down the hall from them, the connections to, as you said earlier, to biology, to mathematics, to English. We all are influenced by coding every day. Everybody could use a great introduction to it. And we think read, write code is just that. So thank you. Thanks for your contribution. Thanks, Tom. I appreciate it. Yeah, I enjoyed it. One last quick question is with things moving so fast, how in the world do you keep up? What’s

Jeremy’s learning function? Wow, great question. I’m always experimenting with different things. I like to do a lot of writing and reading. I feel like news moves fast on Twitter. You got to be very critical of what you’re reading there. I think that some, I really believe in like good guided classes too. I recently started with the pandemic, got more into chess and I’m taking these chess lessons and it’s great. So I think we’re, we’re, we’re, how are you doing it?

There’s a site online and I signed up, I signed up for it and I really believe in growth mindset and continuous learning. And so that’s, that’s one challenge at the moment. That’s great. I love it. Always learning a new skill, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you again. Jeremy, thanks for joining us on Getting Smart Podcast and to our listeners,

check out Read, Write Code by Jeremy Keishan. Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks to Jeremy for joining us on this week’s episode. For more on the power of coding and computer science, check out episode 138, AI for All extends the power of artificial intelligence to high school girls. We’ve got it linked in the show notes and on the blog. All right, that’s it for today listeners. Be sure to hit subscribe so you don’t miss out on any future

episodes and they’re ready for you every Wednesday morning. Thanks for tuning in for the Getting Smart Podcast. This is Jessica signing off. Thank you.