Presentation by Hadi Partovi: "Codification, the new universal language. Let's learn to code".

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
Welcome to the EnlightED Podcasts, the worldwide conference that focuses on the challenges of education in the new world. Driven by Fundación Telefónica, IE University and South Summit, it gathers leading experts in education, technology and innovation.
Why is learning computer science and programming at school so important for the future? Hadi Partovi, founder and CEO of code.org, tells us in this talk how programming can improve education in general, as well as being fundamental in tackling the great challenges facing humanity.

**Hadi Partovi** (0:53)
Thank you very much, and I'm so happy to be here. Thank you to the Fundación Telefónica for inviting me into, and I'm so excited to be here at the brand new building as well for IE.
I want to talk about the importance of teaching computer science as a fundamental part of education. I like to start all of my presentations with a personal story, and this is a story of my childhood, because when we think about education, we have to think about children. I had a very different childhood growing up than most of us.
This is a picture of me growing up with my identical twin brother. I'm the one on the left-hand side.
And when I was growing up, right around when this photo was taken, we were living in Tehran, Iran, and our country broke out into an Islamic revolution, and then a war with the neighboring country of Iraq. So I spent most of my childhood during the day living in a police state, and at night our city was getting bombed, and my neighborhood was actually one of the bombing targets. So I spent most of my evenings holding my ears in the basement, hoping that the bombs wouldn't hit our house. It was a terrible place to grow up, and my life changed dramatically one day when my father brought home a magical gift. He brought a Commodore 64 computer, but this wasn't the magical gift because it had no apps, no games, no software. The magical gift was a book, an introduction to basic programming, and there, living during a war and just trying to survive, learning programming was my escape. I learned that if you learn to code, you can create your own dreams and bring them to life. And so when I came to the United States as a young immigrant, I basically had... I became my own example of the American dream because of what I learned in technology. I started working at internships in technology companies when I was 15 years old, before I was even legal age for working. And I studied computer science in universities, worked at the best companies and then started my own startups. And I've developed a successful career in technology and had an opportunity to invest in many of the most successful companies and learn alongside many of the top technologists. And so my story is a story of opportunity.
But as we think about the world around us, the story of opportunity is not the same for everybody. And in fact, over the last 20 years, it feels like fewer and fewer people feel satisfied about the possibility of the idea that if you work hard, you should be able to make a better life than your parents. That idea doesn't feel like it's applying for everybody the same way. And there's many reasons for this, but one of those reasons has to do with the impact of technology on our workforce. We all know that today's workforce is gradually seeing work getting automated. Predictions say that over the next 30 years, roughly half of all work is going to be in some way impacted or automated by robots and computers. And what we need to think is, how do we react to this from an education system? The problem is that the majority of our schools don't even teach computer science. Which is the most foundational basic concept and the most foundational basic course you need to take if you want to participate in the future of work. Now, computer science isn't only important for preparing the labor workforce. Really, computer science is important to rethink education as a whole. Education in the entire planet, all around the world, schools everywhere with one and a half billion students are all learning the same courses, the same subjects as we taught 100 years ago. The students have changed, the schools are new buildings, but the curriculum is 100 years old. And we need to rethink education to think about what is the curriculum for this century. If we want to prepare students for life in the year 2050, what are the subjects we should teach them? We shouldn't be teaching them memorization. We shouldn't be giving them tests where they go work without the internet, don't talk to anybody and just memorize and answer the questions. We need to teach students creativity, problem solving and collaboration. And the best way to do that is by rethinking the curriculum. Now, the reason to teach computer science is because it makes all of education better, not just for the students who want to go into technology. And there's multiple ways it makes education better. The first is it prepares you better for life.