Presentation by Linda Liukas: "The grammar of computers"

SPEAKER_1 (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.

How can we teach programming in schools? Linda Liukas, the author of the bestselling children's book, Hello Ruby, talks about the need for new narratives to introduce computers and technology in the classroom. Don't miss her presentation and subsequent conversation with María Teresa Nieto, blockchain specialist at Telefónica Tech.

Linda Liukas (0:54)

My name is Linda Liukas. I'm a children's book author, illustrator, programmer from Helsinki, Finland. And this is pretty much the first live event I'm doing since the pandemic started. So it's so exciting to be here with all of you today.

My work is about reimagining ways technology can belong to everyone and how we can give the vocabulary and the understanding and most of all the agency to understand the world more and more run through technology.

And this here has been my credo for all of the projects I've worked on. If code is the next universal language, instead of only grammar classes, we need to be teaching more poetry lessons. And what I mean with that is the idea that we learn through so many different methods. We learn a new language by speaking it, by swimming it, by dancing it, by flirting in it. And in some ways, the ways we teach technology are very narrow and very limited. And we need to be offering more poetry classes, more pathways and more opportunities for people who wouldn't otherwise discover the joy of it.

Most of my time, I spend writing and illustrating children's books. And these books have been widely popular. They've been translated into over 34 different languages. The latest ones are Farsi and Thai and I can't remember which Turkish I think came out this year. And I think it speaks volumes of how both kids, but also teachers and adults and parents want to learn about this more complicated and technical world through softer and more gentle ways. But in addition to this work, I've worked within the realm of computer science education for almost 10 years now through nonprofits like Rails Girls to nowadays running as the chairman of the board for our own 42 Helsinki, which is called Hive Helsinki. So very excited to see some familiar faces here in the audience today.

But what does it mean then to teach children about a technological world? For me, it's meant a lot of play, because in some ways the original way we learn about the world is on our hands and knees, through our fingertips, through sticking our tongue on things. And often the world of computer science is abstract, it's high up here. So my mission is to turn the children into a computer and play act how computers work. Sometimes we learn about sorting algorithms by building a cardboard YouTube and figuring out how and what kind of recommendations the kids get. And sometimes it means baking gingerbread cookies in the shapes of hardware. But through all of these projects I'm trying to paint a future and a vision that is more inclusive when it comes to technology.

And why then use storytelling? Why am I here speaking to you today instead of running a workshop or speaking to you in code alone? Well, I think stories have this power that is very, very easy to overlook. Because stories are the original way we humans learn about ourselves, we humans learn about each other, and we humans learn about the world surrounding us. And there is only one shape of stories in technology today, and that sucks.

We are in a very historic building today. I've learned a little bit about the history of the building today and the Telefónica Foundation building. It used to house a lot of women who worked as telephone operators, telephone switch operators, which was definitely not considered as a classy or exciting or fancy job back in the day. But they were part of the history of technology. And I think a big part of what I want to dedicate the next 10 years working on is figuring out how do we tell more nuanced stories around technology so that it's not always a hero's journey, it's not only a lone cowboy coder who solves the problem, that we showcase that technologies happen through people working together through multiple different ideas coming together from material sciences to cognitive sciences to math to philosophy to arts and even to the switchboard operators who translated those phones to one person to another. And all of this means that even though today we have the device we like to call the computer, it didn't arrive from the sky. It wasn't born from the earth. It came together because a lot of people wielded together. And I think those are the kinds of stories I'm most interested in today.