Code Break 5.0: Simulations and Data with Bill Gates

all right i'm taking us off of mute so people can hear us they can hear you now yes we're no longer on youtube have one more minute before we start because people are going to start joining in are you ready sofia don't get nervous so the hannah you can slightly here all right we're waiting a few more seconds because people are joining the zoom call really really quickly we're almost ready to start all right it's 10 a.m almost ready don't forget to smile um hi welcome to code break and happy earth day my name is hadi there are tens of thousands of people joining us across zoom on facebook live and on youtube live together we're hoping to build the world's largest live interactive classroom with so many students at home my team at code.org invites families everywhere to join us for a weekly dose of inspiration community and computer science this is my daughter and sidekick sophia hello she's a budding computer scientist for those families who've been enjoying code break i want to take a moment to thank you for joining us every week and also to ask you to consider supporting us at code.org our goal is to give every student in every school the opportunity to learn computer science and every dollar you can give code.org will support one student to learn our team created the hour of code which has engaged so many students and we're just a few days away from celebrating one billion hours of done by students but we need your help to keep education free for all students so to support us please considering going to code.org and click the button that says help us or you can visit code.org help whether you choose to donate money or you can buy one of these super cool hats together you can help our cause please spread the word and invite others to join code break the larger our audience the better the special guests will have to join us and today we have a very very special guest bill gates who'll be joining us in a little bit but first let's get a chance to meet our live audience we have dozens of students on camera can everybody wave we're going to unmute you and everybody say hello all at the same time [Music] and i want to get a chance to meet the rest of our audience to find out where everybody is from we use a geographic poll so i'm going to switch to screen share to show where all these students are calling from look at all the countries of the world that folks are calling from so there's a whole bunch of people in the united states you can see uh but yeah and also from canada there's people from hawaii there's people from africa there's people a lot of people from india oh my gosh from south korea from japan so these folks are calling it it's it's live but it's for some folks at 7am or 6am for some folks it's after midnight uh people are calling from really all hours to see this live show you can also of course watch the recordings after the fact if you miss it so those of you who are in japan or china uh it's great to have you join us live but if there's families who miss this they can also watch it on youtube afterwards i also want to get a sense of the difference age levels grade levels and experience levels so could we do a quick audience poll to get a sense of what grade the students joining us are in so if you're on zoom you can answer this poll and submit it those of you who are watching us on youtube or on facebook live will share the results of the poll relatively soon and we're collecting answers from thousands of folks let's put the answers up on the screen all right so we can see the biggest group of folks are in middle school and in late elementary school but they're students ranging everywhere from k-12 and a whole bunch of adults as well let's also get a sense of the experience level of folks so we're going to put up another poll asking you what your computer science experiences now we've prepared code break for students who are beginners just getting started or intermediate or even advanced we're going to try in one hour to go through all levels of computer science uh which is not an easy thing to do in one hour all right if we could put the results on screen you can see the majority of folks are intermediates and a lot of beginners a few advanced folks as well if you're advanced please be patient with us we're gonna get to more advanced stuff by the end of the hour and if you're a beginner and things move too quickly for you it's okay you won't necessarily need to learn every single thing we talk about but you'll still learn some stuff that's cool now when bill gates joins us i want to make sure to give everybody a chance to ask bill a question he's a few minutes away but you have time now to think of your questions in advance and i'm going to tell you how to ask your questions when bill joins so listen carefully because i'm not going to repeat this on the fly if you're on zoom you can use the q a button which looks like this and if you're on a touch screen you may need to tap the screen to look at it if you're on facebook live you can use the comments in the live stream and if you're on uh youtube live the comments have been disabled but you can always use twitter if you post to twitter using the hashtag codebreak like this hashtag codebreak we'll pull the best questions to ask from bill gates now today's episode has multiple parts we're going to talk about simulation and data first we're going to talk about simulating a disease next we're going to do a q a with bill gates then third then we're going to talk about estimating the spread of the disease and then finally about visualizing data and all of this of course in the context of the cronovirus pandemic that's going on through the world as we go through this we may run into few bugs and if we do run into glitches we're going to learn a computer science concept called debugging this is sophia's little bug she drew it herself and debugging is what we do when we try to run into problems problems happen all the time with computer science and it's not a question whether you run into problems it's how you debug them now before we start today's lesson we want to welcome some students to demo their creations last week's challenge was to make your own pixel art or to improve our image doodler each week when students join code break we we ask you to send the things you create as the challenges for the next week and then we'll invite some folks to join us for next week's episode uh so i'm going to screen share but can we first invite daniel and sophia who who sent us stuff from last week hi are you guys up there say hi hi hi there where are you calling us from austin texas austin texas wow that's a you're like in the middle of a flower field aren't you yeah that's a very cute background so i'm gonna screen share what you two created uh and why don't you tell us a little bit about what this is so you use the pixel yeah pixel emojis which one have you made which one [Music] so i made the red heart and my sister made the other one i made the red part with the black outline and then daniel made the one with a red heart but with a green outline all right and so you see ones and zeros so you guys didn't actually color the dots in you made all these little tiny little ones and zeros over here to make the r to yourself was it a lot did it take a lot of time to make this oh i think we lost them in their cool background well i can't hear them so bye-bye to daniel and sophia the other thing i want to share is this this pixel art that was created by ish john ishan is a six-year-old boy studying uh in bangalore india and he's been with code break for the entire time we've been doing it and he sent this in and again this is pixel rt created using ones and zeros and he said he wrote sentences and said i love the pixelation it is so so cool i use three-bit code to make the code sign i first drew it on my math book and then i coded it on the workspace using ones and zeros and i chose the aqua color with the zero one one code because it's thecolorofcode.org i loved it thank you thank you so much ishaan as well so we're to start today's lesson and we're going to start learning about simulation our word for today is simulation simulation is something that scientists and computer scientists use to run science experiments usually when you make science experiments you do it in a lab like in chemistry when you mix a bunch of chemicals together to see what happens or you can do something with live animals but there's a lot of things you can't do in a lab and that's why you use simulation to make an experiment that simulates the real thing that happens rather than having it happen in real time so for example if we want to simulate how a disease spreads you don't want to actually spread a disease among real humans you want to simulate it to see what could happen now sophia is going to join me to code this uh and i'm going to share my screen to show you what we're going to be creating so just one second so i'm going to first show you the finished product of what we're going to create is going to be a simulation that shows a bunch of sprites or little monsters you're going to see these there's going to be one that is going to be red the red one is infected with a disease and if anybody any of these sprites that's red touches one of the blue sprites they spread the infection and you can see gradually the whole community is getting that infection we're going to see we're going to create the simulation in code and sophia is going to be doing the coding here we are in code.org in our tool called sprite lab this over here is where you're going to see the simulation this here are the different commands you can use and our code itself is going to be over here and i'm going to hand the mouse to sofia to do this so sophia the first thing you want to do is create a background so go into the world menu and set a background and make it be a k because our sprites live in a cave now what we want to do is we want to create 10 different sprites so go into the sprite menu and club make new sprite um but instead of having one of these we want 10 of them so i'm going to loops and repeat 10 times so we're going to make 10 sprites and now these are all at the middle of the screen so we want to change the location so if you could take that little block out and go to the sprite menu and choose random location so there's going to be 10 sprites at random locations are perfect now these are too big so if you could make them smaller or go into the action menu and set their spot size to 50. all right perfect right so now we have our 10 sprites and these are the healthy sprites but we want one that is infected with the disease so make a new sprite go into the sprite menu into the sprite menu and make a new sprite and choose a different costume for this make the red one now i want to show something by the way you can change the costumes if i go into the costume tab you can choose different looks and feels for these sprites and you can actually edit them yourselves we've already created some to use in this tool right now so for this red sprite we also want to make this one uh small as well so go into the action menu and set its size to 50 as well so we're going to make the red side sprite size 50 great so this is how our world is going to start but we want to have all these spots moving around so go into action and have the sprites begin wandering so have that wandering block that's going to make all of the blue sprites wander and you want to make the red sprite wander as well all right now if you hit run what's going to happen they're going to want they're all going to wander but right now nothing's the infection isn't passing around but we want to write codes that every time the red sprite touches one of the blue sprites it passes on the infection so hit reset and now we want to use events go into the event area and and save so that when a red sprite touches a blue sprite or sorry when a blue sprite touches the red sprite so first thing you want to do is have it bounce off so have it have an action to make it bounce off and then have another action to have the blue sprite change costume to become red because basically he's getting the disease and it becomes red all right now hit run and see what happens as soon as a blue sprite touches the red sprites wait all of them turn red oh that's because we made all of the blue sprites turn red hit reset and see where it says change the blue sprites to red you want to get rid of that and instead you want this sprite to turn red so yeah so that way only this sprite that touch the red sprite turns red right so now we can see as soon as any of these sprites touches the red sprite the disease is spreading and this now we made a simulation of how disease can spread but that's not all we can simulate more stuff let's simulate what would happen if we want to try to prevent the spread of the disease so what i want to do is introduce the idea of a green sprite that doesn't get the disease and when you click a sprite you make it green so uh so can you add an event so when you click on a blue sprite when you click on a blue sprite change its color to be green go to action to change its costume to be green right now i run this to see how it goes and then click on this oh wait oh all of them turn green stop it again instead of the blue turning instead of making all of the blue ones turn green again we want to make the just this sprite that you turn green all right so now anytime we click on a blue sprite it's green and because it's green the other event won't happen so it's protected from getting the disease this protection is like a vaccine it stays on and protects the sprite so it can't get that disease but we can also use a different kind of simulation and simulate as if it's washing their hands so hit reset we want to make it so that if you're green if clicking a sprite to make it green is like washing your hands it doesn't stay washed you can actually make it so that if the green sprites it's got its hands clean but if it reaches a red stripe again it's no longer clean you can't wash your hands today and then keep it clean yeah they're not clean forever so make it so that when one of the green sprites touch a red sprite when a green sprite the red one it has its hands clean but when it touches somebody with the infection it bounces off again and then also you want to change its costume now to become blue so it's back to normal it's not sick change that to this sprite so now when a green sprite touches the red sprites when you when you click a sprite they wash their hands and when you click you wash your hands they're protected briefly but if they touch an infected sprite again they need to become green again you need to continuously wash the hands of these spikes to protect them click click protect them see if as soon as a blue sprite touches the sprite with the virus you need to click it again so it washes its hands again and so this is a simulation of how the virus is trying to spread and if you don't wash hands quickly enough everybody gets this infection all right so this is kind of a interesting way to show a simulation and you know this looks a little bit more like a game real science uses a much larger simulation but this is something that we just created in just five minutes uh and we can share this out to you i'm gonna click the share button to share this out uh and you see this qr code and i'm gonna make this a little bit larger if you have a phone you can actually scan that qr code by opening your phone's camera and if you do that you're gonna actually get a little pop-up on your browser that actually sends you a url to the code that sofia just made and you can actually play that simulation on your phone right now and don't worry if you don't have a phone if you're actually watching this on your phone if you sign up for code break we're going to email this to you afterwards now not only can you play the simulation that we just created we're going to challenge you to improve on it you know what we created simulates washing of your hands but as we know to stop the spread of the vaccine stop the spread of the disease something else all of us have been doing a social distancing and staying away from each other so one of our challenges is going to be what if you could make some walls to prevent the sprites from running into each other so they could sort of get back and forth between the walls but they don't run into each other quite as often that's going to simulate what social distancing does or you can simulate what it's like to have a vaccine all of these simulations are basically things you can add to the code yourself and let me stop my screen share so if you um so one thing i want to do uh last is show by the way another very simple thing you could do in the simulation is you can see for example what would happen if we had more sprites to begin so if we had 20 sprites at the beginning look how quickly the disease spreads and how hard it is to wash your hands so this is just an interesting simulation you can do to see basically what the spread of a disease looks like now what i want to do um all right we're done with talking about our simulation now we're ready for the next part of today's lesson which is our q a with bill gates our special guest is joining very very soon now i can't wait to join bill gates to join us i first met bill when i was working at microsoft years ago when i was a college student actually and i was amazed by how much effort bill put into learning everything about everything this is a man who was reading multiple books a day every day and at code.org we are so fortunate to consider bill among the very very first supporters of the work that we do bill are you here with us yet i am do you hear me yep we can hear you how are you doing uh you know it's a crazy time uh very different but uh you know i'm safe and with my family and you know trying to help out with all the drugs and vaccines we're gonna need to get out of this situation yeah so bill today's code break is about simulation and data and we're going to talk about how we use modeling and simulation to stop diseases we're joined by tens of thousands of students either on this live zoom call or on youtube or on facebook and they're ranging from kindergarten through high school they're joining us live from as far west as hawaii and as far east as japan so it's anywhere from six a.m to after midnight their time but first i want to introduce my daughter and coding sidekick sophia hello she's an avid computer scientist and she's going to start us off with the computer science joke of the day okay hi mr gates or am i allowed to call you bill sure all right okay bill why did the java programmer need eye glasses he couldn't see shark that's a good one and if people didn't get the joke c sharp is a microsoft programming language all right so bill i have a first question is this with one billion students at home with school closed and teachers or parents are struggling to make sure learning keeps going everybody's having trouble focusing what do you do personally to make sure you spend this time productively instead of just watching tv or playing on an xbox or what do you what are you doing with your time are you reading how do you stay focused of course we're all on different schedules and you know we're often squeezed into less space you know all trying to get things done than before i do think that having a normal pattern a new normal pattern of okay what time am i gonna really focus on my schoolwork what breaks am i gonna take in that and trying every day to stick to that you know it's pretty helpful then you can figure out uh you know who has the machine and when people need to be quiet in the room that you're trying to do the work in uh you know it is amazing there's you know you guys are putting out great resources uh khan academy is putting out great resources so people are rising to the occasion uh you know sadly some schools uh aren't as equipped uh as others and you know teachers are having to learn new things but i do think the discipline uh is pretty important i'm still reading a lot you know mostly about the epidemic frankly i'm not reading as many books as i used to because the stuff about the epidemic every day there's just so much new yeah it's not even in books it's online exactly and by the way one great thing about code break this format that we're doing we've designed it so students can even participate on smartphones so even in families that don't have computers can be watching and lots are sophia has a question which i think is on behalf of literally every student in the world so if you want to ask your question do you think schools will open up against fall i mean nobody knows for sure but what are the odds i'm pretty optimistic uh but you know we can't say for sure what's going to happen is that we'll get through this first peak in the united states and many other countries and then we'll want to open up somewhat so you know some people will be going back to work although probably wearing masks and still trying to distance from each other and by the fall we should have uh better treatments for the diseases so it's not as risky uh as it is now uh you know we'll be getting closer to a vaccine but we won't have a vaccine until sometime next year you know we'll understand why young people don't seem to get uh infected this much or and you know don't get serious disease you know so maybe uh if they're careful uh that you know having school back in place doesn't create a large risk so i you know i'm i think it's likely but there's a few months here where we need to learn about the disease you know for example we don't know if it's seasonal most respiratory viruses including the flu which is the most common uh respiratory virus are rhinovirus that causes the common cold or these other forms of chronovirus uh that were benign that came before they're seasonal and that would mean that you could get um in the summer less spread but then as the fall came you might see a rebound there and the key is going to be having lots of testing so that we can start to see their pockets it won't be as uniform as it is right now there'll be many places that have it under control and then there'll be rebounds in a few places and those places may have to tighten up their policies so uh you know schools are going to have to be agile i think they will meet in person but they might face a situation that you know for a month you would go back in if that particular location was seen to see spread you might have to go back online for a month and um you know so we have to prepare for that eventuality but you know i'm i feel really bad for the students who've missed out like three months of school particularly if their school isn't set up uh to provide the online connection yeah well hopefully they can spend that time whether on khan academy or on code.org to keep up so bill we're learning about simulations and and modeling today scientists have been studying medicine disease for centuries and you know vaccines were invented in the 1700s antibiotics were invented in the 1900s in this century what's different about medicine that's uniquely possible thanks to computers and computer science well we're if this epidemic could come along say 10 years ago there's a lot of things that would be worse both in terms of our ability to do medical work and in terms of our be able to stay in touch i mean things like you know the call we're doing today there wasn't the bandwidth or capability uh you know you couldn't do netflix you couldn't do these business meetings people are doing so you know the internet is helping uh reduce the pain a little bit in biology now we can actually sequence things it's so cheap to sequence things we can understand things about who's infecting who we can discover antibodies very quickly and make tests based on those antibodies so eventually we'll have a little strip test that instead of having to send the sample the swab up in your nose into a big machine which is called the pcr machine you'll be able to take that swab put it in liquid and then pour that on a piece of paper and it'll indicate our do you have some of the virus and therefore you should be isolating yourself and getting that skilled up you know it looks like in the next six months we'll get a lot of those and that's based on uh you know new technology also the ability to make these drugs very quickly and test them uh you know we have these mass assay capabilities that have come along in the last 10 years and so treatments that's an area that i'm seeing you know fairly quick response we have scientists sharing all over the world uh you know trying to figure out what are the symptoms you know because we don't have enough tests for everybody if we can figure out what symptoms might indicate that you have disease then we can give the test just to those people and so uh you know we'll find out very quickly uh who's who's at risk and then uh trace their contacts um we're not we weren't just ready for this epidemic as we should have been uh there were people including myself that worried about this and spoke a bit about it uh some work was done to make vaccines faster because they usually take five years to create here we're hoping uh that you know somewhere between a year and two years we'll get a vaccine uh which is pretty unheard of but we have like uh over a hundred efforts around the world ten of which look very promising and uh you know if this had come ten years from now i think we would have had the tests out more quickly in the vaccine more quickly and when something's spreading exponentially it's hard for people to appreciate just acting a month earlier you know would have been like you know 30 times better uh exponential stuff you know we we should show people with software how you know it's either doing this if your reproduction rate is greater than one or it's doing this if your reproduction rate gets below one and you know that's where a lot of the us's today is because of these drastic actions which and caused big problems that reproductive that exponential number is below one uh but sadly as we open up and some places will go too far and it'll get back to say two and that runs the risk of filling up the hospitals again and we're actually later in this episode we're gonna walk through modeling in a spreadsheet how you do that because these models and simulations are exactly how people are figuring out how to slow down the virus um we want to give a chance to the audience to have an opportunity to engage with you bill uh so folks have submitted questions and i'd like to invite akira gilbert who helps us run code break to introduce the various student questions akira are you there i am how are you up how are you hottie i'm great thanks yeah and hello bill so last week we put out a call to students around the world to ask one question to bill gates so today we have our top video selection as well as some excited panelists that you can see on screen and first i'd like to introduce aisha cortez who is from puerto rico aisha are you ready you should be unmuted yes hi hi bill gates in haiti are you sure do you have your question yes okay um my question is what advice would you give to the parents the teachers and students who are working from home well it it takes a little more discipline i think to uh learn from home i you know you don't have everybody sitting there uh if you get confused it's a little harder to reach out and uh and sometimes it's hard to stay motivated hard to stay focused you know your siblings are running around and uh you know that that can be tricky i do think uh you know some students are going to actually learn more it'll be interesting what they learn about themselves and their ability to uh look online you know some of the online material whether it's lectures or exercises are just really super good and of course you do get to go at your own pace if you're confused about something you can go back uh look at it uh i know a lot of parents are kind of frustrated that if their students are studying a subject they don't know they feel like oh i wish i could help out uh you know so still you know reaching out to your friends particularly your friends who are really good at the subject uh and sitting and talking think throughs i think that's important you can get discouraged if you you're just totally studying on your own and you can share you know where you're understanding stuff share that with other other students uh and you know you still should get outside a little bit if you're allowed to uh you know and get refreshed so you don't overwhelm yourself but i can sit in front of the screen for a long uh period of time you know sometimes i i stay up a lot later than i should if i run into some really good good online lectures well thank you thank you aisha and thank you bill um i'd now like to invite bennett schwartz from new jersey to share his question bennett are you ready you should be unheated hi mr grades i'm bennett schwartz and i'm eight years old i am an avid coder what can i do at home with my own coding to help with this pandemic well i think uh you know pandemic is an opportunity to look at many different things there's a group called neck strain that's got a website where they show how they're sequencing the virus and how it's changing over time and there's a lot of data there that you could write programs to try and visualize there's a lot of data you know like different states uh you know compared to their population are having different uh number of cases different numbers of deaths the trend over time so you know in terms of navigating data and graphing data to show interesting trends you know i think there's an immense amount that can do that that could even contribute to people's understanding the actual simulation of which activities put us at risk the modelers are having a very tough time with that and because it's exponential if you get just a few parameters that we don't really know you get them wrong you can over predict or under predict and the model that's actually been the most successful is more of a statistical model more of a trend following model that a group i fund called international health metrics and evaluation is done it's at healthdata.org so i'd encourage you to look at that but uh data visualization is something that i think is an exciting thing and then code isn't that complicated to try and look at data in different ways uh you know there's different runtime libraries that can help with that or you can uh write the code for that yourself uh so it's great everybody's being open about how many cases they have and deaths and the trends on those things we need insights that pour out that will help us set the right policies thank you so much bennett um so last week we actually had our audience submit video questions for bill to answer live on our show we have one question from andrew casey who's a literacy coach and he joined in with his family in halifax canada considering we are in a world of connectivity and what way do you foresee students within our schools can connect with those in situations of high needs throughout the globe to help with early literacy we are a nation in canada of diverse languages and cultures and as an elementary teacher myself i see an opportunity for global book buddies you know the you know the use of digital which we're all uh you know doing a lot more than uh we've ever done in the past it definitely uh it makes us think okay how can we reach out to other people you know whether it's mentoring uh tutoring uh just you know getting in touch with people from other cultures you know particularly the disease is is going to be worse in the developing countries which is uh uh although the number of cases are still pretty low you know it's likely uh to be much worse there and so you know i think you're right that the you know who can do tutoring who can share ideas uh even you know you do need to have a common language still the translation isn't good enough to uh avoid uh that requirement uh but we ought to be able to find you know there's a lot of older people who would love to mentor and tutor uh who are almost kind of isolated and matching them up with students that would benefit from that even if they're not uh in the same country uh a lot a lot that could be done there to take the idle time and and put it to good use thank you for that um and so now we have time for a question that was submitted by our audience in our q a this question comes in from susanna and she said how important is imagination when doing work with computer science what exercises do you do to stimulate your imagination and how do you think that's contributed to your success well of course you you don't want to write the same program that everybody else has written uh you know first trying to do the kind of standard problems helps you understand data structures and algorithms uh but then you know the real value added is when you think okay what can i do that hasn't been done uh by somebody else before now you can be very inspired uh from people who've done uh you know fantastic work in the past uh but it's you know it's kind of uh you know trusting that you know your wild ideas will sometimes be right about things i remember i tried to write programs for things uh you know i tried to do this huge baseball simulation program and it turned out that was way too ambitious i you know the computers and the software of the time just didn't let me do it so you can sometimes uh reach too far uh in in things but you know you're going to be motivated to really learn how to program if you think there's something cool for some people that's a way of looking at data some people that's a way of uh making a game uh you know sometimes it's actually solving a problem and so uh you know everybody everybody should you know push themselves to think okay my my programming where can i contribute to the world thank you so much and for our last question i actually like to head back over to our student panel and introduce fiona from colorado um it's earth day and she had a climate change question so fiona are you ready to share you should be unmuted at this point yeah hi bill um what is a big project the gates foundation is working on to cope with climate change yeah climate change of course is a huge looming problem and you know before the pandemic we might have identified it as one of the problems we're not putting enough effort into because over time it'll be such a big deal it's a challenge because we have to change that not only the way we make electricity but the way we do transportation the way we grow food the way we make materials like cement and steel and even though i'm mostly working on the pandemic i'm still keeping some of the climate change work up it's going to require incredible technology innovation you know one of the simulations uh is the uh what's the electricity grid going to look like because it's we're putting unreliable sources intermittent sources like sun and wind in where we used to have uh constant uh things that wouldn't all go away at the same time like a coal plant or a natural gas plant that now we have to get rid of uh so you know i've been supporting uh the idea of energy storage which would help a lot or you know if nuclear reactors could be much cheaper and safer that could help a lot and i created a venture thing called breakthrough energy ventures that's out investing in uh now over 30 companies uh that have these ideas of making steel a new way so we need we need a lot of innovation the cost of doing things in a greenway is so expensive that even if rich countries chose to do it the countries like india um you know as they're trying to build new cities and provide light and thing air conditioning things we take for granted if if the premium the so-called green premium is still as high as it is today you know they won't be able to shipped over uh and so the us even though we have to cut our 15 of emissions we have to do more than that we also have to do the innovation to make it economic for all countries to go along with these green approaches so our foundation helps farmers uh and because they are going to suffer the most you know the bad weather is meaning that the crops fail which for a subsistence farmer means they don't have enough to eat so the pain of climate change uh is already evident uh in the the places where people live the the toughest lives so giving them better seeds helping them out uh that's called uh uh adaptation and then reducing the emissions which is called mitigation both of those are a big deal and uh you know i hope we don't get too distracted away from that or at least get back to it uh as we get the pandemic over thank you bill so much for inspiring students about the ways we can help solve these problems you know computer science is increasingly becoming part of the school curriculum and six studies have now shown that students who learn coding and computer science go on to outperform in reading and writing math and science and they're even more likely to enroll in college but with great power comes great responsibility and as we celebrate the 50-year anniversary of earth day it's so important that educators make sure computer science is taught equitably and that students like the ones here are inspired to learn to harness technology for good i have one last question i want to ask you i know you're short on time with millions of coronavirus infections globally many people are pointing fingers placing blame and deepening political divides but we're all going to look back one day and this is going to be one of the greatest trials the human race has ever faced what are the some of the best things you've seen people do to support each other and what would be a message you can send about how we can use this pandemic as an opportunity to bring the world together rather than stray apart yeah this is a bit like a war but in this case all of humanity is fighting the virus and so every bit of understanding uh that can be developed you know helps all of us so it doesn't really matter which country the vaccine comes from or the drug that's a therapy or even the understanding of what type of opening up how you can do it in such a way uh that you don't get more cases and so you know we're looking at germany and sweden and denmark who are a little ahead doing this opening up and trying to see okay what happens there uh you know sadly some people are trying to uh you know point fingers at other countries because of course the infection has spread by international travel and you know international travel will be greatly reduced so hopefully that's not a permanent thing in terms of uh the international commerce or exchange of ideas that have built up the trust and uh working together i am seeing uh at the scientific level it is pretty amazing i mean the chinese even in the early days were publishing the the gene sequence and now the number of papers coming out uh that international collaborations and you know clearly they in order to make uh the vaccine we're gonna have to have factories in many many many countries and multiple companies collaborating on that and you know wow everybody's got this has their attention uh and so you know we have to see great international collaboration we also see crazy rumors but i don't think that many people are paying attention to those i hope not uh you know there's a big triumph that'll come here based on the scientists of the world working together you know uh and so i'm optimistic about uh you know that we've got all of humanity working towards a common goal thanks so much bill thanks so much for inspiring us uh and i know i speak on behalf of all of us that we really appreciate you joining us today uh we have all the students on camera right now everybody could all wave and say goodbye to bill to and thank you thank you guys that was great it was fun good to see you all thanks buddy bye-bye bye-bye all right so now we're going to take a quick break for a trivia question it's trivia time so since we just met with bill gates today's trivia question is which was released first the first version of microsoft excel or the first version of microsoft windows and this is going to show up as a as a zoom poll for those of you who are joining us live on zoom those of you who are on youtube or facebook we're going to share the answers soon but which came first microsoft excel or microsoft windows kind of a tough question right we're collecting answers in real time from thousands of people let's share the results all right so most of you guessed that windows came first and some of you said that excel came first then a small group said that both came at the same time so i'm going to show the results on screen just one second uh and this is a very short history lesson in microsoft windows 1.0 was released on november 20 1985. that was 35 years ago and it was the first version of the microsoft windows line this is what it looked like sophia does this look like your computer no no um but it turns out microsoft excel was released earlier 51 days earlier and was released for the macintosh operating system in september 30 1985 and this is what microsoft excel used to look like 35 years ago okay um so yeah it's kind of interesting and in fact excel for windows took two more years before it came out now speaking of excel this is going to take us to the next part of our episode which is just as bill talked about how scientists use data on simulation to look at accidental growth we're going to learn about how to estimate the spread of a virus and we're going to use microsoft excel as our tool for doing that so i'm going to share my screen again to do this just one second and what we're going to do is show what it's like to model the spread of a virus now this is going to be a very simplistic model but it's going to familiarize us with how exponential growth can get really big and how uh how delicate is and how scientists are using actually computer science to protect us so let's start by asking how many people does an average person meet in a day so if what would you say like five or ten or twenty let's say ten let's do ten right so if an average person meets ten people in one day so what's the chance that an infected person passes the disease when they meet somebody should we say like one percent two percent two percent two percent so if you run into somebody and they're infected and there's a two percent chance you get it from them so then each day one infected person infects how many more point two right point two yeah they're going to meet ten people and there's a two percent chance and we can calculate this with an equation we can say equals this times that so points each one infected person infects 0.2 people now let's model the growth of a virus just using those very simple assumptions and i'm not assuming how many people die or how many recover or if we have any other things just at this very basic thing and if we start with 500 people on one day and i'm going to put january 22nd here because that's the day that the coronavirus had had 500 people uh and then if i say what happens the next day so if it's this day plus one we're going to have the next day the same 500 people plus a new set of infections which is this people this set of people multiplied by 0.2 so basically 500 people who already had the infection and each one of them brings on 0.2 more so then what happens one day later those 600 people infect 720 and then one day later those 720 and i'm just copying down these formulas and i can copy them way down to here all the way to april 22nd and we get a whole bunch of people and now if i actually want to chart this growth i can insert a chart so i'm going to say insert chart and this can now chart the growth of the virus using these very simplistic assumptions now what you'll see right now is this font is a little small so let me change the font so everybody can see it with this tiny font you can see in just the three months we reached 8 billion people which is the entire human population would get the virus with these assumptions now what's interesting about exponential growth is how small changes can make a difference so if we had people meeting each other just a little bit less like each person meets nine people a day suddenly instead of 10 billion people we got to 1.8 billion if each person met only eight people in a given day suddenly that top line growth became only 350 million what would happen if we all started washing our hands more which of these numbers would change the second one the two percent chance you're less likely to get the disease if you if you wash your hands so let's say it's a 1.5 chance you get the disease now it's 14 million people or if you said there's a one percent chance you get the disease now only 500 000 people get the disease and if we distance ourselves even more so the average person only needs three people a day wow now only 7 000 people get the disease it's a complete difference small numbers can make a huge difference now this is basically fake data we're making up but scientists are looking at the real data that looks like this and we're actually going to share out to all of you real data that is live that shows in every state in the united states on any given date how many cases there were and how many deaths and in every country uh oops these are all states as well but we have data for basically every state and every country showing how many people have gotten this disease now if you have this data on excel you can click here on ideas and excel will help you visualize it but instead of doing that what i'm going to do is we're going to switch the next part of our episode which is going to be about talking about visualizing data oops visualizing data and to do this we're going to bring on hannah hannah walden is going to join us and hannah is one of the top computer science teachers at code.org she's actually the author of the cs principles curriculum which is the most popular high school course in computer science and it's a wonderful course and in fact what she's going to be walking us through is going to be part of what students are going to do in that course later this year uh hannah are you there with us hi hottie can you hear me yep i can hear you but i didn't can you say hi again hello all right i think zoom may be acting up on us we may be having a bug sophia do you got your bug ready all right all right continue calling us from hannah so i am calling from maine and i am here with my daughter ava av you want to say hi hi hi ava how old are you i'm 17. so ava is my daughter she's joining me here in maine we are social distancing together here in our house and i'm going to try to pull up my screen for all of you right now how do you think if you stop sharing your screen i believe i've stopped you have yes yes zoom is uh crashing on my computer so that's a lot of fun right now all right so hottie what i think that we should do right now is if you could take over this i'd like you to show the model again on your screen and i'm going to reload zoom on my end and i will rejoin in just a minute all right all right well i'm gonna go into screen sharing again and so if you pull out your bug so what hannah's gonna do is basically bring us to to show the same excel spreadsheet that we created that showed the number of deaths and we add and the number of cases from a virus what we're going to do is we're going to take data that looks like this that has data from every state and from every country and we're going to make our own app that basically graphs the growth of the virus uh and hannah if you're not ready there if your computer's still crashing i can i'm ready honey i think we're here all right yeah there you are all right let's do this okay so i'm gonna share my screen here we go all right so we are looking at app lub right here and ava's gonna be my pair programming partner and we are going to program an app to visualize the data that hottie just showed so uh let's get started here i'm going to actually show what this app is doing right now it's partially working we're going to finish it up so as i click run it's loading and now we're going to pick a u.s state or territory to visualize ava where are we going to start let's do north carolina all right so we're going to do north carolina here we go and what's happening here ava what are we seeing so we're looking at the north carolina kevin 19 cases and deaths on any given day right so as i as i mouse over or i click on the line i can see the data points for any given day and now if i go to country and i choose a country ava what country should i choose the bahamas ooh nice and warm in the bahamas let's go there okay um but nothing's showing up ava why is that because we didn't add the chart we need to add the chart so if you remember from previous episodes we showed you that in design mode you can set up your app so i'm going to go to design mode now and ava's going to take over and show us how to add a chart to our app all right so to add a chart you can either drag over the chart button or to make things a lot easier you can click on the chart that you've already created and you can duplicate it and drag it down yeah all right i'm going to make my screen just a little bit wider so we can see things a little bit easier there we go okay so we've created a chart and now let's go code it so up at the top of the code this may look like a lot of code to you but what's happening here is this is starter code that is pulling in the spreadsheets that hottie just showed you so we've done the work for you and when we share out this app later with you you can take a look you can unpack all of these start web request blocks and read our comments and see how all this works but we've got it set up so that we can just focus down at this bottom part and set up things so we're going to go right down to the bottom and this is the area where we set up our charts so ava first we need to make sure that we're sending it to the right chart we're going to draw the correct chart so what do we need to do here we need to call chart two okay so we're gonna we're gonna draw chart two and right now it's set to be a bar chart what type of chart were we using we want a line chart all right so let's set a line chart and let's run it and here we go the data is loading once it's done it will swap to the next screen where we can visualize it here we go all right i have another another state let's do connecticut connecticut it is and one more country to france france okay and our app is working and this is an interesting app it helps us to compare different states different countries get that information but as i was hearing hadi and i was hearing bill gates talk about using computer science for good i was thinking about how we can use these visually visualizations as inspiration and what we can do now that we have this knowledge so i've been working on an app that i'd like to share with you now and this is the main kovad19 data app uh ava for those who don't know where is maine located so maine is in the northeast of the united states upper corner and it is very cold yes and in fact it snowed last night so a little colder yes it did so here we've got our app and it's got the same starter code up at the top we're loading our chart just like we did in the other app but now we have some new buttons down here that take us to helpful websites that will give us kind of interesting information that we can use then to help our community so i've got a button down here it says sewing masks for me if i click on this button it's going to take me to this website and on this website there's information about how to sew masks how to make them the correct way how to volunteer um and then hooking up with people who uh who need those masks um so ava tell me about your sewing skills um they're not very good okay so maybe this volunteer opportunity isn't isn't quite the right one for you but let's see if we can find another one so let's go back here and we're going to add another button here so ava can you walk me through how to do that all right so we're going to go to the home screen and you can select the sewing mac master remain and you can duplicate it all right so we're going to create a button that looks just like the other one so it looks nice and neat and what are we going to call it volunteer button okay so this is our volume tier button and what text is going to display we're going to display volunteer opportunities perfect all right so uh now we have our button all set and now where is that butt gonna go so i did a little research beforehand and i found a website called the main ready website and this website has all sorts of volunteer uh opportunities essential volunteer opportunities in maine so these are the volunteer opportunities that are safe to participate in that are essential for the state and good ways to get connected so again this is our local community we want to support them so i'm going to copy this url and go back here and now ava what am i going to do to program this button i'm going to need to create an on event all right so let's go over here to my toolbox i'm going to grab an on event and pop it in here okay and then you need to create the open link right first off i'm gonna make sure that we're connecting to the volunteer button yes and i'm gonna use the open block that's down here it's a yellow block in the ui controls drawer and i'm going to drag it over and here's how the open block works i have the command open and then over here i have a string where i'm going to put the url the website the web link that i'm going to go to the address so i going to copy paste that in there and now we're all set and we're ready to go one last thing actually let's actually change our chart up a little bit so i'm going to hit run just so we can see how things are set up i'm not going to test my button just yet but we're almost there so i've got a green line and a purple line here but what if i wanted to change the way my chart looks ava can you give me two other colors i could use orange okay and blue perfect that's some good colors okay we're gonna have some good contrast there that's a good good thing to think about when you're charting so i'm going to click run and let's look at this chart now the data is loading we don't want to visualize the chart before the data is ready here it is we have a nice orange line and a blue line very visible great and now i if i'm using this app i'm seeing the trend in my state and i'm ready to click on different links that will give me information what can i do now that i see the trends now that i know what's happening in my state what can i do about it so let's actually test out the button that we added but to do that what we're going to do instead of testing it here on the screen is i'm going to click the share button so all of you at home can test this out with us sophia are you ready with your phone too all right so i'm going to put up the qr code i'm going to make it nice and big you can scan that qr code ava's going to scan it all right and i'm going to take this down for just a minute stop screen sharing so i can show you ava's phone and on ava's phone it's loading the data right now a little hard to see there ava can we hold it up there okay [Music] so yep there we go thousands of people loading the data all at the same time so i don't know if that's making it any harder oh that's a very good point everybody's loading it all at once so it's a little bit slow but what will happen eventually uh is the data will load and we'll be taken to that screen and we'll be able to test our button so let's actually go back to the screen share so we can see that really quick before we close this out so i'm going to go back here i'm going to close this down same time as well and if i click on my volunteer opportunities button it's going to take me it's going to give me a message asking if i want to open that link and i do and it will take me right here so that's what should happen on your app as well when you load it so i would say give it another 10 minutes or so uh and give it another try and we'll see if that works so this app was made hannah said uh if you could stop screen sharing for a second what we're going to do for anybody who wants to get that app that hannah shared out we're going to email multiple apps and the spreadsheets for people to follow on as your challenge for this week you'll certainly get the two apps that hannah and ava showed for us one visualized visualize states and countries where you can change your state and country and one which you can customize to your own country or your own u.s state and you can put whatever you want on it the starter code we give you pulls that live chronovirus data from the spreadsheet that i showed earlier and we'll also send you a link to that spreadsheet so you can do your own modeling or visualization in the spreadsheet and then lastly we'll also send the code to the the the simulation that sophia made with the little sprites moving all around infecting each other and we're going to challenge you to create a busy model and simulate what would it be to add a vaccine on top of washing your hands or to model and simulate how social distancing would work to get every one of these assignments you want to go to code.org break and sign up there and each week we'll send you the assignments for that week so whether it's creating your custom coronavirus tracking app for your location whether it's modeling and simulating the data better any of those things you can get from there i also want to remind you again by the way parents who are out there please support us at code.org if you go to code.org help or if you click the help us button we want your help to support the work at code.org to keep computer science free and you can buy our hats which are very very cool as well before we close i also want to say two more things first of all please spread the word to other families the more people we have joining code.org the better the special guests we're going to have and in fact next week's special guest i'm going to announce ahead of time there's two of them but one of them is going to be vint cerf the actual inventor of the internet is going to be joining us on code break uh and what's particularly neat about vint cerf is he's a relatively older guy and he actually just caught the coronavirus he's been struggling with it throughout the month of april and he just recovered in time to join us on code break next week so that's going to be pretty cool to see uh to see the actual inventor of the internet um there's also another special guest that'll be joining him as well so we'll announce that in a few days um but that's it for today's episode let's switch to folks on camera i also want to say since we're on uh since we're here on zoom i wanted to say one cool thing we can do that's the benefit of the pandemic is when you're on zoom in it doesn't matter how you're dressed because we're all at home and i'm proud to say i spoke to bill gates in my pajama pants which of course bill didn't know uh but thank you everybody and let's wave hi to the camera as we close today's code break and see you next week if you're studying alone take a code break bye-bye everybody [Music] all right you

Channel: Code.org

Views: 49,214

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Id: fv5g9xw_jek

Length: 68min 57sec (4137 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020