Alice Steinglass Code.org expanding access to computer science

>> It was an 8086. At the time, 8086 was already out of date, but I had one. It wasn't until about senior year in high school when I realized what I could do with it. I have a little brother, and so I made it so that when he tried to log into the computer, it would just beep really loudly. And then it would put up this huge ASCII warning error that was like "Intruder, intruder." >> "Intruder alert. Intruder alert." >> "This intrusion has been logged." It wasn't actually logged, but it looks scary. >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind The Tech. I'm your host, Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft. In this podcast, we're going to get behind the tech. We'll talk with some of the people who made our modern tech world possible and understand what motivated them to create what they did. So, join me to maybe learn a little bit about the history of computing and get a few behind-the-scenes insights into what's happening today. Stick around. Today, I'm joined by my colleague, Christina Warren. Christina is Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft. Welcome, Christina. >> Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here and I'm excited to learn more about today's guest. >> Yes. So, we're having Alice Steinglass on the show today. Alice is the President of Code.org, which is an organization doing stuff that's super near and dear to my heart. So they are trying to teach every child how to program, and they partner with teachers in K through 12 across the country and increasingly across the globe to try to help make computer science a part of the K through 12 curriculum. >> You have a lot of similarities with Alice because you also have an organization that has a similar mission? >> Yeah, I do. So, one of the things that I've been trying to do, and like this podcast is a little bit of a reflection of that, is to show the truly diverse set of faces and tell the diverse set of stories that lead people into computing and what their careers look like. Because when I look around me and like I see all of the amazing people who are helping to build the technology that we all depend on, it's not this monolithic thing. There are just so many different folks, genders, and ethnicities, and folks who came from like their parents were college professors to folks like me who no one in their family went to college, and it was an interesting quirk that they ever found their way into computing. One of the things that we know both from my work, the Behind The Tech, and my family foundation is that the earlier that you set the spark of interest in a child and the more of the barriers you get out of their way to pursuing that is an interest and maybe ultimately as a career, like the happier, more successful they'll be. >> Definitely. I think a lot of people have an orthodox path into getting to tech. I got into it because I had that sheer force of will. >> Yeah. >> But I think about kids that I went to school with and if they'd had those opportunities that were accessible to them like the way that code.org is making things accessible now, how different things might be. >> Yeah. Sometimes your journey can be sensitive, so to speak. So, like one thing can completely change your path. Like with me, I was lucky enough to get into a science and technology high school when I was a senior. If I hadn't had that experience, I don't know what my career would have looked like, whether or not I would have chosen computer science as a major when I went to college or maybe even whether I went to college at all. So I think what that tells me is let's do everything humanly possible to expose kids to as many of these opportunities as possible. It's not that I think everybody should be a computer scientist, but you should at least have the opportunity. >> Definitely. >> Thanks for chatting, Christina. We'll reconnect later at the end of the show. Coming up next, Alice Steinglass. Alice is the president of Code.org. Her teams build curriculum tools and software to support introductory computer science classes for students from kindergarten through high school. They also partner with education and software companies across the industry to run the Hour of Code, a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in over 180 countries. Alice, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> So, one of the things that I would love to start with is your journey. So, how did you get into computing? >> I'm so lucky to be here, but my journey was not the journey that a lot of people had. I didn't play with computers from the time I was little. I didn't take them apart for fun. I actually got into computer science because my school taught it and- >> This is your high school? >> Yeah, my high school. I didn't really know what I was signing up for. I was into math, I was into other things. I said, "Okay, I'll try this. I hear you can make things with it." I took a class and I loved it. I had a final project, where I built a game called Snake, which similar to Tron what everybody built it back then. But I finished it, it was fun. I tested it, I tested it, and then my teacher ended up staying up like all night testing it and found out that the high score could go even higher. It broke if you had more than like five digits in the high score and I said, "How did you find that?" He said, "We were playing it all night." What other class do you get to make something where your teacher plays it all night? >> Yeah. So, was it the whole thing, was it the technical challenge of writing the code, was it the fact that you made something that someone was a little bit addicted to? >> I think it's all of that. I think for me it's like the best of Math and Art and English, and all of that put together. I always liked Math, but Math, most of the problems have an answer. There's no creativity. Here's a challenge, can you figure out how to find the tip-top of this curve or something? In computer science, it had that same logical backbone, but the problems were open-ended. You're never done with a project, and even in real world. When we're building software, we're never done with it. So, we're always making it better, you can always improve it, and there's this blank slate aspect where you can create something. I loved art, I love creating, and I think computer science is like creating both logic, and then it gets to move at the end, which is cool. >> Yeah. It's super cool. So, when did you get your first computer? >> When did I get my first computer? I had a computer when I was younger. I was lucky. My father's office was selling off cheap computers, older computers. So they sold them to the employees for I think it was like $50. He got me an old computer. >> Wow. >> It was an 8086. At the time, 8086 was already out of date, but I had one and it just sat in my room. I didn't code it. I didn't program it. I used it. I've wrote papers on it. It wasn't until about senior year in high school when I realized what I could do with it. Once I figured out computer science, I did go back and code it, but I'll have to tell you. So, one of the first programs I wrote for it, I had a little brother and I made it so that when he tried to log into the computer, it would just beep really loudly. And it would put up this huge ASCII warning error that was like, "Intruder, intruder." Then, of course, it named him because there's no other possible intruder in my house other than my brother. So it would say, "Seth, you were trying to break into this computer. This intrusion has been logged." It wasn't actually logged, but it looked scary. >> Yeah. This is the thing that really amazes and interests me about computing. There's this notion I think in the minds of a lot of people that there is one stereotypical path that you're like a nerdy teenage white boy and you get your machine when you're 13 years old, and you start writing your first code. This notion that you have to be a prodigy to get in to compute. But when I actually talk to people, everybody's story is so different. Anders Hejlsberg, who we interviewed in a previous episode, he didn't start coding until he was in college. So, some people early, some people late, and the motivations are all over the map. Some people just love the creative aspect, some people love the fact that they can make the machine do something. My kids love that. It's like, "Okay, I can tell the machine what to do. I can't tell mom and dad what to do, but the machine will listen to me." >> Yeah, absolutely. I think it was a little intimidating for a while because there's this language that goes around computers, and there's this barrier where you feel like if you don't speak the language then you probably can't learn computer science. But the truth is you absolutely can learn it, and the language is just a false barrier. I went to college. I heard all these guys talking about things like bulletin board systems in the '90s, and it was like a thing then. They were all on it, and I have never been on a BBS in my entire life. You think, "Okay, BBS is some technical world, and I can't possibly code if I don't know what a BBS is." It turns out that a BBS is just like Reddit, but in the '90s. >> Yeah. >> You absolutely don't need to use Reddit to do computer science. I mean, I love computer science. I love the logic. I love the challenges. I love building. But to this day, I still have not done BBSs, and it's okay. >> It's super okay. >> Right, and it's this language thing. It's this language barrier that just, it makes you feel like you can't but you absolutely can. >> Yeah. So, from your senior year where you took your first computer science course, what was next? >> So, I went to college and at that point, I was already into it. Actually, that's not just me, that's really common. What you see is that women who take AP Computer Science in high school are 10 times more likely to take it in college. That's one of the reasons we're fighting so hard to get computer science offered in high school is because it helps dispel these notions. It helps make you feel like you can do it. So, I went to college and I knew I wanted to take Computer Science. I majored in Computer Science in college. I did the typical startup on the side. >> What was your startup? >> It was dynamicfeedback.com. Yeah. We partnered with a professor who is doing management consulting and worked on how do you help people take 360-degree surveys to learn how to be better in the workplace. It was interesting, it was fun. Like everybody's first startup, we totally underestimated the amount of code that we need to get written to do what we thought we would need it to do, we worked all night. Part of it for me was the experience of learning that a company is more than just code. We had to figure out things like customer support and lawyers, and I had to find a space. >> Really unsexy stuff. >> Yeah. Where we actually go to sit. So, that was interesting. I ended up coming out to Microsoft after that and I worked on. >> How did you decide on Microsoft? What year was this? >> This was 2001. >> Okay. >> I was working on the first version of Xbox. >> So, super exciting. >> It was super exciting, and then I got to work on the first version of Xbox Live. What's weird is I'm not a hardcore gamer, but it was still a really interesting set of problems. I think, sometimes not being a hardcore gamer actually helped. I was working on the high score system for Xbox. I kept talking to people and everybody had a way we should do high scores. They have to work like this because they work like this is my favorite racing game. They have to work like this because they work this way in my favorite shooting game. Coming in as a neutral person I said, "No, I'm going to look at all the games and understand how high scores work across everything." I went and played 50 games and learned about how high scores worked in every game and talked to a lot of people, and then, designed a system to allow any game on Xbox to use the Xbox high-score system. So, it was interesting. >> Yeah. >> Interesting work. >> Did you have a course charted as you were going one thing to next? The reason I ask is, I think, everybody has such a different path through their career in computing, and they're all good and interesting. >> I think in retrospect, I could probably tell you a story. But the reality of it is that I think a lot of it is happenstance, a lot of it is you don't know. >> Yeah. >> You try something and you find out you like it or you don't. The one thing that I would recommend to young people who are starting their career is to try some different things. I think you can get stuck in one thing pretty easily and not even have a plan that that's what you're going to do you just end up doing it. The easiest time to switch and try some new things is in your 20s, when you're not an expert yet in one particular field. So, one of the things I did do was I tried different technologies. So, I worked in Xbox, I worked on Live, I worked on Services. I was in charge of all of the APIs for Xbox Live across the board, which is really interesting. I went from that to looking at the Toolchain that developers use and working on XNA before it was XNA. Then I went from there, I said, "What's the opposite of everything I've ever done?" Right. I've been working on more the APIs, I haven't touched enterprise software and enterprise services and I just want to know what the other side looks like. >> Yeah. >> So, I went to Office, I went over to Microsoft Project partially because it was just a very different space. I figured this was a good time to learn about a different space. I had a lot of people who thought it was the most insane thing they'd ever heard. Right. Why would anybody leave Xbox on purpose to go work on Project? But I actually found it really fascinating and interesting. Understanding about how do companies make purchases, and what does it mean to sell and to enterprise sales, and how do we make workplaces more efficient, and what is business software look like. I thought it was a really fascinating space. >> It sounds like one of the things that has driven a lot of your journey is just curiosity. You've explored a bunch different things, startups. >> Yeah. >> Ton of different things at Microsoft. Were you the kid that was taking all your mom's stuff apart, or asking five million questions? >> I mean, yes, but I think we all are. >> Yeah, you think so? >> Yeah, I think kids are naturally curious. I think we all want to learn. I think we all want to do that. I think there are barriers that hold us back, and some of those barriers can feel more real than they are, especially in tech. It's a booming space. There's a million jobs right now. Everybody's looking to hire. When I'm mentoring people I feel like talking to young people in tech. Sometimes they're afraid to make the choice, to try something new or to change. But, it's a false barrier they've put on themselves. >> One of the things that really strikes me about the industry over the past, let's just say, 10 or 15 years is, I think, in some ways we've gotten more complex. The number of programming languages, the number of frameworks, the whole ecosystem is just bigger. But, in a very real sense it's easier than it ever has been to go make something with code or with technology. When I was in college, folks had this notion like, "Oh, my God. Coding is so hard, you have to go get this degree, you have to practice." To get really great at anything, all that's true, but my kids can go make interesting things right now without a Computer Science degree because the tools that they have are so powerful. Is that something that you're seeing helping students get into computing? >> Absolutely. There's a level of relevance, right? >> Yeah. >> When I was a kid, I made a game from my calculator that was [inaudible] . I made a game and I also made it formula solver cheat sheet kind of thing. >> Right. >> But helped you with your physics formulas. This wasn't going to be the thing that took over America. >> Right. >> But it was popular, among all the students in my class. Right? I think there's the same thing today. We see kids making games. There are some of those things are just not that complicated, right? >> Yeah. >> So, students have the potential to make things that are definitely cool. They're not as complex as an Xbox game, but they're cool. But, you also see that there's a lot of space for things that are locally relevant. Some of these kids' apps, there's one with their teacher's face, you could feed the teacher ice cream, but the teacher got a kick out of it, and it's fun, and it's cute, and it's relevant in that classroom. It's relevant in that school, your friends are all going to try it out. I think it gives you a taste of something without having to be an amazing artist, just like anything else, there will be steps. >> Also, talk a little bit about what you do right now. So, you're the President of Code.org. So, tell us a little bit about what Code.org does. >> So, we build curriculum, we do professional development for teachers, we do advocacy work, but our goal is that every child should have the opportunity to take a computer science class in K12. I was shocked, especially from the tech industry. I was shocked to hear that most schools today don't teach computer science, and it's not even that most kids don't take it, it's their school doesn't teach it at all. So, even if they want to take it, they can't. This disproportionately affects students in high need schools. It disproportionately affects underrepresented minorities and women who are discouraged from taking these classes. And the result is that because they never get this introduction in K12, it's really hard to start after that. It's really hard to start in college. So they may never go into the field. And even if they go into another field, they don't have that background in computer science. So, our goal is that every school should offer this course, so that every child has an opportunity to take it. At this point, we're the most popular computer science platform curriculum in K12 in the country. About 25 percent of students actually have an account on Code.org. So, we're reaching a lot of students but there's a long way to go. >> Yeah. So, how early should we be teaching kids computer science? >> So, this is totally different from how I started, but our recommendation is actually to start in elementary school, and there's some good reasons for doing this. Let me start by talking about how we teach about biology today, because I think it's a really good analogy for how I think about computer science education. So, every child when they go to elementary school gets to learn that they have bones, they have a digestive system, just the basics of how does my body work. We don't do that because they're all going to be doctors or nurses or EMTs. We do that because they're going to live with that body for the rest of their lives and they should know how it works. When they go to middle school maybe they learn more about it. In high school, a kid can take Biology or AP Biology. Even after they take all of those courses, all the way through K12, they're still not qualified. I don't trust a high school student who's taken AP Bio to do anything to me. So, there's still more work if they want to be a professional in the field, whether it's a nurse or a technician or anything. Computer science is the same way. Every kid is going to be surrounded by technology their whole lives. We have our phones in our pockets, who knows where they're going to be when they grow up. The same way we get to know that we have a digestive system, they should understand, what is the Internet? What is the Cloud? What is data? How does this phone work? It's not a magic box that does magic magic. It's a computer, and what is a computer, right? These are just basics that should be part of our education system. >> Right. >> So, I think of it in a very analogous way. In K5, we get to teach the students, what are these things? What is technology? Then, when they get to middle school, maybe they take more. If they're interested, they can take an AP Computer Science class in high school, and at the end of that, they're still not a programmer. They're going to go on and take a two-year degree. They could take a four-year degree. They can become a lifelong computer scientist. But, no matter what they do in life, it's useful to know how computers work. >> Yeah. >> So, the same way we teach our kids how the body works, that's how we think about teaching it in elementary school. There's another reason to start so young, and that has to do with supporting diversity in computer science. What we see is that women tend to become less interested in the STEM fields around the middle school, early high school. In computer science, it's between about 12 and 14 when they lose interest. So, what we want to do is reach them before that year, so that while they're still interested in learning these things, we can show them what it is, so that if they're interested, they can keep going. So, there's a bunch of pieces here, part of it is encouraging them, thinking that they'll be good at it, getting that encouragement. If they're very confident in their ability to do it, they're four times more likely to go into computer science or take computer science classes than if they aren't. Girls, right now, oftentimes, they don't get this opportunity in elementary school, and so what happens is, when they're thinking about taking it in high school or middle school, they do it just based on the zeitgeist of what people tell them that they're going to be good at. >> Right. >> Right? Unfortunately, what we see is that they're often told they won't be good at computer science. Teachers are two and a half times more likely to tell a boy that he'll be good at computer science than a girl. And it's not because they're against it. These teachers are supportive, they care, it's just these cultural norms are embedded in our society. >> Well, and kids are also pretty good pattern matchers. One of the things that I've noticed disturbingly with my own kids, I've got a eight-year old and a 10-year old right now, and very, very early when they were three, four years old, they would look around at the world and start making these classification decisions. It's okay, this is a boy thing and this is a girl thing, and this is without anything in their household telling them that thing A and thing B has a gender association with it. It's just them sorting things out. One of the things I love about what you all are doing is there's this bootstrapping problem that I think you have to solve where we just need more three and four-year-old seeing seven and eight-year-olds being successful in a computer science curriculum, so it helps them decide to do that when they're just a few years older and up the entire stack. >> That's absolutely true, and you see it when you go into the classroom. So, you take a bunch of second graders. They don't have a stereotype yet that computer science is a boy thing. >> Yeah. >> Right? They're too young to think computer science is a boy thing. >> Yeah. They probably don't even know what computer science is, right? >> Right. They see like, "Hey we're going to make some stuff today," and they're so excited about it. Our classes, when you look at those elementary school classes, they're half female, the kids are all excited, they're super into it. We have a little tool at the end, what we call our funnel meter. They can give it a thumbs up, thumbs down at the end of every activity, and the girls actually give it higher funnel meter ratings than the boys do. The girls are into this and they're into it young, and so when we can get them before they've got those stereotypes, they can make a huge difference in terms of giving them the momentum to keep going afterward. I see the same thing you see with my own daughter. But, she's also excited about computer science because she doesn't see it as a boy thing. >> Yeah. >> Even if you look back in history, computer science used to be a female thing. >> Yes. >> It's just flipped, right? >> It's about from the very beginning, the first programmer was a woman. >> The first programmer was a woman, Ada Lovelace about 100 years ago, and then you look in the '50s, in the '40s, computers were women and computer science was a female, the stereotype would have been women. >> Yeah. >> Then, it's men, and we can get back to a place where it's both. We can get back to a place where we look at it and we say, "No, no, computer science, it's something that everybody does. There's no reason it's one or the other." But, it's not just teachers, it's also parents, it's social, it's friends. Let's say there's an after-school program, you can just see this. Mom says, "Oh, look, some after-school classes. Bobby, looks like there's a coding class after school on Thursdays. Do you want me to sign you up?" Right? "Emily, it looks like there's a dance class on Tuesdays, do you want me to sign you up?" It's so easy. They're not thinking about it. They're just trying to find activities for their kids. So, when we do it after school, what we see is that same skew where boys are more likely to get signed up after school for computer science. If we do it in school, we don't see that. So, that's why we want to start in elementary school. >> Yeah, which I think is awesome because sometimes when you're focusing later, it's just really, really hard. I had this friend call me up. He was like, "I'm trying to get my daughter to stay enrolled in her AP Computer Science class." She was a senior in high school then. She just didn't want to be in this class because she was the only girl in there. >> That's so hard. >> And this isn't Silicon Valley. >> Yeah. >> What wound up working was connecting her with a bunch of really successful women computer scientists, software engineers, who were having a really great time in their career. And she stayed in AP Computer Science class. She went off to university. She majored in Computer Science, dean's list student, is now in a professional, so she's a software engineer at a tech company. And that whole thing is hard to scale. What you would want to do is do that for everyone. But, it's so hard when you're starting later, whereas starting earlier you can maybe get to the point where just naturally you're not having a class full of boys in 12th grade in this AP Computer Science. >> Absolutely. We just hired a woman for our engineering team a couple of months ago who's studying computer science in college, was one of the only woman in her class, dropped out because she felt she didn't belong, but liked computer science. She liked it. She just didn't feel she should be in it because there weren't any other women in it, and finished college still regretted it. Still wanted to do computer science. Ended up doing night classes and side classes and learning it after work, eventually did a boot camp, learned computer science, moved into the career, worked as a computer scientist, and just recently joined our engineering team. >> That's awesome. >> But, you know that's the hard way. >> Yeah. That's the hard way. >> It would have been easier if she had just been able to stay in those classes in the first place. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Tell us a little bit about Hour of Code. >> So, Hour of Code has just become a phenomenon. It's exceeded our expectations. If you're not in school right now, you may not have heard of it. If you're in school, you probably have. It's like Earth Day, but for computer science. >> Yeah. >> It's a national holiday. I don't have the exact numbers or the number of which schools participate. But, as far as I can tell, everybody I talked to, their school seems to be doing it. >> I realized there was a bigger thing than I thought when Steph Curry was posting on LinkedIn about him doing his Hour of Code. >> Oh, yeah. Oh, hey, if you're into sports, then Steph Curry did it. If you're into other things, Barack Obama's done it, Justin Trudeau's done it, Dave Cameron, that we've had about eight world leaders who've participated. We've had musicians. We've had actors, actresses. But, I think the most important thing is the schools and the teachers are doing it. >> So, tell folks what the Hour of Code actually is. >> So, the idea is that I can tell you, until I'm blue in the face, that computer science is going to be fun, that you can do it. There's nothing like actually trying it. So, what we do is we get students and teachers to spend one hour trying computer science. We've built scaffolded activities that make it easy for beginners. In one hour, they can actually build something. You could actually build a little, mini game, something you can share and be able to say, "Hey, I did that," and you actually learned some computer science. I mean, you don't learn all of computer science, it's one hour, but you learn a concept or two. You might learn about if statements, you might learn about loops and how they work. So, the students get to try it, they get to try one hour. It's a great introduction. We did a survey last year looking at thousands of students before and after they tried the Hour of Code, and what we found was that it does increase the amount that they say, "Hey, I like computer science or I'm interested in computer science." But, was especially cool for me was that the group that was the most impacted by doing this was high school girls. High school girls were probably coming into it thinking, "Hey, this is not something that I'm into." They try it and then they're into it. At this point, we've had 500 million hours of code around the world and it's been in 180 countries, it's in 50 languages. It's a huge event every December. We do it for CS Education Week, and basically it's just a way to introduce students around the world to computer science- >> That's incredible. >> -by actually building something. >> Yeah. It's really incredible. >> Yeah. it's not just us, this is one of those things that we do in partnership with about 200 different companies and organizations that run it and do activities. Microsoft has partnered with us on the Minecraft Hour of Code for the last few years which is our most popular Hour of Code activity, and students and teachers love it. It's an opportunity to use these characters they're familiar with from Minecraft, but to learn computer science with them. >> So, what's the dream for Code.org? If you had a magic wand to wave over the world, and you can achieve whatever success you wanted to achieve, what does that look like? >> I think it looks like every child has the opportunity to learn computer science and that the students who are learning it look like the world. That the diversity matches, so that when we look at the workforce 20 years from now, whether somebody is in education or marketing or retail, they're going to be using computers. It's going to be a part of their lives and everybody gets to understand things like how the Internet works and how computers work. And that when we look at the tech workforce, that the students who are prepared to join this, that they look the population, and I get to look around and half my team is female. I want to state that we're working on one part of the problem, which is the K12 education. That won't solve the tech workforce by itself. There are definitely issues around hiring, retention, workforce bias, all of those other pieces which also need to be solved. But, I think if they we're working on one really important part of the problem. >> Yeah. >> We do need to bring more diversity into the tech workforce and I think education is critical. >> Yeah, I think it really is. The thing that keeps me up at night about our future is I just look at every year technology has a bigger and bigger impact on the world and the trajectory tells us that that's going to continue for the foreseeable future. And in a whole bunch of different ways you want as many people and as representative a set of people as possible participating in the creation of this technology. You want all perspectives, all backgrounds, all ethnicities, you want it to look like the world, which I think was beautiful way that you said it. But, you also want society at large to be well informed because a lot of the funky stuff that's going on today we're going to have to make an increasingly large number of decisions, policy for instance, in ethics and the laws that we pass and the regulations that are put into place to govern the intersection of society and technology. You want people super well informed when we're making those decisions, and you want them represented--it's like everybody. >> Absolutely. I mean, it's just critical that in this world, everybody has this opportunity. >> Yeah. >> At Code.org, what we do is we make it as easy as possible for schools to teach this. We offer free curriculum, we offer free professional development for these teachers, we help teachers who don't have a computer science background. >> Yeah. >> Because the teachers don't. I mean our schools don't teach it. They didn't learn it when they went to school. >> Yeah. >> So, giving the teachers the opportunity to learn to teach computer science. They're History teachers, English teachers, Math teachers. >> Learning to teach computer science, as you pointed out earlier, is different than even knowing computer science. >> Right. It is different. That's funny. We actually find that it's not the computer scientists make the best teachers of computer science. It's teachers teach computer science the best because they're good teachers. What we've found is that experienced teachers with no background in computer science make excellent computer science teachers because they know how to teach. >> Yeah. >> If we give them the tools and the resources and the curriculum, they're fantastic in the classroom, and their students do really well. So, that's what we're working on doing. I mean, these schools teach computer science. >> What are some ahas that you've seen over the past several years trying to teach computer science kids? >> Oh, there are so many. I'll give you a personal one to start out with. So, I came into this thinking I was a good computer science teacher, and it turned out surprise, surprise, I was not. I love teaching. I think a lot of people like me, they enjoy it. It's fun. I taught in college, I started a program to bring students into local schools to teach computer science. I was TA, I was a teacher, and I always got good reviews. I always got high scores on the which TAs are the best, which teachers are the best. So, I had this misimpression that I was good at teaching. It's been fascinating getting to work with a bunch of pedagogy experts on how do you actually teach because what it turned out was that I was entertaining in front of a room, which is different from being a good teacher. >> Yeah. >> So, when we teach networking, we have a thing called ABC CBV, which is you do the activity before the concept. >> Yeah. >> You do the concept before the vocabulary. It's not about a teacher standing in front of a room lecturing. It's about letting kids discover it on their own. The art of teaching is stepping back. It's doing less. It's not being entertaining. It's not being this person who's like super energetic, exciting person to watch. It's about crafting experiences where the student is going to get to figure it out without you being involved. Because if they figure it out themselves, they're going to remember it. So, let's say, we're teaching TCPIP. We pair them up and we say, "Hey, you guys got to figure out how to send some messages back and forth." We have this little software that lets them send these little packets of messages back and forth. But, our software is going to drop some of those packets on the ground. We're just going to lose them. We're also going to send some of them out of order because that's how the Internet works, and they've got to figure out, "Okay, I'm sending you messages, some of them come on out of order and some of them get dropped. How am I going to deal with this?" I don't care how they deal with it. Some of them will send five copies of the packet because there is going to be like, "Okay let's just keep sending them because they're going to keep dropping them." Some of them will number them, some of them will send back [inaudible] to say, "Yeah, I received or didn't receive your packet." It doesn't matter what method they come up with. The important part was that they really understood the problem because they tried to solve it. Then, after they've done that we say, "Okay, that thing that you just did, that's called a protocol." >> Yeah. >> The protocol the Internet uses is called TCPIP. Now, what did the teacher do in that whole lesson? They facilitated the communication with the students. They got the students paired up, they helped a student who was blocked get to that next step. But nowhere in that lesson that the teacher stand up in front of the room and draw a picture of TCPIP. >> Yeah. I've had similar sorts of problems with my kids and it was the same thing for me at my goal in life was to be a computer science professor from age 16 to 31 when I left academia. I taught undergrads for years, I taught grad students, and now I'm trying to teach a couple of really young children about these computer science concepts. And so I'm sitting down at a restaurant and teaching them about binary search, and that will give a total win. I think they got it right away because I made it into a guessing game. I'm going to teach you a trick for how you can get someone to play this guessing game with you where you can find the number that they guess between zero and 128 in seven steps or less. You know they're like, "This is great." But, then I wanted to teach them how to do search, and there are like these little things about teaching search that sort of hard. One of the things is, if you just take a bunch of numbers and write them down and say, "How would you sort these?" One of the things that's interesting is human beings can see all of the numbers at one time. So, they're cheating in a sense when they're imagining how they're sorting. And so I devised this thing where I could give them a bunch of blocks where the numbers on the blocks were covered up and, so they could go examine the number on the block one at a time, which is how the computer goes and does things. I just really realize that I was all kinds of wrong about how good I was going to be at teaching little children these computing concepts. >> Actually, the way you ended up doing it is very similar to how we do it in our class. So, what we do is we give the kids decks of cards. They're only allowed to lift two at a time to compare them because that's how a computer would do it. >> Yeah. >> They can't look at the cards when they flip on. They show him to the other student and the student says which one's bigger. >> Yeah. >> So, they get to pick two at a time and see, and then actually, one of the things that's cool about that and a lot of our lessons is they're not on a computer. They're actually using physical cards in the classroom. >> Yeah, which I think it's actually great. >> It's great. Yeah. Because you know when you say computer science, I think, sometimes people think, "Oh, it's all on a computer," and really about half of our lessons are off the computer, and it's about interacting with other students. It's about internalizing the concepts by working with the actual concepts and the logic outside of the context of the computer. >> Thank you so much for doing this work. I couldn't be a bigger fan and I think you guys are having an enormous and amazing impact on the world. Thank you for taking time to be on the show today. >> Oh, no, thank you, and thank you for Microsoft's support. >> Well, thanks for joining us on Behind the Tech. I'm back with my colleague, Christina Warren. Some of Alice's insights were pretty awesome. What stood out for you? >> So, one of the interesting things I thought about your conversation with Alice, and we talked about this a little bit before, was hearing her story and hearing about the atypical journey and how she got involved with technology. >> Yeah, I think there's an incredibly diverse set of folks in tech, just sort of based on the path that they took to get into the industry. I've had the great pleasure of being a computer science teacher and being an engineer and engineering leader for a really long time now, and have just come into contact with tons and tons and tons of engineers. Each one of their stories is a little bit different and some are sort of stereotypical image. But there are all sorts of other folks like Alice, who discovered computer science in their senior year of high school. There are some folks who discover it in college. There are some folks who actually go off and have a career in some completely different thing and decide that they want to get into computing later in their life or later in their career. The thing that I'm seeing now is that, it's increasingly easier to make those transitions because the tools and capabilities and sort of richness of our programming environments and the way that we build software just sort of allows more and more people to get bootstrapped more and more quickly. Part of that's a byproduct of the open source wave of software that we've been witnessing over the past three decades. >> Yeah, definitely. One of the things I love about code.org is that, even if the kids who are going through this programs, even if, say, they don't choose to study computer science in college, they still have that foundation. >> I think it's a really important thing that everyone in society understands a little bit about computing because computing and technology is having a bigger and bigger impact on all of our lives all of the time. So, being informed about some of that stuff and having an idea in your head about how things work is going to help you be a better citizen. >> I feel like that's the only way that our products get better is by having more diverse viewpoints and different types of people coming into doing things, because you never know what someone's perspective is going to bring. I love what code.org is doing in bringing more and more people into the fold and letting them know, "Hey, you can do this and it's fun." >> Yeah, tons of fun actually. But I have a biased opinion there. I think that whole pedagogical framework for teaching computer science to kids is really great. I think it's actually going to prove to be great not just for kids but for adults. When I was a lecturer at the University of Göttingen in Germany, I was teaching a class on programming languages and the theory of computation, and some of that is difficult material to teach. That certainly challenged my ability as a teacher especially because I was lecturing in English to a class full of non-native speaker. >> Yeah, I was going to say, so you're doing this in Germany, teaching English and then there are non-native speakers, although I guarantee that they understand English far better than I understand German, but still. >> That was always embarrassingly true for me. Their English was way better than my German. In some ways, it's a different challenge to really bring someone up from the ground to how do you get over this beginning set of conceptual hurdles so that you can then get into the computer science curriculum? By the time I got them, they knew sorting algorithms, they knew if-then-else statements and while loops and all of the basic things of how you construct a program. I think at least until I had kids of my own, I took for granted how difficult it is to teach the "quote unquote" simpler stuff. I think the lesson for me is appreciate my teachers even more than I already did. We should all appreciate those teachers who are out there loading knowledge into the heads of our future fellow citizens. >> Absolutely. >> Well, thank you so much, Christina. This has been a great conversation, and I look forward to being back with you again in the next episode. >> Me, too. Thanks so much. >> Next time on Behind the Tech, we'll talk with Andrew Ng, the co-founder of the Google Brain project, Coursera, and most recently, deeplearning.ai and Landing.ai. Andrew is one of the most influential leaders in AI and Deep Learning. Be sure to tell your friends about our new podcast, Behind the Tech, and to subscribe. See you next time.

#MicrosoftEDU Event Keynote

It was the tail end of the First World War in a remote and a rural part of India. My great grandfather who was a marginal farmer had just passed away leaving my great grandmother a young widow with two sons and no source of income. To provide for her sons and their future she had to move to a town nearby and make some difficult choices. She became a domestic servant, but still could only afford to send one of her sons to school. While the two boys were close in age, both in grade school, one was seen as being more responsible while the other was a bit of a troublemaker. My great grandmother opted to send the more responsible diligent son, viewed as having more potential, into the workforce. He became a day laborer at a construction site. He would continue in that field for the rest of his life, never given the opportunity to gain new skills and gain higher level employment. The other son was sent to the local school, and that boy was my grandfather. Despite being seen as being less responsible, he continued through school and eventually became a police officer. Despite entering the workforce nearly a decade after his brother, his starting salary was exponentially higher. It was my grandfather's education and the eventual career that enabled my father to pursue his own education, which eventually allowed me to follow my own passions. The opportunity my grandfather was given impacted the trajectories of the generations to come. This personal story reflects that often repeated adage. Talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Today's event is about education and technology. More specifically, it is about empowering the students of today to create the world of tomorrow. We live as an amazing time of technological progress. Every aspect of our lives, economies, and societies are being shaped by digital technologies. However, technology's also creating disruption. There is a growing concern over job growth, economic opportunity, and the world we are building for the next generation. The real question is how can technology create more opportunity, not for a few, but for all? Addressing that question is core to our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. This is not just a set of words for us, but something we care deeply about. Our success is measured by others success. Demarketising educational opportunity speaks directly to our mission. And it's one of the most pressing societal challenges. Technology can amplify the work of dedicated people and institutions but rarely can substitute for it. Kentaro Toyama, a former researcher at Microsoft and the author of the book, Geek Heresy, captures it best when he says, "That societal change requires more than just technology." Technocrats as term or reference to them have a tendency to extol the virtues of technology and view it as a remedy to all that ails the system. I'm here today as a heretic. We are under no illusion that technology alone is the answer to transforming education. Dedicated administrators, great teachers, motivated students, and involved parents and communities are the ones changing education. And technology is merely a tool to empower their creativity and their ingenuity. It is this opportunity that motivates our work in education and everything you'll see today. One of my favorite parts of the job is to be able to see and learn from the students all around the world. Over the past two years, I've had a chance to visit students from 20 plus countries, to see students in Jakarta and Tel Aviv use the same office tools that my daughters use in Seattle. How teachers in Tokyo and Madrid are using Minecraft to teach students computational thinking. How a group of young female students in Cairo were inspired to learn to code, and built an app to assist the Syrian refugees in their own community. I've been struck by the commonalities amongst the students. Their ingenuity, their thirst for learning. Diversity and dreams for future. As I've spent time visiting these classrooms, a few things stick out to me each time. First, technology should help not hinder teacher's work in the classroom. Teachers have constant demands on their time. They must create curriculum, grade tests, and papers, manage classrooms, discipline, educate, and inspire. Each time I leave a classroom the job of a teacher makes my job look easy in comparison. Technology should make teacher's lives simpler and spark student's creativity not distract from it. This is a top priority that we have focused on at Microsoft. Today you'll see how we're delivering an accessible, streamlined platform readily available to all classrooms. So, teachers spend less time focused on technology and more time doing what they love doing, inspiring students. Secondly, the nature of work is changing drastically. Much of work today happens in teams, within groups of people working together to solve a problem. Where the sum becomes greater than the parts. We need to prepare our students for this future. And enable team-based learning experiences in the classroom amongst groups of students, between students and teachers, between teachers and parents. What you will see today is how any classroom can promote learning through collaboration, hubs for teamwork, personalized learning tools, and the ability to co-create. By empowering students to learn together, their educational opportunities get better. Third, we must prepare our students for tomorrow. Consider the report from the world economic forums and the jobs report. An estimated 65% of the students entering school today will have jobs that do not yet exist. Teachers know this, and they are hungry to equip their students for this future. They know that computational thinking and problem-solving skills are key to the future. But they also know that they need to take a much broader view of STEM. By bringing STEM curriculum alongside reading, writing, design, and art, we'll set these students up for success in the future. Throughout today's presentation, we will show you new technologies designed to address these needs. And most importantly, how technology can empower students and teachers to enhance learning outcomes and create a world of tomorrow. Lastly, demarketising educational opportunity must be inclusive of everyone, not just a select few. To me, this is something that's deeply personal. This includes students with disabilities and different learning styles. They must be given an opportunity to pursue their own dreams. Dyslexia is estimated to impact one in five people. 72% of the classrooms have students with special learning needs. Reading is an essential competency and once a student falls far behind it's difficult to catch up. And it's not just about reading. You fall behind in every other subject area. This is something that we aim to address with the OneNote learning tools designed specifically to help students with dyslexia, but it can help students everywhere with their reading and writing skills. It's been incredible to hear the feedback from the teachers using this to teach emerging first-grade readers or from parents who have exhausted their options seeking help for their dyslexic children learning to read. Or how a teacher in Macedonia used the Learning Tools to teach young students English. We will take a look at how these Learning Tools and much more as Terry Myerson joins me today to share more of the news. To close, I want everyone to imagine the world we're building for tomorrow. Just as my grandfather's opportunity changed the trajectory of our family, this is what inspires me. How can we collectively come together to demarketise the educational opportunity for every student, both for this generation and the generations to come. Thank you all very, very much. - The true purpose of education is to create possibility. - Gone are the days where the teacher can stand up in front of the classroom and teach to the mythical middle. - When you have learners who might not be reading at grade level, technology plays a very pivotal role in the classroom. - A lot of my students have struggled for a long, long time. - It was a little hard for me. People laugh whenever I read sometimes. - I'll be nervous when I have to read out loud. - Well, they knew how to read, and I didn't. - Learning Tools not only reads to them but gives them a better ability to pick up the words on the page. - It highlights the words to know where I am. - When it's reading, I see spaces between the words. - And it's easy to focus on. - It helps me figure out big words. - With Learning Tools they have the ah-ha moment. The light bulb goes off. They feel empowered. - The first time I actually could read that book, I was proud of myself. - I was very proud of myself. - I want our students to experience success, and so if we can accelerate that, if we can bring them up to speed, that's what I want for them. - When technology and education come together, possibility becomes reality. - I want to read every book in here. - Those kids just inspire me, and their smiles remind me why we create what we do. The gift of technology is that it can make life easier, but the power of technology is how it can just awaken this human potential. And the biggest, raw, untapped, creative potential resides in our schools. The makers of tomorrow are sitting in the classrooms today. This is the next generation of creators who have embraced technology as their first language. The generation of problem solvers who naturally learn by creating, collaborating, and communicating with people all over the world. The generation of inventors who create with touch, command with their voice, and conceptualize in 3D. Our team just loves creating a medium that empowers other people to create. That ignites this creative impulse all around the world. That turns creativity into this force for positive change. And our mission with Windows is to create this platform that inspires this creativity in each of us. And we're so gratified that Windows 10 has been the global leader for devices chosen for K through 12 education. With twice as many Windows devices shipped in 2016 as any alternative. Teachers today are choosing Windows for the rich creativity inspiring applications like Autodesk SketchBook, Adobe Photoshop, Minecraft, and the rich Office 365 desktop applications which do so much more than the mobile apps available on other platforms. Teachers also choose Windows for all the things they can plug into Windows, including these amazing new STEM lesson plans with Legos and Arduino boards. Tools that enable accessibility for every student. Virtual reality headsets, interactive whiteboards, and more. But to understand how we could do more, our teams have traveled the world. We have talked to teachers on the front line, school principals, and superintendents, but most importantly the creators in the classroom. Because a complete solution for education must scale from classmate to classroom, from school-wide to district-wide, from system-wide to worldwide. The teachers were consistent. Young kids, sometimes they get distracted and don't always follow direction. They asked for Windows to be more resilient. So literally hundreds of kids interacting with each device during the school year. Maintaining the same great battery life, fast log in time, and overall performance on the first day of school as the last. Ricardo Garmendia from the Renton School District told us how he manages or supports 850 classrooms with 11,000 Windows devices in his school district. And he was overwhelmed with the ongoing of setup of new devices each summer. And the management of the current devices in the classroom all school year. So to give students, teachers, and administrators like Ricardo what they need we're taking a new approach. Simplify to magnify. Writers and storytellers cut for pacing and music you just still down to a single hook that can become the song of the summer. In sculpture, you chip away all the stone that doesn't look like David. In software, we code for elegance because simplicity is power. Well, I'm proud today to introduce you to Windows 10 S. It is streamlined for simplicity. It is secure. And it runs with superior performance. But I personally like to think of it as Windows 10 S, the soul of today's Windows. We've taken everything that teachers need, and millions of people love about Windows 10 and created a new Windows experience that's ideal for all of our creative endeavors inside and out of the classroom. Let me show you Windows 10 S. So, here I am running Windows 10 S on a Surface Book. Windows 10 S runs on the full range of Windows 10 hardware like this powerful Surface Book, but also the entry spec devices that we find in classrooms all over the world. Now, the first thing you'll notice about Windows 10 S is a new default desktop image. Just like we've streamlined Windows 10 to create Windows 10 S, the default desktop image on Windows 10 S has been streamlined and still beautiful. Now, everything that runs on Windows 10 S is downloaded from the Windows Store, which means first, it's verified for security and performance. But then when it's downloaded to the device it runs in this safe container to ensure that the execution of the application doesn't impact the overall performance of the rest of the system, allowing the performance of the device to be the same on day one as day 1,000 in use of the device. Now, there's many applications within the Windows store, but it's pretty exciting to announce today that the Office Suite, the full desktop applications, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and more will be coming soon to the Windows Store. Now I mentioned also that Windows have been chosen today for the peripherals, the things that teachers or students are plugging into Windows. Well, the full Windows peripheral ecosystem is available on Windows 10 S. We're seeing incredibly mixed reality headsets being created by our partners. I'm so excited to the classroom lesson plans that are being created to go with like Acer Virtual Reality headset here with this Surface Book. But some of the most exciting stuff that we're seeing plugged into Windows are these new lessons for STEM education. And so today what we're done here is I've downloaded from the store OBOT, which is this Arduino-based robot. You can see here what a student has done is programmed from scratch, visually programmed from scratch this lesson plan. - Hello, humans. I'm OBOT. Who is programming me today? Nice to meet you, Terry. I love working with kids to teach them how to code. I'm already being used in over 1,000 schools around the world today. I've got to say Windows 10 S looks pretty impressive so far. What else have you got to show us, Terry? - So, I mean I think down this showcase you'll see many more. There's just so many cool things that are being plugged into Windows 10 or Windows 10 S soon to enable these great STEM lesson plans. Now I've talked about how we've been listening to teachers and students to inspire Windows 10 S, but we've also been doing the same with Microsoft Edge. Now Windows 10 S will run any web browser in the Windows store, but with Microsoft Edge, it's inspired by teachers and students as well. So when recently we announced the ability to set aside tabs, what we were really doing at that time was thinking about how a student doing a research project would collect. Here's the tabs of the research I'm doing on the Solar System. Here's the tabs related to the research I'm doing on the Amazon Rainforest. Here's the tabs associated with my science research. When we add annotation to Edge, we're thinking about a scenario of a student doing his research, highlighting a section of a web page, circling a section that they really enjoy, and then sharing it with other teachers or students in the classroom they're doing their collaborative work for. So Microsoft Edge is increasingly more focused on being delightful for these teachers and students in the classroom. Now I mentioned every application that runs on Windows 10 S gets downloaded from the store. So what happens when a student tries to download something, not from the store? Here we've created this fictitious website Crazy Picture Editor, and I will try and download something and run it. When you do, Windows 10 S pops up this helpful dialog letting you know the application you just tried to run has not been verified for security and safety by Microsoft. What it does though is offer you applications in the store that do similar things. So here it's recommending instead of Crazy Picture Editor, Adobe Photoshop. Now if a teacher or an administration really wants to run that application from the store at any time they can go to that Windows store and switch the device from Windows 10 S to Windows 10 Pro, which would allow them to install that application. Now I mentioned maintaining consistent performance is so important in the classroom. The one scenario that's particularly important in the classroom is the first login of a student. In classrooms, we see these carts of 30 or more devices and students are coming in and out of the classroom, and they pick up a random device. And all the time it'll be the first time they login. And so we've been focused on that with Windows 10 S. So here I have two devices. A Windows 10 Pro device loaded up with several applications that are commonly found in the classroom. We have Google Chrome installed. Adobe Reader installed. McAfee Anti-virus installed. And that's it. And over here we have comparable applications running on Windows 10 S. And so maybe a student logging into this device for the very first time. And you'll see that the Windows 10 S device is going to log in for the very first time for this student in less than 15 seconds. This 10 Pro device will take 30, 40 seconds to log in. More applications would have it take even longer to log in. And so what this means in the classroom is the teacher can start teaching quicker. Doesn't have to keep the students focus waiting for a device to log in. So this first login performance is fantastic. Now if the student has been on this device before, every login after the first one on Windows 10 S will be less than 5 seconds. So, it's just great performance on that first login. Now, going back to the scenario Ricardo talked about, setting up new devices. This is a scenario many teachers think about during the summer or school districts are getting new devices all the time. So what we've done is we've created a new application called Set Up My School PCs. And what happens is a teacher or administrator goes into a wizard. They set up the wifi network for their school. Say these are gonna go for my math cart. Maybe set up a new desktop image with the school logo. Specify I'm setting up whether a single student device or a shared cart or a lab. Specify what applications they want on the device. Here we're recommending Office or Minecraft, but they're not there by default. A school chooses what they want. But the end of this process, what gets created is a USB key. And then what the teacher or administrator does is they collect all their classroom PCs. This is literally what we see happen in the classroom. And they'll take a PC in any state. This particular one is just out of the box. You plug in the USB key. It's detected by Windows. And in less than 30 seconds I'll be able to pull this USB key out of the device and move on to the next one. This system is configured completely per the spec that I put together through this wizard. There's a school in Colorado couple weeks ago decided to move to Windows 10 from Chromebooks, and using the Set Up My PC app they set up 600 PCs using 30 USB sticks in one day. So, it's a pretty incredible process to set up and configure a set of devices exactly how the teachers would like them to be. Now, the last step in our solution here is Intune for Education. I mentioned how Ricardo's got 11,000 PCs in his school district. So, what we've done is we've taken our enterprise systems management software, and we've customized it for schools. Intune now knows about carts and classrooms and knows about teachers versus students. And what an administrator can now do, you can see this is Intune for Education configured for two high schools, Contoso and Fabrikam. The teachers and students in each. And an administrator during the school year can go in and say, oh, in this classroom the students at this high school, for example, let's turn off the camera in that classroom. So all of the attributes in the devices that are in the school district, if they're connected to the Intune for Education, that can now be centrally managed with all the power of this rich enterprise management software we've had for years now customized for schools. So that's Windows 10 S. It's inspired by students and teachers. It runs full, rich applications that are secure and verified by Microsoft. It's easy to set up and manage. And it will have the same performance on the first day of school as the last. It really is the soul of today's Windows. Now the world benefits when all students all over the planet have access to this latest technology. Windows achieves this scale through our partners both our OEMs and software developers globally. And our goals with Windows 10 S is to develop the same vibrant partner-centric ecosystem we have today. Our partners, including Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Samsung, and Toshiba offer a range of new education ... Windows 10 PCs for education today starting at only $189. These partners will offer these devices and new, beautiful, premium devices with Windows 10 S in the coming months. But I'm excited to announce more. All of these new education devices will now come with a free one-year subscription to Minecraft Education Edition. And we are making Windows 10 S free for all schools on any of their current Windows Pro PCs. And that Office 365 for Education is also free for teachers and students worldwide. And, today, Microsoft Intune for Education becomes broadly available for administrators worldwide. So, Windows 10 S devices, Office 365, and Minecraft, this is our complete solution for education. And all of it will be available this summer, ready for the new school year. So, on top of Windows 10 S now we want to show you some incredible education experiences. First, we've created a natural way to foster collaboration and encourage creativity in every classroom of every school with Microsoft Teams and Office 365. Then we have Minecraft. What continues to amaze me about Minecraft is that this is a video game that has become such an important learning tool to teach teamwork, logical thinking, and problem-solving. And then we have to take a look at mixed reality, and how it's just this magical teaching and learning environment. Over the past five years I've been fortunate enough to experience battling aliens, fixing a Japan Airlines jet engine, and even walking on Mars with NASA, but when I see how it is bringing a whole new dimension to teaching and learning it really makes me think how awesome it would be to be a student again. So, let's start with Microsoft Teams. Please welcome Catherine. - Good morning, everybody. As Sachi has shared, we believe that education unlocks potential. And that technology can empower teachers and students to create the world of tomorrow. With over 100 million active users, Office 365 empowers individuals, teams, and organizations to communicate and collaborate every day. And Office 365 for Education builds on this rich foundation to offer the broadest and deepest toolkit for content creation, personalized learning, and modern classroom collaboration. So to share some ways that Office 365 is used in today's classroom, it's my privilege to welcome Anthony Newbold, the principal at Bear Creek Middle School in Fairburn, Georgia. Good morning. - Thank you, Catherine. - Absolutely. - Good morning. 18 years ago I started my education career right across the river in Patterson, New Jersey. And in that time, I've served as a teacher and an administrator. And over the years I've watched as education has matured and grown in amazing ways. Now, teachers are instrumental in any classroom with technology. They can engage and improve their students learning experiences. - Now, Anthony, I've had the opportunity to hear how you use Office 365 at Bear Creek. Can you give some examples? - Absolutely. Now as you all saw in the video, we use Learning Tools at Bear Creek. And it's impressive to see how many students are taking more academic risk now that they're feeling more comfortable with reading. Students also improved their writing skills by using tools such as Editor and Researcher in Word. And as usual, PowerPoint is a pretty popular presentation tool. Now we also use OneNote Class Notebook as a digital binder in the classroom. Our art teacher, Mr. Smith, has students capture their artwork, and now they have a digital portfolio. Ms. Thompson, one of our history teachers, you saw her in the video. She encourages her students to share their digital class notes with their peers. And Dr. Prewitt, a physical science teacher, encourages her students to review their Cornell notes right before any exam. So we're seeing some great results already with Office 365, and I can't wait to see how some of the technology we're gonna hear about today is gonna impact student achievement. - That sounds great. I loved hearing the stories of how you use Office 365 in your classrooms at Bear Creek. But are you ready for what's next? - Let's do it. - All right. So, in March we launched Microsoft Teams, a chat-based workspace as the newest addition to Office 365. And today I'm proud to announce new classroom experiences as part of Microsoft Teams. These new features will make it the digital hub for teachers and students. Teams will help teachers with their daily activities and will help students prepare for the future. So, let's take a look. On the left ... This is Microsoft Teams. On the left, you'll see all the classes that a teacher is responsible for, and project groups that they assign to their students. In addition, all of these are set up automatically at the start of a school year including the student roster and always kept up to date. And teachers can communicate with their students and collaborate, but they can also collaborate with their peers. Down below you see that Bear Creek Middle School staff section right there. Up at the top, you'll notice the tabs. This provides easy access to information that teachers and students need like files, the OneNote Class Notebook, assignments, quizzes, and more. And teachers can customize these tabs for their class or a project group making sure the students have what they need anywhere, anytime. And the magic happens in the conversation. And that's in the center. This provides a persistent, rich interaction between the teacher and the students so they can learn, they can read, they can interact real-time in the classroom or at home when they're studying for that last minute test. And what's great is if a student misses a few days or joins mid-semester, they have all the recorded conversation and content that they need to have context. So, Anthony, you've had some opportunity to get a sneak peak on Teams. Can you talk a bit about how you see using it in your classrooms? - Absolutely. So there are so many learning resources beyond the four walls of your typical classroom, but because of cost and time, we can't always bring them into the classroom. It's easy with Microsoft Teams to connect to more of those external learning resources. So, for example, I can introduce a new unit to my World History class by bringing in an anthropologist into the classroom with a video call. This enables students to interact with a professional, and seek the information that matters most to them. But the real beauty of this is now students can question and engage each other versus just simply reading it out of a textbook or online from an article. Engaging students in the class discussion is a challenge. Now some students are gonna be shy. Others may be what we call overly spirited if you will. The students will love this tool. So I have a 13-year old daughter, and I watch her text, and I know how she uses emojis. So now the students can bring in emojis, stickers, and GIFs. As a result, we can get more students involved as you see here in the conversation tab. Now in this particular tab, I'm happy to see that all of the students use proper chat etiquette. But if they didn't, it's okay. I'll use that as what we refer to as a teachable moment. And I have complete control. I can delete a message. I can mute a student or the entire class if need be. And in this conversation you'll see Polly. Now Polly is this pretty cool polling bot, so I can create a poll. And now I can facilitate student engagement in exciting new ways. Teachers can tailor their class experience and add some interesting apps from Microsoft and some of our favorite edu apps. And that provides fun, dynamic, and informative tools for teachers and students. Now every student has choice and voice on how they choose to engage in the classroom. If you talk to any teacher, they'll tell you that once they grab a students attention the lessons and the content come alive, and ignite deeper learning. Now as educators we must focus on preparing our students for their future. And to that end collaboration and communication are key. Now on top of learning the new material, developing and honing those collaboration skills is something that we can model in our assignments. As a part of this class, I've broken them up into various groups to work on a project. So, let's take a look and see how they're doing. So I see here that this particular group has already started on some different aspects of the project. They seem to have some questions here, so let's go in and take a look at their document to see how they're coming along. So it appears here that I have a couple of students who are already working on this right now. You can see it in real time. The students can also see each other's changes in real-time no matter where they are physically. Now even though this particular group chose to Word for their online assignment, other tools like Excel and PowerPoint also have those co-authoring capabilities. As I continue to scan through this particular document, I see that they're missing one key cultural aspect of government. Now I can go back to the conversation thread and provide feedback with an at mention. Once I do that, every student instantly receives notification. And now they have the confidence and information they need to keep moving forward. But the rich, persistent conversation experience in Teams takes classroom collaboration to a whole new level. This group, for instance, is on a video call. Everyone knows that in today's busy world it's often challenging to get students together in one place. Although they seem to message each other all the time, sometimes that face to face interaction is absolutely necessary. Hey, guys. I love how naturally the students can now work together with Microsoft Teams. And if you will, I'd like to share with you just one more thing today. Because we're also using OneNote, students can even review concepts that were previously taught. So, you see here I posted a map that I used to teach a lesson in class. So if a student is absent, they can just go back, hit play, and the steps that I took while teaching the lesson are instantly revealed to them. It's metacognition. And that's some teacher talk for ensuring that the students understand the process of getting to the answer. My favorite, my greatest gratification is when students are achieving their learning goals and acquiring those life skills. But what really hits home is how I can redefine what a classroom means for my teachers and students. Office 365 for Education now with Microsoft Teams brings in resources from around the world providing the students with anytime, anywhere access to the skills that I know that they will need to be successful in their future. - So, Anthony just shared how Microsoft is helping redefine classroom collaboration. These new classroom experiences for teams are available today in private preview and will launch worldwide this summer. Thank you so much, Anthony for sharing how you use Office 365 in your classroom. You're an amazing principal and an inspiration. - Thank you. - Thank you. So we just talked about engaging students as part of the modern collaborative classroom. Another way teachers are sparking their student's creativity is by learning by doing. And at Microsoft, we've been running pop-up STEM classrooms for the past year with thousands of educators around the world. We've built standards aligned STEM lesson plans that are targeted to middle school students, and are available to download for free. These STEM projects use everyday objects like paper cups, straws, and string to make sure that learning is affordable and accessible to everyone. For example, this sensorized glove project has students use copper tape, Velostat, and cardboard to make a flex sensor for a quarter. 25 cents. And after completely the sensor, students can control a robotic finger made from a straw. And stream live data into Excel that measures the flexion and extension of their finger. How cool is that? By mastering these skills, students can use their imagination and creativity to make something of their own driven simply by their passion. Like this dragon designed by students from Rosehill Middle School. Building on our experience with the National PTA, today we're excited to announce that starting this Saturday, for the month of May, we'll bring these pop-up STEM classroom experiences to the Microsoft Stores across the country. And this summer, we'll host STEM summer camp programs at select Microsoft Stores. So this was just one example of how students can bring their creativity into the classroom. And now let's explore how learning by doing sparks creativity in the virtual world of Minecraft. So, please join me in welcoming Deirdre to talk about it. - Hello. I know some of you remember the very first video game you finished. Mine was Super Mario Brothers. I was 11, but I can still hear that music and feel the controller in my hands. My best friend and I played every day after school for months learning how to defeat each enemy, memorizing the timing and how to solve each puzzle. We basically created a study guide from what we were learning so that we could solve the last level. And what I can see now is that we were learning as we played. Now I think about this experience when I see students and educators using Minecraft in schools. Minecraft is already transforming how people teach and learn. Minecraft has over 100 million players worldwide. And today, just a few months after launching, schools in over 100 countries are using Minecraft Education Edition. Teachers have created hundreds of lesson plans to show the potential for Minecraft in any lesson. In fact, one of the very first lessons shared with us was from a teacher named Simon in the U.K. He was using Minecraft with his middle school students. He asked them to create a Mars habitat in Minecraft. The students got started right away planning what humans would need to survive on Mars. And like Matt Damon's character in The Martian, solving the problem of how to grow food in a Martian landscape and using math to manage their resources. When I visit classrooms like Simon's, I see players debating, negotiating, and working together. Educators like Simon are amazed and encouraged by the level of student engagement when they use Minecraft, and how it opens up creative exploration across the curriculum. So, how can Minecraft make a difference with computer science education? I first learned coding when I was nine. And later was one of just two girls in my AP computer science class in high school. 25 years later, the way that we teach coding has barely changed, and women make up less than 20% of professional software engineers. Efforts like code.org's Hour of Code and the USCS initiative have made huge strides breaking down the barriers and showing the power of computing to solve problems. And games are playing an important role too. The Minecraft Hour of Code tutorials on code.org have passed over 50 million play sessions with students and educators around the world. So it makes sense that one of the top requests that my team hears is a growing urgency from educators and from school leaders to inject technology into their curriculum, specifically computer science and coding. So that's why today I'm proud to announce Code Builder for Minecraft Education Edition. Code Builder is a new Minecraft extension that lets players build, move around, and create in Minecraft by writing code. Let me show you how it works. You're gonna write code today to search for water on Mars. Let's start with the Mars exploration world from Simon's class. We're gonna enter right into the world, and you can see the habitat they built and their interpretation of a Martian landscape. Once we go inside Minecraft, you can start Code Builder just by typing slash code. With that, you can connect to popular learn to code packages like Tynker and ScratchX from MIT, or you can even add your own service. Today you're gonna use Tynker, which has custom blocks and commands that are connected to Minecraft. Now back in Minecraft, you're gonna see your agent or a sidekick appears to execute the code that you write. Students really love the agent. It's a great way for them to get started. Make that experience even more personal. In Tynker you drag and drop blocks of code to create a tunnel program that moves the agent and digs down to discover what's beneath the surface. In this example, we're gonna use the agent to dig a tunnel outside so that we're safe from the elements on Mars. But Minecraft players out there can imagine dozens of uses for programming the agent like mining all night or building a lit path to your farm while you work on your house. So here the agent's gone to work running code. Digging down and identifying the resources that are underground. If you're more experienced, you can even switch from blocks to Javascript and run code without the agent to go even faster. Using Code Builder students will be able to create some really cool stuff. And like my own experience with Super Mario Brothers, they'll be learning as they play. Let's hear from someone who's seen this firsthand. A high school STEM teacher who runs a girl's coding workshop was recently selected as a PBS digital innovator and has been working with her students with Code Builder and Minecraft for the past few months. Please join me in welcoming Melissa Wrenchey. - Hi, Deirdre. - Hi, Melissa. So, tell us about your experience with Minecraft and Code Builder. - You know what's cool? I'm working on a project with my language arts teacher. She wanted a better simulation tool than she had had before. She wanted her students to actually get in and build it. So, here you're looking at Shakespeare's time, you're looking at the Globe Theater. So most people can look at a simulation, but instead what we're going to do is have students actually build the Globe Theater and set the stage for this. So, you have your balconies here. You have the Groundlings area. So what we'll have happen is students are going to actually be building currently the Globe Theater itself. You're also gonna set the stage with what this place look like. So, there's gonna be some houses that are gonna be built for the patrons because those were typically nicer. And then you're also going to have the Code Builder's going to build the homes for the people that they were called the Groundlings. So you're setting that stage for what it was like in Shakespeare's time. There's more examples here. So, for instance, here you're watching the agent is actually 3D printing a windmill. You see the finished project here, but here it is checking X, Y, and Z coordinates for building that automatically. And then finally we'll go to our last example here. There's your two agents that Deirdre talked about earlier. And the two agents are building, in this case, the Parthenon. So imagine what you have here is a column. There's 70 columns that are needing to be built for the Parthenon. So, what you can do here is actually have the agent create one column, and then use a loop to actually build the rest of the columns. So, it's perfect example of using algorithmic thinking. - Thank you so much for showing those examples. Does anyone every ask you how you can use Minecraft in your classroom? - I do, I get that a lot. But I would always point them to our Minecraft mentors. They do a great job of writing resources that they've been using. Lesson plans. There's the website to go to. And things that have been successful for them. They're really helpful with a lot of questions. And the last piece I would point out to you is that computational thinking piece we talk about. It's computer science, and this Code Builder does a great job of teaching those concepts. - Great. Thank you so much for being here and showing those examples from your class, Melissa. - Thanks. - When I look at those examples, what these students are creating, and I think about my own experience developing some pretty great problem solving and study skills in Super Mario Brothers, and I look at my two daughters today, I feel a real sense of urgency to put these tools in the hands of educators and students. From the 50 million Hour of Code sessions, and the examples from Simon and Melissa, we know it's engaging. We know it's working. And we know it's reaching both boys and girls. How cool is it that my daughters could build and fly through the Parthenon or program a virtual 3D printer in Minecraft? And how different from the way coding's been taught for more than 25 years? I know that with tools like this we can inspire the next generation of creators, leaders, and innovators. Starting today, you can give Code Builder a try with a free trial of Minecraft Education Edition, and the brand new beta of Code Builder. Both available for schools right now at education.minecraft.net. Next, I'm going to introduce Megan who will talk more about the potential for 3D and mixed reality in education. Thank you. - Good morning. My name is Megan Saunders, and I lead our initiative around 3D for everyone at Microsoft. And I'm so excited to talk to you today about the magic of 3D, mixed reality, and education. Now, as humans, we learn from the real world around us. We learn by reading, by experiencing things first hands, and by doing. It's part of who we are. But today we not only learn from the real world, we also have created new ways to learn with technology. We can see kids create in rich 3D worlds like Minecraft. There they can bring their ideas to life, and they can creatively explore, and problem solve right in the moment. So, how do we bring the benefit of our real world and this digital world together? We call this mixed reality. And mixed reality begins with 3D content. Now research tells us that 3D improves attention span, engagement, motivation, and overall academic performance. And my personal favorite, girls enroll in math and science classes at a much higher rate after taking a course in 3D. So today we're gonna show you a number of demos that highlight some of the benefits of 3D in and out of the classroom. Now schools have different access to different resources. So we're gonna show you a wide range of tools that educators can use. So I'm very excited now to introduce you to Amy from our development team who is going to help us on this next set of demos. - Megan. Let's get started in Microsoft Teams. Here students have a new assignment around little-known space facts. And there are a lot of questions around when eclipses happen, so I'm gonna use Paint 3D and PowerPoint to bring the idea of eclipses to life. Paint 3D is free in Windows 10 and is one of the easiest ways to create in 3D. Here, teachers can create classroom boards and stock them full of models for their students to use in their projects. Now I'm gonna build the Solar System. So, the first thing I need is the sun. Drop it in. Then I'll go back to the board and add the Earth and the Moon. Just scale them down. Now, let's make our sun a little more realistic. Here in the stickers tab I can add any 2D image from my PC and create a custom sticker just like a texture. I've already added this lava sticker, and we'll go ahead and place it on the sun. Stick it on. Nice. Okay, now we just want to line everything up. So, we'll grab the Earth and the Moon. Move them into position, and because we're working in 3D, I can move back and forth in space. Great. So the Moon travels around the Earth every 29 days. And based on this tapped down view, you'd think that we would have eclipses every month. But as soon as we change our perspective, you can see that the Moon's orbit is actually tilted. So it's not causing an eclipse. Now that we've used Paint 3D to see why we don't have eclipses every month let's finish this project in PowerPoint and see when they do happen. Coming this fall, adding 3D models to your slides in PowerPoint will be as easy as adding a 2D image. All you'll do is go to insert, 3D models. Grab the model we just finished in Paint 3D, and drop it in. Now, I'm not an animator by any means, but PowerPoint will actually animate my 3D objects for me. All I'll do is duplicate the slide, select the model, rotate it to show the tilt. Just about there. And then go to transitions and apply the morph transition. Nice. Okay. I finished the entire presentation earlier, so let's go ahead and take a look at it. Here we go. Because of the Moon's orbital tilt, we don't have eclipses every month. But let's fast forward three months. Now the Moon's orbit will align with the sun and the Earth to block the sunlight and cause a total solar eclipse. The next time this is going to happen is on August 21st when an eclipse will travel across the United States from the West to the East Coast. Thank you. - That was a great presentation, Amy. So we just saw how Amy could simplify a complex learning point using 3D with Paint 3D and Office. Let's extend on that concept. The class is working on another project around the Curiosity rover, and the teacher has just loaded a model of the Curiosity from NASA's website to Microsoft Teams. - I've actually already downloaded the model, and I've got it open over here. Now, most people think that the Curiosity is about the size of a small lawnmower. In this view, I can spin it around, see it from a couple different angles, but I can't really get a sense of its size. - Now, Amy is showing us how we can see 3D content in our screen, but I'm excited to announce a new feature coming to Windows 10 this fall that allows you to view 3D content through your screen. Kind of like a magic window. We call this new feature View Mixed Reality. Now, this feature is not only available on what Amy is showing today, but it's gonna be available in a wide range of experiences. Okay. So, Amy, I'm 5'11". How big is the Curiosity? - Let's find out. You could head towards the back of the stage. - Okay. - I'm gonna drop the rover right next to you. - Like about here? - Perfect. - Okay. - Okay, here we go. Nice. Let's capture this. Yeah. At seven feet tall and nearly 2,000 pounds, it's pretty unbelievable that we've landed this on Mars. - With View Mixed Reality, we can bring this rover that was over 250 million miles away right into the classroom, giving us this unique perspective to understand the Curiosity's scale and size in the relation to the world around us. In this case, me. Now, here's the good news. All of this can be done on any classroom Windows 10 PC that just has a simple RGB camera. Even a plugged in web cam will work. And it's free. So we just saw some examples of how we could simplify the complex using mixed reality, but let's pivot and see how we can learn through experience. Now, field trips are a great way to enable experiential learning. But not all schools can offer as many field trips as they would like. But with Windows Mixed Reality devices we can bring those field trips right into the classroom. Now, Amy's going to be using one of these new affordable headsets to take us on a trip into the future far, far away. Guess where we're going? Yep. We're going to explore space. - I'm looking at the Solar System in a way that used to be impossible. In textbooks, the eight planets are usually shown in a straight line, but in this immersive view I can actually move around and get a sense for how they're spread across space. - Now, these types of applications can be really rich for self-guided learning. Not only can Amy explore our Solar System, but she can travel through time. And in this case, into the future where the year is 2492. Now, this will be the next time that the eight major planets are in closest proximity to one another. The last time this happened was about 1,000 years ago. - Zooming in I can see how the planets will look when they're grouped closer together 500 years from now. What a cool way to learn about space. - It's this type of immersive education that can enable any student to explore the world or even the galaxy without even leaving the classroom. Thank you, Amy. - Thanks, Megan. - We are so excited about the opportunity for 3D and mixed reality and learning, and we're not the only ones. Pearson, one of the largest education company's in the world, has just begun to integrate 3D and mixed reality into their secondary and university level curriculum. They're gonna be offering courses in commerce, history, health, and STEM. So, in the school year 2018, any student can take any one of these courses on any Windows Mixed Reality device. Yes, it's good. Wow. I heard a wow. It's great. Because this is the future of learning. So, let's take a look at that future curriculum with Microsoft HoloLens. - I was tired of preparing kids for yesterday. You're always preparing kids for this world that didn't really exist anymore, and it wasn't going to exist when they graduated. And I wanted to get my kids to the point where they could actually build the future. - We've seen a fundamental shift already in how a lot of educational resources are being delivered. We've seen a shift from print books through to ebooks. And I think the next evolution of that is from books to mixed reality. - As I started preparing my lectures and thinking how I'm gonna communicate this to the students, one thing I wished is I had a 3D chalkboard. - You actually have all these tools that allow students to generate content for other students, which means that you could have students that are subject matter experts informing the development of experiences to help teach content that they're learning about in their other classes. And that's just amazing. - With the HoloLens our idea for an app was if you didn't have access to all different instruments, you could learn them. I feel like being able to interact with something is what makes you remember it more. - I'm a visual learner. I'm someone who learns by experiences as opposed to just reading it out of a book. And so having the HoloLens put that visual in front of you makes things much easier. - We could use mixed reality for agriculture. - Science classes. - Geography. - Math would be a big one. - It provides a much more engaging experience for students, and that's the ultimate goal for a teacher is to engage the students and have them learning. - From 3D in your screen to the world is your screen, mixed reality is the future, and it's available today. We have a wide range of tools for educators that they can use to create curriculum for their students and peers. From Paint 3D and Office to View Mixed Reality to those immersive Windows Mixed Reality headsets coming this holiday starting at 299. With 3D and mixed reality and Windows 10, any student can simplify the complex, can creativity learn through experience, and can gain new understanding by bridging their digital and physical worlds. Creativity leads to learning. Learning leads to innovation and the future. Thank you. - Our aim is to unleash the creative potential of hundreds of millions of next generation creators. Whether they paint by colors or numbers, sculpt in 3D or code, design new worlds or buildings, compose symphony's of music or science, create ideas or possibilities. However, they choose to create we are building Microsoft Education for each of them. We want Windows 10, Office 365, Minecraft, and Mixed Reality to be the place for creators in the classroom to create, learn, and play. But our commitment to education goes further. We've focused so far today on how we seek to inspire students from kindergarten through to twelfth grade. But Windows 10 S will also be great for higher education students. And when I think about the right device for them only one thing comes to mind. The most soulful expression of Windows needs to run on the most soulful expression of a Windows device. Please welcome Panos. - So cool. What a day, right? It's been crazy. It's so incredible. This day of learning, it brings us inspiration when you think about teachers and students and how that all comes together. For me, in planning this event, it pushed me very hard to think what are those moments? What are those most impactful moments in my life? Those moments where I was learning most or where the teachings were coming to life. And it really pulled me back. It pulled me all the way back to the teaching I would get from my dad, which is such an important part of my life. Now check this out. That's my dad. Hopefully, you look at this picture, and you go, "Hey, that's his dad." Right? I look at the picture, and I go look at my blue leisure suit because it's pretty hot. And then I wonder why they continuously dressed my brother and I the same way. That happened for years, and it was awful. Anyway. So, now that I'm done with my therapy. My dad was an engineer. He was a hardware engineer. He was a guy that he wanted to put things together with his hands. He wanted to take them apart. He wanted to learn how they worked. And that was a big deal. When I was growing up, my dad and I shared a room. It was my bedroom, and it was his office. And that was special to me. That was special for many years of my life because his desk was in my room. And my mom would put me to bed at night, and that was awesome, and I'd pretend I was asleep, and I'd lay there. And maybe 30 minutes or an hour later my dad would come in. He was relentless. He'd come in every night, and he'd go to work. And I would creep out of bed, and I would go sit next to him. And he let that happen. I don't think we ever told my mom because I'm like, "Hey, Dad, do we have a picture?" And he's like, "No, we never told your mom." Those were the moments that you can pull all the way back to from a learning standpoint. He used to teach me. We would hand build TVs together. And he would teach me. I was six, seven, eight, nine. It took us a long time, but he would talk about every single detail and how it mattered. And then if you got it wrong, you had to do it again. And you had to do it again, and then again. But it mattered that you didn't miss anything because if you put everything you had into this product, then you were gonna get everything that you wanted out of it. And he would say it. He'd say it to me. "When we watch this TV you're gonna love this TV better than any other one." Because I'd ask Dad, "Why don't we just buy a TV?" If I only knew what he was teaching me back then. Because right now I'm reminded of that exact same feeling in the work we do in Surface and in Windows and now across Microsoft. This is a culture driven by passion like real passion. That same passion my dad had in teaching me how to put a TV together. It's a culture driven by iteration. And it's also a culture driven by learning. And the best thing about making a product every day with a team is this. I'm surrounded by some of the best product makers on the planet. The best. But they put their heart and soul into every single detail. It doesn't matter if it's the tiniest hinge or the creation of an entire category. Their heart and soul goes into it. It doesn't matter if it's the bit that we align to the pixel on the screen. And it turns out the more you look at it you start to realize it's not actually all these little details and parts that make these devices great. But it's all the passion that the people making these products put into them that make them great. It's that same passion we want you to feel when you're using our products. That same energy that resonated with me when I watched TV with my dad. And that can be true. It's actually true for our entire Surface family. If you haven't picked up a Pro, you should. And there's many of you using them, and I'm super pumped about that by the way because I can't remember the last time that happened. Thank goodness. If you haven't used a Book, you should take top off, reverse it, fold it down, take the pen out, and create. Let your energy come into that. Push the GPU. If you haven't seen touched or felt a Studio, you have to. Put your hands on it, pull it towards you, immerse yourself into it. Hey, Sue. You have done an amazing job today. Has she been amazing? Your work is inspiring, and you make that Studio look absolutely beautiful. I love that. I mean you bring it to life. The way it's meant to disappear, and you're creations show up here. It is wonderful. And we are finding that people are using Surfaces just like that. Now each one of these products has pushed the boundaries of innovation. They're products that help you create. They're products that help you think. They help you love do what you love doing most. That's true. They help you be more productive. But it's not the product. It's the product disappearing into the background, and it's the mind that gets to go into that product. To create what needs to be created. Your musings, your learnings. Everything you think about comes together through this seamless dance of hardware and software. And in essence, every one of these products, they're made for creators. And we've said this. Don't be confused. You may be a creator of a spreadsheet or a symphony or a novel or a drawing, but what about the student? What do they create? Can you imagine? They are creators of their entrance essays. The thing that impacts the next four years of their magical lives. Should the technology be in their way? And today is all about students, isn't it? And for Surface specifically, this is where we wanted to put our focus. Into those next four years of a student's life. When they're just about to get out of high school. When they don't even know what their major is. We wanted to bring them a product that they could have so much confidence in they didn't have to worry about it. Now we know today, we know today many students, many students who use Surface Pro, and we love that. It's cool. And a lot of them use Book because they do need that DGPU in it, and they push it. But they're asking for more. They're clearly asking for more. And we talked to a lot of them. We love them. There's some students here, and we love you. - We love you too. - They're asking for a laptop, right? They're asking for a Surface laptop. Cool. They want a bit of a choice. They want a product that's gonna continue to empower them and remove every limit. Have you, have you watched a student lately? Have you seen what they can accomplish? Have you seen what they can do? Just watch. Their minds, their hands. They move so fast. They come out of school. They come into Microsoft. They run circles around me. Circles. I'm almost embarrassed sometimes how fast they're moving compared to me. It is extraordinary. They create fast. They think fast. Nothing should stop them. Nothing should get in their way. There should be no technology that stands in front of them. And isn't that what Surface is? Isn't it? The technology that disappears to the background. So to give that perfect laptop, to marry the hardware and software together, the team across Windows and Surface and Office had to look at everything from the materials to the science to the architecture. Every bit of our experience in making products had to come to life, and we had to re-examine the entire laptop market. And then push those same boundaries of innovation you see pushed in the other Surface products into this product. We had to breath into this product some life that really started to change this category and continue to move it forward. So, we built a laptop. And it's beautiful. But it's beautiful because it's personal. It's personal because it's meant to be a reflection of who you are. It brings you that security and superior performance that Terry talked about. And probably most important it's gonna last you. And it's gonna last that student from the day they walk into their orientation to the day they walk across the stage for their graduation. I think this is the one you're gonna want. This is the Surface laptop. - I've got chills; they're multiplying. And I'm losing control. 'Cause the power you're supplying. Is electrifying. Electrifying. You better shape up 'cause I need a friend. And my heart is set on you. You better shape up. You better understand. To my heart, I must be true. You're the one that I want. The one that I want, yeah. You're the one that I want. You're the one that I want. The one I need. Oh yes indeed. You're the one that I want, the one that I want. - Cool. It's simply gorgeous. I'm telling you, this is gorgeous. It's such a gorgeous product. This product is so meticulously crafted. When I talk about the details of putting a TV together with my dad, this is unreal what this does. Every single part of this product, every detail thought through. Every single detail. When you look at this product, and you put it in your hands, you're gonna find no reference to how any of these parts have come together in the product. You won't find a screw. You won't find anything that leaves a parting line across the device. You see perfect lines. A perfect flow of energy. When you pull it apart and open it seamlessly, you see a tone in tone balance in the colors. In product making we have a thing called the first read. We talk about it in our design labs all the time. What's the first read on the product? How does it feel? It's meant to be silent to the eyes. That's critical. When you look at it, does it feel good? Does it draw you in? What does it mean? Why? How do we get people into their flow? How do we get them moving? It really is a product that draws you in. It's one of these products where you have to feel it to understand it, and so we'll do that. Can I show you this device? I want to talk about the way we made it with you if that's cool. Am I embarrassing you right now? I probably am. I mean you have lovely equipment. I don't want to hurt it. You don't have to move. Stay right there. Stay right there. No, totally cool. You do have to move though, so scoot in a little bit. All right. Cool. All right. This is the Surface laptop. And this is burgundy. You're wearing burgundy. - I am wearing burgundy. - I think we didn't plan this, did we? That's pretty cool. I want you to see it. I want you to feel it. I want you to kinda get the essence of this product. When you think of what we're trying to do with the laptop and where we want to push things. We want to push things a little bit further. We want to move from things that are feeling like machines, and we want to move to something that's more personal. Something that's just more personal to you. Keep it for the show. Show it to whoever you want. But I think ... Do you like it? - I, I, I ... - If you take a look, we've designed the product in four gorgeous colors. Burgundy, graphite gold, platinum, and cobalt blue. All beautifully inspired through different elements in nature to bring it to life. And the idea of making something more personal and bringing it to you was critical in this product. Now, when you hold this product, it feels amazingly thin and light, which is really important when it comes to a laptop like this. It's 2.76 pounds. It's under 14-1/2 millimeters. And with one finger you can open the screen, which is super cool, but it's very elegant in the sense that I just open it smoothly just like that. And what you get is a 13-1/2 inch diagonal with a 3 by 2 aspect ratio. This is the ... When you think about aspect ratio and this diagonal, that's the productivity of a 14-inch laptop and your standard 16 by 9 format. So it's like a 14-inch laptop, but it feels and acts like a 13-inch size when it's in your bag. When you close it. When you close this product, it feels so elegant. It's important. It's important that it sounds good when you close it. 'Cause when you're done with your thought, and you close something don't you want closure? Of course, you do. Now when you look at the products you're using right now, and there's a lot of them out there, you're gonna find a rubber bumper around the screen. You're gonna find either a piece of plastic around the screen. The reason that's there is because when you close these devices, you don't want to break the glass. I mean that's pretty smart. But this elegant dance between these two parts come together so seamlessly in this product. And when I say at the first read you won't find any misplaced parts and every detailed matter, there's no rubber bumper. There's no plastic chin. There's no hinge that you can see. It's all part of the device that flows and fades to the background. The screen itself is 3.4 million pixels. 3.4 million pixels. It's that exact screen that you would expect from Surface. That high contrast. That color calibrated screen. You know what it is. I do it every time. I'm not gonna do it. You know what it is. At the end of the day, this is the thinnest LCD touch module ever created and put into a laptop. And that's how you get this form. That's the laptop. Of course, I'm low on time. I gotta keep going. Okay. We could stay all day. That's an option. I want to show you the Surface Pen. I'm a huge fan of the pen. We talk about the pen all the time. Of course, the pen works on this screen. I want to show you a feature in Windows if you haven't used it in the Creator's update, go give it a shot. Take a video. Get your pen, put it to the screen, and bring this feature to life. I'm gonna show you the craftsmanship video that you'll find in my blog later today. It's about two minutes long. This is a 30 second cut of that just to bring it to life. And what you can do with something. So, students if you will, they're making a lot of videos these days. Even my elementary school girls right now are doing it. My high school son and daughter, they're also making videos. Either they're doing book reports, or they're telling stories, or they're creating. This is happen. That didn't happen in my time, but it is happening now. In the world of video creating for us, the last video you saw we spent a lot of time on every detail and every second of every frame. In this case what I'm gonna show you is how simple communication change with the power of the pen. And then the emotion that can come in with it. I'm gonna hit play. Watch how this will video play. As it's playing, I'll put my pen to the screen to send the note to a team. And notice what happens. And we talked about this a lot. The power of the pen. Don't underestimate it. The emotion that comes with writing. The cognitive recall that comes with writing, but in this case, I'm just sending a message to the team that says, "It is awesome." "The seam here that you cannot see is awesome." "Where the fabric and the aluminum come together is perfect." And I want them to feel that, so I'm gonna send this back to the team if you will right now. And so I'll rewind it. I'm gonna play it. I want you to enjoy these 30 seconds, so I'm gonna get out of your way. But then I want you to see how the ink makes it way back, and that's such a human form where you can collect that emotion because it's the ink and my soul that ends up on that screen that you get to feel because I wrote it with the exclamation points and with my handwriting. You also can kind of figure that out. If I was mad, it looks very similar. Okay. Take a look at this. - We tried to put every good ingredient we learned from the past into Surface laptop. Like the fabric customized for each keyboard. When you open you only see a piece of glass and piece of fabric, and then keyboard. You don't really see the mechanical hinge. That's the pureness. - There is no compromise in what we do in manufacturing. We're suddenly bringing metal and plastic keys and fabric together. Our manufacturing engineers are driven to invent processes to make sure that ultimately you're getting this full Surface experience. - Now you saw when I use the pen you should see no lag; you should see no latency. And the pen is really coming to life. The performance on this device is absolutely amazing. Think about Windows 10 S for just a minute because it's so important. You get this unbelievably streamlined performance that lasts, and you get this product that starts up unbelievably quickly. And let's just talk about that for just a second. When I opened the screen earlier, you saw me open it with one finger and the screen was just there and turned on. And when I'm closing this screen with its elegant close I'm shutting down this computer and putting it into sleep. And then I want this product. And what Windows 10 has done with the engineering team alongside the Surface team is every single detail had to come to life because we cannot have students waiting for their products. If you're a student and you're in a lecture, you need to capture a note. You have to open your product and move. We're used to generation when you just hit a button, and your device is ready for you. The technology you have is there. Instant on is critical. It is part of our lives. It should be celebrated, but actually the celebration of instant on is because you can capture your thought, you can capture the moment, you capture your creation. And so that's what we brought to life in this product. That performance that's coming right now where it's just there. And if you're using Windows Hello this product will log you in, and you're moving. You're going right in. That's so important. Now, this product comes with the latest corei5 and corei7 Intel processors. It has up to one terabyte if you choose PCIe SSD. And that is integrated directly onto the motherboard, which in essence lowers the power consumption and maximizes the performance on this device. No one has ever integrated a PCIe SSD that way ever before. And it results in this engineering effort that gets you to 14 and a half hours of battery life on this product. 14 and a half. This isn't about taking your charger and pulling it out of your bag in between classes. This is where we want to change the game. Charge your device. Leave your charger home and go to school. And then go to the library. And then come home and binge watch Netflix. And then cram a little. And then charge it. That's so important. But just as important as designing the battery life when a device is on is designing the battery life when the device is off. I know that sounds kind of funny, but the truth is some of that promise of Windows 10 S and Surface is just that. When you close the lid, and you leave for Spring Break, and you forgot to put the charge on. Don't worry. When you get back if you're disheveled a little bit, you're rushing to class. Pick it up. Open it. And you'll be right where you left off. That exact same battery where you closed the lid will be back when you come from Spring Break and ready for you to go. Isn't that awesome? That's just cool. Now let me put this device in a little bit of more context, so you get a little more of that. In the history of laptops and designing a laptop, there has always been something that had to give. Whether it's the weight. Whether it's the battery life. Whether it's the performance. Whether it's the thinness. Whether it's the key switch, the travel, how it feels under your hands. Everything was working against each other. If you want to push more pixels onto a screen like this, you probably need more battery life and a little bit more performance. If you need more battery life, you likely need a bigger battery. If you need a bigger battery, you likely need a thicker device. If you need a thicker device, it's likely getting heavier. And then reverse that or put it in any order. These are conflicting goals. This is the first product that brings that all together. The team talked about making the Surface laptop and used the word balance. And when we create products we talk about it. What is the one thing on this product? And it was balance. We needed to bring a perfectly balanced product. A product that had never been brought together like this before. And a way to kind of put it in context is let's just talk about other laptops because it frames it. Now a lot of students use Macbook Airs and Macbook Pros, and we know that. And those are awesome products. I mean they are awesome products. The Surface laptop itself is lighter and thinner than any Macbook Air or Macbook Pro on the market right now. It's 50% faster than the Macbook Air. And when you compare the corei7 Surface laptop to the corei7 13.3 inch Macbook Pro, the Surface laptop is faster. And all that comes to this moment. We have more battery life in this product than any Macbook on market today. Put all that together, and that's the Surface laptop. We're really proud of the team. Really proud of the team. This is the laptop that starts to reset the category. I mean it is the most balanced laptop you will ever find. Now how did we do it? It's worth talking about because the innovations on this product are hard to see. The beauty easy to see and feel. The innovation hard to see because it's disappeared. We had to push this product to its peak performance while keeping the device as thin and light as possible. Our thermal design allows this front edge of the product to stay under 10 millimeters. That was critical, critical. Because if we're gonna bring something beautiful to you, keep all that performance in it, we couldn't start trading off any of the form of this product. We want students to be proud when they pull it out of their bag, and they want to feel proud when they do that. We integrated vapor chambers right ... Shaped as heat pipes directly into the aluminum backing. Right underneath here. Now I have to tell you this because my team back in Redmond right now is like please just tell them. Tell them. You're never gonna see this, but I'm still gonna tell you. Right under the processor, these pipes run, and basically, it makes the bottom aluminum bucket three different parts in one. It's functional. It's structural. And it brings that cosmetic perfection all at the same time. That's not been done before. It allows us to pack everything we need in here and still give you the weight and battery life and thickness that you wanted. And then we knew how much beauty mattered and we weren't gonna compromise it. And we talked about this being a product I want you to be proud of when you pull it out of your bag. We overlaid Alcantara fabric onto the top of the keyboard. This is a product imported from Italy. It's premium. It's durable. It stands the test of time. But it also allowed us to laser etch after we optically aligned each single key on the product to leave no lines on the product at all. And to let no light leakage come out. So when you are cramming late at night like I did for this presentation, you get the perfect light. You get the perfect light when you put your hands down. But it also allows us a full one and a half millimeter travel on the keyboard. It is buttery smooth, buttery smooth. When you put your hands on this thing and type you feel so good. And why does that matter? Because when you're in the flow ... Because when we have a student immersed ... Because when you are writing that entrance essay, this technology must get out of your way. It must. And it has to work seamlessly. And so when you put this thing on your ... your hands on top of this keyboard it feels warm. It doesn't feel cold. It invites you in. It invites you in. Now the fabric has just a bit more than just form It has some amazing function. If you look at this product, you'll see no speaker grills. You'll see no speaker holes. And it gives that perfect look when we talk about that first read and how soft. We were able to invent a technology to integrate the speakers underneath the keyboard, use the fabric to push the sound through, and then push it out the keys. To point it right at you as you're creating. It's incredible. That's insane, right? I know it's crazy. And now the sounds coming at you while you're working. So if you're editing that video and you want to be immersed and you the sound and the visuals to come together as creators know which are so, so important. This is the product that brings that to life. Now I want to share with you a little bit about Microsoft Office and Surface and Windows coming together. Office, my favorite product on the planet. I use it every day, Word especially, and I want to show you how the dial integrates into this Surface laptop really quick and give you some function of the product. Let me give you my set up really quick. This is the Surface laptop. I'm using the Surface docking station. This product has all the ports you need, and I'm sure the ports you're gonna want. But here we're connected with a Surface docking station. So if you're not a student, let's just say you're a professional. You already have a Surface and a docking station. It works seamlessly together. This is a great product if you're taking it home or for work. But in the sense of student's, this is the Word document. We know students love Word. We know they use it. We know they create ... I create in Word and read in Word. But watch as I move the dial with my hand. What you'll find is we're gonna integrate the smoothness of this dial to the product itself, which was an important element. So as I move left and I move right, you see that integration of the UI of Office. And this is that design that's so important between Office and Surface to get perfect because we want these things to flow seamlessly. And when we demoed this on Studio you say that same elegant piece. I want to show you one more application that brings this product to life. And it's a very cool app, for sure. Before I do that, let's talk. Windows 10 S, Office, and Surface. These are all products that were made for each other. But the key is they were actually made with each other. Every single document you will use on this will be protected and secured. Every single app you use is verified by Microsoft, which streamlines you for security and superior performance. And if you need an app that's not in the store, that's fine. You can just go and download Windows Pro and use any app you want. Now that last application I want to talk about is probably the application that brings it together for me. Now 3D 4 Medical is this company. Amazing company doing amazing work for students and teachers around the world. And they launched Complete Anatomy in our store just this year. And it really is the product that I get to show you today to highlight all the performance in this device. To show you how the dial, the pen, the touch, the vibrant screen all comes together in just a beautiful, elegant application. And it all designs specifically for the Surface to come to life. I want to invite my good friend, Edel, out here from 3D 4 Medical, and she's gonna show you a little bit more about this product. Edel, come on out. Have fun. - Thank you. - Have fun. - Hi, I'm Edel from 3D 4 Medical. When I studied neuroscience, all I had were flat 2D images in textbooks to study the anatomy of the human brain. I remember spending ages looking online hoping to find a better visual resource, but it just didn't exist. At 3D 4 Medical we have a vision. And that is to transform medical learning. I'm real excited to be part this revolution and to show you how using Complete Anatomy on the new Surface laptop creates a totally new and immersive experience for students. On this screen, you'll see the human skeletal model in 3D. And the power of this laptop means that I can easily navigate the model without any lag. The textures and the anatomical accuracy can be displayed in immersive detail no matter how far I zoom in. I love this product because it allows users to explore over 6,500 structures right at our fingertips. And as we are visual learners, simply scanning this model means that users retain more information than they would from a flat 2D image in a textbook. The Surface style allows me to interact with the model. For example, I can choose to fade surrounding structures. And now I can see where this complex bone sits in the middle of the skull. I can explode this region and see the relationship between anatomical structures. Using the dial, I can fully control the movement of these structures. You can't do this with a textbook. Now let's relate the anatomy to function, which students find very difficult to visualize. I can turn on the muscles and see what movement the muscles carry out. This is the actual model moving here in real time. And I can control this body movement using the dial. I am making the neck bend here using the dial, and I can view this motion at any angle. This is a whole new level of exploration, and it's not just applicable to anatomists. It's interesting for me as a sports enthusiast to see how the muscles work in the body. Using this 3D technology, users can completely immerse themselves in learning about the human body. We can go even further and modify the actual 3D structures. Using the Surface Pen, I can cut through various layers and structures such as the skin, the fat, muscles, bone, and even the meninges covering the brain. And now I can identify different parts of the brain and study their related functions. I can also draw directly onto the model. Now I will always remember that this part of the brain is associated with motor function because I have written it directly onto this cortex. And now I have an interactive screen that I have created in seconds. I can share what I have created via the cloud with my study group and friends. 3D 4 Medical's technology together with the new Surface laptop replaces the needs for dozens of flat 2D textbooks. Transforming medical learning by propelling a century's old way of studying anatomy into the 21st century. Thank you. - It's incredible, right? The way learning and students and teaching has evolved. It's absolutely amazing. Now you can preorder your Surface laptop literally right now. Right now. The corei5 is starting at 999. We're pretty excited about it. I'm glad you are too. The product is available for you to either pick up or be delivered on June 15th, so it's coming pretty quick. Go ahead and get your hands on one. Now learning isn't something that has a limit. I believe that. I believe it's an endless pursuit. We want students of any age. We want you to be committed. We want you to never ever stop learning. You never have to. You don't have to stop getting better and you always will if you push. Don't ever stop breaking new ground. And in Surface, we want to give students all the tools they need to enable them to continue learning. From the Surface Pro to the Book to the Studio and now to the beautiful Surface laptop. At Microsoft, we have a mission. And it is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. It is so powerful to hear Sachi say it. It is a mission that is the motivation for every single product we make. From Surface to Windows to Office to Mixed Reality to OneNote to Minecraft to Teams. To every other detail, you saw today. And it's about those details that these passionate product makers bring to you to allow you to put your passion where you want to push it. It's about creating products to empower the students of today to create the world of tomorrow. Thank you. - Every generation has the opportunity to inspire those that follow in their footsteps. To pass along the wisdom, knowledge, and experience needed to reach new heights. Microsoft is working to create a better learning environment for every student. With modern tools that are intuitive. - This is the project. - Collaborative. - That's actually good. - And accessible to all, so every student is empowered to achieve more. This is the modern classroom. Where we go beyond memorization of facts and figures and a one size fits all education. Where students learn in the way they learn best. On the tools they will use in the future. Where teachers create experiences that spark creativity. And everyone can collaborate anytime, anywhere. Microsoft Education. Empowering the students of today to create the world of tomorrow.