Techmakers Give Back with Codecademy's Sasha Laundy.

My name's Angela Lin, and I work on the

YouTube Education Team.

I work with partners like TED, Khan Academy, and edX to

ensure that anybody can learn anything through YouTube.

Prior to Google, I worked in entertainment.

I started my career off at NBC.

If any of you have watched "30 Rock", you can think about

Kenneth the Page.

I was a page at NBC.

Google's not just about work, work, work.

I also love to dance and try out all the good eats around

San Francisco.

With that, I'll hand it to my co-host Bridgette Sexton.

BRIDGETTE SEXTON: Thank you.

I'm Bridgette Sexton.

I'm on the Google for Entrepreneurs Team.

My team focuses on how Google can foster entrepreneurship

around the world.

We do this through a number of things, partnerships with

groups like Startup Weekend, our own programs, where we do

educational outreach and actually help try to figure

out where entrepreneurs can fill some white spaces and do

awesome things on the web and mobile.

And we also look at our products, how our products can

actually help entrepreneurs grow their business.

Before this, I actually worked on the Google Africa Team for

two years, based out of Ghana and some out of Kenya as well.

[INAUDIBLE]

Google [? four ?]

[? five ?].

Before that, I just enjoyed a lot of traveling.

And I also do some things out of work, running, mainly,

running to work, biking to work, and a lot of cooking.

But I have been fortunate to just be surrounded by awesome

people here and impressive women.

Today, we're actually joined by one of

those impressive women.

Sasha Laundy, who was the fourth employee at Codecademy.

And Sasha, would you mind introducing yourself?

SASHA LAUNDY: Sure.

I'm really excited to be here today.

This is a really cool series that you guys are doing.

And I'm really honored to be invited.

I currently work at Codecademy in New York.

And I was the fourth employee there.

We've doubled in size since I started back in February.

And before that, I lived in San Francisco and enjoyed all

the good eats around San Francisco.

And I worked at Twilio, which is a telephony API based in

downtown San Francisco.

Before that, I was developer intern at this really tiny

gaming startup, pre-funding, a very different

experience than Twilio.

Before that, I was a high school teacher.

I taught physics and neuroscience at high schools

in Connecticut and San Francisco.

And so I did a big switch into tech, while I was here.

It sort of was in the water in San Francisco, I think.

And I'd be happy to talk about all that today.

So I'm looking forward to chatting.

ANGELA LIN: Well, you have a fascinating background.

And we will get into it.

But first of all, why don't you tell us a little bit about

Codecademy.

What types of coding lessons do you use?

I spent some time on the site, actually.

Admittedly got a little bit hooked, myself, with one of

the courses.

I think that's one of the things you mean to do.

SASHA LAUNDY: Yeah.

ANGELA LIN: So tell us a little bit about your target

market and what you guys are up to.

SASHA LAUNDY: Sure.

Absolutely.

If you've taken a look at our website-- now might be a good

time to do that--

we offer interactive programming lessons in HTML,

CSS, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby.

And our aim is to get people hooked on programming.

I think it's really important that programming is seen as

something that's interesting and can solve real problems

for people.

Because otherwise, young people won't get

interested in it.

And we've got a big shortage in developers right now.

So with our interactive lessons, you're able to--

we don't make you do any installation or downloads or

configuration, which can take a really long time and really

isn't very fun.

The fun part is the coding.

So we let you get started on that right away.

So there's a console on the front page of our website that

asks you to type in your name.

And you start using strings right away.

So you just get going coding.

And we make sure that the lessons on our site are

interactive, so you can actually learn by

doing, learn by coding.

Instead of having to pick up a book and read hundreds of

pages, you can just get started right away.

We also make sure that the projects we have people doing

are really practical.

So instead of doing sort of an esoteric math problem-- and

don't get me wrong, I love math problems,

definitely love math.

But not everyone does.

And so we make sure that the projects that people do are

really practical.

And so they feel like they could pick this up and use it

in whatever job they have to become more effective and

maybe do things faster or more powerfully

than they could before.

BRIDGETTE SEXTON: That's awesome.

How many users do you guys have currently?

SASHA LAUNDY: We have millions of users.

BRIDGETTE SEXTON: That's awesome.

And how has the teaching of code evolved over time, from

10 years ago, 20 years ago, to what you guys

are teaching today?

And how are you seeing that encouraging more?

SASHA LAUNDY: That's a great question.

I wasn't learning programming 20 years ago.

But we have this rise of interpreted languages that

abstract away some of the really difficult parts about

programming, like memory management

and things like that.

And so there are languages like Python, which are great

to learn programming with because They get rid of a lot

of the syntax that can really trip up beginners and help

them really focus on the concepts.

We're also able to put these lessons online, which we

weren't able to do before.

But now we've got this pretty massive web application that

lets you emulate all these programming

languages in the browser.

We can host these sorts of lessons online in a way that

we couldn't do 10 or 20 years ago.

So the advances in technology and the internet are making it

a lot easier to teach people in new ways.

So instead of the book and then computer combination,

we've merged the two.

So the instruction and the actual practice and learning

happen in the same console.

ANGELA LIN: So it seems like you have a really innovative

course creator, where, like you're saying, anybody can

actually teach a course and put a course together.

Tell us a little bit more about that and if you have a

favorite course that you've created, that

we should be taking.

SASHA LAUNDY: Sure.

As you say, we've got a course creator tool.

So anyone out there who's interested in teaching the

world how to code can pick it up and create a lesson that

looks just like the ones that we have on our site.

And we've got this system to help you.

We've got feedback at every step of the way.

And we've got a few thousand beta testers who are like

champing at the bit to get access to the newest courses

and test out those courses and get the bugs out before they

launch to the mainstream.

So we help you, basically, learn this new format.

And there are some really talented people who are great

at programming, great at explaining, and this lets them

reach a huge audience.

Because we've got users in more than 100 countries, and a

huge range of people taking our lessons.

So I'd love to see what you'd come up with there.

BRIDGETTE SEXTON: I saw you guys were offering kits for

after-school classes now.

How is that going?

SASHA LAUNDY: It's going really well.

And let me tell you a little bit about why we did that,

because I think it's important to understand that.

Particularly for the sorts of people who are watching this,

it's important to understand what's happening with the

kids, especially in the US right now.

We've actually seen a decline in the number of computer

science courses, both AP level and entry level that are

offered in the US.

And teachers are less and less prepared to teach those

classes which is a problem, because the internet is not

going away any time soon.

Technology is here to stay.

BRIDGETTE SEXTON: We hope not.

We hope the internet is not going away any time soon.

SASHA LAUNDY: And Google is doing a great job in helping

it become here to stay and keeping it useful and huge and

interesting.

So technology's not going away.

And it's becoming increasingly important that people

understand how technology works when they use it-- that

they're not just consuming the technology, but they have some

understanding of how it was made.

And this is impacting field after field after field.

You've seen what's happened to the music industry in

the last few years.

It's going to revolutionize pretty much every industry

that we have.

And so to become relevant and valuable in this modern

society, you have to understand technology and

really understand how things are put together.

Because if you don't, it's very easy for people who have

that power and have that understanding to take

advantage of you and get ahead in a way that you can't.

So schools.

Estonia.

Have you heard of this Estonia news?

It's pretty interesting.

Estonia recently announced that they're going to teach

every first grader how to program.

Every first grader is going to know how to program computers,

which is really interesting.

So Estonia is figuring this out.

And they're like, OK, we have to get ahead of this trend.

We have to prepare our students for this modern

world, this brave new world.

And they're taking the appropriate steps.

But the US is actually cutting computer science classes.

So we've talked to a lot of passionate teachers who

understand that this is a problem, and they know they

need to prepare their students.

And so we, basically, instead of having them wait a year to

get trained and maybe wait another year for their school

district to add in the computer science classes, what

we've done is we made a computer science

kit club in a box.

So they can pick this up.

They have all the lessons, all the curriculum.

We even made like photocopyable posters, with

cute robots on them.

So they photocopy them and put them around their school

announcing their club.

Some stickers, because everyone loves stickers.

And we've made this free for anyone who signed up.

And we put it up on the web.

We didn't really know how many people would be interested.

We made 250 kits and hoped for the best.

I think we had 2,000 schools sign up in the first month and

a half, which blew us away.

So there's clearly a ton of demand for this.

And this isn't just in the US.

It's all over the world as well.

But with these kits, teachers can pick this up, get started