While I am extremely pleased and grateful that 26 years of writing on Linux Journal survive online without being 404’d, I also realize that this condition probably won’t last forever. Also, some pieces are now missing their images and other graces. This is one of them. It is also one of my best, I think, Or at least one of the most important. This is a late draft, rather than the published final text, but it’s still good. Read on and enjoy—Doc
It starts here, in the heart of Long Island, a couple dozen exits east of Queens. I saw it with my own eyes in Mineola’s Public Schools, where kids, led by a nonprofit called kidOYO (“Kid-oy-yo”), are learning to program in different languages on different computers and operating systems, creating and re-creating software and hardware, with fun and at speed. Their esteem in themselves and in the eyes of their peers derives from their actual work and their helpfulness to others. What I saw was also sure to strip the gears of any system meant to contain them. Mineola’s schools were not among those.
OYO means Own Your Own, and that’s what these kids are learning to do. In geekier terms, they are rooting their own lives online. They’re doing it by learning to program in languages that start with Scratch and move up through Python, Java, C# and beyond. They’re doing it on every hardware and software platform they can, while staying anchored to Linux, because Linux is where the roots of personal freedom and agency go deepest. And they’re doing in all in the spirit of Linus’ book title: Just for fun.
With kidOYO, the heuristics go both ways: kidOYO teaches the kids, and the kids teach kidOYO. Iteration is constant. What works gets improved, and what doesn’t gets tossed or replaced. The measures of success are how enthused the kids stay, how much they give and get energy from each other, and how much they learn and teach. Nowhere are they sorted into bell curves, given caste-producing labels such as “gifted” or “challenged.” Nor are they captive to the old report card system. When they do take standardized tests, for example the college AP (advanced placement) ones for computer science, they tend to kick ass. (At that link we see how nearly all the 6th-9th graders who took the test passed, meaning they were ready for AP college work.)
kidOYO is the creation of the Loffreto family: Devon, Melora, and their son Zhen, who is now 12. What started as a way to teach computing to Zhen turned into ways to teach computer science to every kid. Their methods resemble how the Linux kernel constantly improves, stamping out bugs and iterating toward ever-expanding completeness, guided by an equal mix of purpose and fun.
Before we met, I had assumed, from Devon’s writing style and deep knowledge of stuff, that he was a gentleman perhaps of my own age, or even older. So I was surprised to find that he was not only a youngish guy, but a New York state high school champion baseball and basketball player who went to college on a sports scholarship. Also that he looked a stunt double for George Clooney.
I also knew what he and kidOYO were doing was important. But my mind wasn’t blown until I finally obeyed Devon’s invitation to see their approach at work. That happened on Groundhog Day in February. (An album of pictures I took on that visit is on the Linux Journal Flickr site here.)
Mineola is about as prototypical as a middle class New York suburban town can get: a 2-square mile village of about 20,000 in the center of Nassau County, which lays between Long Island’s north and south shore and is home to about 1.5 million people. The Mineola Free Union School District, however, is anything but typical. I’ve never seen a public—or any—school system with its feet equally planted in the digital and the physical worlds, or as eager to run forward in both. For example, all three schools I visited had created social and hacker spaces within their libraries. The books and the stacks still mattered, but so did the ability of kids to research, learn and teach together using computing and related gear, such as 3-D printers and programmable robots.
Standing in the Coding Center at the Mineola Middle School, surrounded by kids doing amazing stuff on their Chromebooks, Dr. Michael Nagler (@naglersnotions), superintendent for the district, gave me the backstory on how kidOYO got involved.
“Three years ago my wife signed our son up for a coding class these guys were putting on,” he said. “So I drive my son out there, and I’m watching what they’re doing, and I’m impressed. I ask Dev, ‘Why aren’t you in schools?’ He says, ‘The schools won’t talk to us.’ So I say, ‘Well you’re in luck, because I know a guy.’ We worked to help adapt their platform for schools, starting with ours. And I mean all of ours. We jumped in the deep end, starting with the little kids first and pushing it up through high school. And now we’re on this three year journey, so far, during which everything changes. Constantly. The little ones get the skills, and they roll up. Now I have to adjust my next level, and do it waaay faster than I have to with any other curriculum. Right now, for example, for the AP Computer Principles course in high school, they’re doing the learning path for (hatchcoding‘s) Hatch 1 and Hatch 2. Meanwhile, my sixth graders are already finished with it. So by the time these sixth and seventh graders get to ninth grade, my expectation is that every student in the district is taking AP Computer Principles. That’s going to replace our Exploring Computer Science class. And then we build in connections. So we’re doing Arduinos here in the Middle School’s sixth grade, and simultaneously in ninth grade in the high school. Then, as the younger kids move forward, we’ll change the ninth grade setup.”
Since Maker Faire New York is a great place for kids from everywhere to show off their maker chops, I asked Dr. Nagler if they had plans for that.
“We merge CS and computational thinking with making. We have a whole design and creative thinking framework tied to our mascot, the mustang. We make ways for the kids to conceptualize, design, iterate, prototype, test, refine, go, back, and build things.”
I asked, “How do you deal with the combination of kids who are already on this path, kids who want to come in and need to catch up, and eventually everybody in the school doing AP level work on computers? And beyond that, how does this whole thing catch fire?”
“A couple of ways. First, it’s not an elective. Here in Mineola, every kid has to do it. They also have to do it in their subject classes. So we tie a coding project to a curriculum project. Every grade has to do three a year. So we teach a language that way. We teach it independently the OYO way. And we teach it the formal way, cycling kids through CS classes, for example here in this room. As for catching fire, we’re Ground Zero. We succeed here and it spreads to other districts.”
“How do you all scale? I mean both what you’re doing and what kidOYO is doing?”
“I think we’re unique in that I don’t want it to be a formal class. I want CS to be ingrained in everything we do. In the process we’ll refine it and share it in ways that can be adopted by other districts. I’m a big open source guy. Sharing is key. So I’m taking the kidOYO platform and building an open computer science curriculum in social space. The beauty of their platform is that it lets me build an OER—Open Educational Resources—using their concept of learning paths, which we also work on together. Dev also built me a website that I can send to an organization I belong to called the League of Innovative Schools, which is a national organization. We can crowd-source content there. For example I built a sample curriculum unit. I can push that out to various states. By crowdsourcing we already have a ton of content on there.”
At this point Devon joined the conversation. “Tell Doc about MC².”
“Right. It stands for Mineola Creative Content, and it’s a video production studio, where we do fun learning videos, which are a basis for the learning pathway here.”
The opening text on the site (https://mc2oer.oyoclass.com/) explains, “This community showcases open educational content and other materials from the Mineola School District. Mineola is a suburban district located about 30 miles outside of New York City. Our school district is dedicated to the #GoOpen movement which supports sharing educational resources.
“It’s all about #OER—Open Educational Resources—and open source,” Dr. Nagler explained. “We use the videos here in the district, and also throw them out to the world where everybody can use them.”
Look up “Dr. Nagler” on YouTube, and you’ll find lots of them. He’s the star, as both a mentor and an animated character. There’s even one video where talks with his animated brain, bearing his signature goatee.
“An important context is that there is no central repository of educational materials in this country, because they’re all locked up by proprietary publishers. What we’re doing here is a way to get around that. And I have a lot of flexibility. I can market MC² as a school district entity, and not worry about all the copyright crap. It’s all made to share.”
I asked, “What happens to the world when these kids graduate into it?”
“They’re going to change the world. That’s clear. We’re also all dealing with astronomical change in the technical environment along the way. Constantly. This makes everything very hard to predict. Look at my 2019 high school graduates. They started Kindergarten in 2006. Even from just 2006 to 2009, the technology advances were astronomical. And then look what happened in the next ten years. Huge. So if I start planning now for where Kindergarten kids will come out at the end of the next twelve years, I’m already lost. But if I trust the process we have in place already, I’ll be fine. We’re driving it, and the kids are driving it too. It’s a constant cycle.”
I replied, “We also live in a world where giant companies are also working to contain those kids’ agency inside corporate silos. Some of those silos also spy on everyone constantly. How do you deal with that?”
“The common denominator is CS, and the flexibility within it. There’s freedom in that. I’m not going to force you to master, say, just one language. I’m going to get you on a platform where you can play with any and all of them, learn quickly and well, and apply whatever language you like toward building something. And because we’re merging the making and the coding, your next question will be, ‘What will this code do?’ The answer is, computational thinking will always push you toward solving problems. If you look at the big picture, content already is readily available to every kid. And content has always been our specialty, as a school. But with CS, the kids learn to master that content, in many ways. That’s key. Kids need to know and feel that they’re on top of things. That they Own their Own.
“What about curricular necessities: mandates that come down from the federal and state level?” I asked.
We’re still a public school, and we do have formalities. For example, here in New York every kid has to pass the state Regents Exam. We teach to that, but we also make sure there’s no way a kid graduates without exposure to computer science.”
“And you trust that’s going to equip them, once they’re out.”
“It’s more than that. Working with kidOYO, we’ve developed something that not only should be replicated everywhere, but needs to be. Here’s the important thing: there aren’t enough people who know computer science who can also teach it. So when you figure out a way to virtually do it, to scale the knowledge outward for everybody, it’s a big deal. The investment I make here probably cost me one teacher’s salary. But it scales to the whole district. To scale evenly, you can’t beat it. In fact it’s the only way to scale up computer science through schools, because the current credentialing system is too slow, and too top-down, and formal training is too slow, too far behind the curve. The kids and their mentors are moving too fast for that.
The biggest absence I saw that day was anything that looked like a bell curve. the system here clearly
What I saw here was a system that doesn’t have a bell curve, with A+ stars at one end and failures at the other. The system is made so every kid progresses, and every kid succeeds. A few minutes earlier, Melora explained, “We have no lowest common denominator, because everyone succeeds. There are twelve-year olds in this program that a 7th grade teacher wouldn’t look twice at in an ordinary classroom, but proves into her future as a profound programmer. And choice is key. When Dr. Nagler brought in this program, it wasn’t just for a select few kids. He wanted it to be open to everybody. And everybody has the ability to chose anything they want. It’s a totally different ecosystem than you’ll find anywhere else. And he’s gracious enough to reach out to other school systems to help them break down their own classroom walls. One of the things he preaches is that you have to believe. That’s a requirement of being on the cutting edge. The failing forward principle works for everybody too. It’s a model that works.”
The spirit of helpfulness and failing forward also fosters kids’ confidence that they can weigh in with solutions of all kinds. To show me how that works, Devon took me over to a table where Jordan Chaver and Connor Scott, a sixth and seventh grader, were working together on something.
“These two guys,” he said, “are your app builders. They came with us out to Stony Brook University for some of our software program there. Jordan pitched them on building an app on iOS, which he already knew how to do. But there was not a single mentor in the room that knew what he was trying to do—. legitimately, because in university CS they don’t want to work in a closed environment. So we transitioned the challenge over to the Web: to instead make a Web based app with database functionality. And that’s what these guys are building. And there isn’t just one app. There’s one they call social-emotional. And another called Class Dash. Asked to demo one, Connor pulled up a Chromebook, angled it toward me and said, “Let’s say you have a research paper. One that’s big and complicated. And you press Submit. Behind this you have something kind of like Dropbox, where you can share documents.”
Devon jumped in to explain, “They’re sharing all their class assignments in a firewalled white spaced environment where they don’t have access to their emails. So this is a simple way of sharing inside that environment.”
Connor continued, “You also have this five-character ID code. Jordan can type in the code, and he gets the same exact document. So can anyone else with the code. The idea is to share something with the class in a way that avoids complications. We’re also in a class play, Once Upon a Mattress, which is based on the Princess and the Pea. I’m the Price and Jordan is the Wizard. So Jordan made this schedule for all the performances, where you can buy tickets, and so on.” On his Chromebook, Jordan showed me his page with the schedule next to a graphic of the play’s title. He then gave Connor the five-digit code for access to the schedule, and it came up on the Connor’s Chromebook. (A picture of that is here.)
Connor again: “Right now I’m adding a way to lock a document. Let’s say that Jordan is the teacher and he finds a spelling error in my document. I’ll add a button you can click on and see if anybody has updated the document.”
Jordan said, “Let me tell you more about Class Dash, which I did for Stony Brook. It’s a student-teacher companion app. It has multiple uses, but the one that’s currently available is called Schedule. It covers notes, teacher, room, and supplies. I play drums, so drumsticks are an example of supplies. I also have Instant Messaging Teacher. The idea is, if you have a homework question, instead of emailing the teacher and getting a response the morning after, the teacher gets a push notification on their phone.” Class Dash will first hit the market in April as an iOS app. Other versions will come after that.
Joseph Malone, also twelve, is at the same table, hacking AI algorithms. Devon said, “Joseph here is spinning up his own virtual machine and generating algorithms to train his AI to run his scripts. He’s going into OpenAI, playing with AI algorithms, modifying them, and putting them to use. It’s neat stuff, and it’s also huge.” Melora told me Joseph is also helping out by volunteering a stream of challenges, solutions and badges for kidOYO courseware. “He does all the work himself, and makes it open and available to everybody.”
“We’re fully networked here,” Devon adds. “No need for back-end support.” Meaning no external corporate dependencies. kidOYO and its participants—learners (they aren’t called students), mentors (they aren’t called teachers), parents, schools—all work together, and for each other, as a “community of communities.” They’re also not moving at the speed of anybody’s clock, or anybody’s class. Though they’re sure to change the world, that’s not the goal. In fact, there is no long-term goal. The journey is truly the reward, and the journey is called the learning path. That’s what matters, and its not seen, or built, as a way to plow through the status quo. Even though that’s one of the things it does. Neither Mineola nor kidOYO want to burden kids with anything at all, other than the need to master their digital worlds, and to constantly advance their mastery.
The Middle School was the second one we visited in Mineola. The first was Hampton Street School, which is Pre-K to 6th grade. There we saw clusters of five and six year old girls and boys in the library’s Coding Center, hacking away on on school-issued tablets using Scratch, which is free (as in both liberty and cost), open source and runs on anything. They were also doing this both by themselves and collaboratively.
The way kidOYO works, all the kids know they are working both to expand their own skills and those of other kids as well. There are also rewards along the way, such as on-screen fireworks and badges. After a bit of working on their own, the kids’ work is shown on a screen for review by each other and Melora, their mentor. (The learner/mentor relationship is central to the kidOYO system, and practiced in the Mineola school system as well.) Devon later explained what was going on: “Melora was reviewing the process of getting challenge submission feedback from mentors, as well as introducing them to a new app called Sprite Editor that we recently released for kids to create art they may want add to their Scratch, Python or Web-based projects. Often it’s their own video game character art.”
When one boy failed a particular challenge, he embraced it, knowing that FAIL means “first attempt at learning.” Three girls came over to help the boy out. It was interesting to watch how they knew their job wasn’t to jump in with the right answer, but to help the boy learn what he didn’t know yet, so he would have the satisfaction of succeeding for himself. This was a far more sophisticated and mature than I would normally expect of kids so young. Instead I would have expected kids that age to show off what they knew, or to one-up each other. But that’s not how the kidOYO approach works.
Have you ever played the red/black game? I remember it as an exercise the human potential movement used to teach in weekend retreats and workshops to show there’s more to be gained from cooperation than from competition. The idea behind the game is to reprogram adults so they value cooperation at as well as competition. My point in bringing it up is that it’s hard to teach adults how to deal with each other in ways that are as empathetic, helpful and vanity-free as what I saw as normal behavior among these little kids.
At Hampton Street, Devon spent most of his time working with a second grader named William Ponce, who was clearly grooving on what he was doing. Later, Devon wrote to explain what was going on:
Here is William Ponce’s portfolio. Every kid has one. You can see badges he has earned. If you click on one of his “Mastery Badges” you will see the “Learning Pathway” that he navigated in earning it, displayed as evidence in the badge. Clicking on the micro badges in evidence will show you the badges earned on way to mastery badge.
Here was helping William earn his first Mastery Badge. Since we left that class, you can see he has earned two more already!!
Our third stop was Mineola High School, which has a fab lab and manufacturing facility. “We actually source product from them,” Devon told us on the way over. “For our store. Coding is the underlying infrastructure, but it’s applied everywhere.”
The Fab Lab is beyond impressive. It’s as big as a lumber yard and has lots of machinery, materials, and students making stuff. Ken Coy, who runs the lab, explained, “We do it all. Welding, electronics, coding, Arduino, hand tools, computer tools. We bring it all together here. We have all the old traditional tools you’d have in wood shop days—drill press, band saw, lathe, tools for sanding—plus all the new stuff that’s both manual and computer controlled. Large format printers, laser cutters…”
When I asked him about Linux, he brought me over to the shop’s Linux CNC (Computer Numerical Control) computer, running on Ubuntu and attached to a Probotix controller and a router. (Not a network router, but a powered workworking tool that cuts with bits or blades.) In the design class space, Andrew Woolsey (@WoolseyDesigns) showed me a CNC controlled laser cutter where the students were tracing, carving and printing out parts for art projects, signs and much more (which occupied students on adjacent tables). He also showed me a printer as wide as a piano churning out student portraits and posters of amazing quality, including ones for the Mineola Robotics Team (@mineolarobotics), which is apparently (judging from the awards and posters) always competitive. I don’t often see stuff that makes me wish I was fourteen again, but Mineola High School did the job. Walking around the fab lab, the library and the halls, I didn’t see a kid who wasn’t upbeat and engaged, or a teacher who wasn’t the same.
My mind blown, I followed up that one-day tour by asking Devon and Melora a lot of questions that amounted to an interview. Here it is.
DS: How much about Linux, including, eventually, operating in command line mode, do kids pick up, and at what stage? I also want to know how kids learn to be masters across platforms: from Linux to Mac, Windows, Android and iOS, because I saw and heard all of those discussed in the schools we visited.
DL: It varies by program type and mentor interaction. In schools, its limited. While schools are using Chromebook computers which can be dual booted into a Linux Ubuntu environment, this is generally disabled. Some schools will use Raspberry Pi’s that will allow for introduction to Linux OS, but its still rare. To some degree they are limited by the gear they get, and the familiarity with Linux of the mentors. But we support Linux with curriculum whenever it’s possible. And we do our best to push schools in the Linux direction.
In kidOYO programs we run in our own community, outside of school classrooms, Linux engagement is higher. Here it scales with complexity of lessons and the skills of students and mentors. This past semester, our program was hosted at Stony Brook University, and we had ten to sixteen year old students learning to create projects within Linux Ubuntu and GNU Linux OS, as well as Mac plus Windows by installing Windows sub-systems for Linux. They can set up their dev environment with basic shell commands, using Vim, gradle, flask, etc. Skills and proclivities on this path vary widely, but I will say that outside of game development skills specifically, most high level learners tend to be Linux proficient as well. It’s just a corollary I’ve observed over many years. For his Demo Day project to show parents, one kid built Ia multi-player version of Space Invaders in Java using libgdx on his machine running Linux Ubuntu. He did this at age eleven.
Since our platform runs on Linux, and my core team also serves as mentors to kids in these programs, we always enable students to see behind the scenes, and learn why we use certain tools, such as Linux and Vim. To a kid at first this stuff is not obvious, or necessarily relevant. Still, as they advance we show them how Vim works and how it is used, then create challenges for them to try it out. Some kids are tuned to this innately and once they touch Linux and root dev methods via command line, they never go back to the GUI. Others fight it, as you might expect, and prefer GUI computing. Once kids self-identify as interested/proficient in an area like this one, I try to support them sharing their knowledge and interests as they think others should also like learn. Here is one such example, created by 12 year old student who only uses Linux machines.
DS: What is it that makes kidOYO’s approach so different?
DL: Our main goal, which is to influence the way learners—not students—approach learning. This affects both students and teachers, as we create opportunities several ways: one in the context of indie classrooms that our organization leads, another in K-12 classrooms our mentors support, and another in the context of professional development, or PD, allowing teachers to self-provision their needs as a peer-group and as a school district. Our platform serves as foundation for STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, math) learning across a diverse landscape of tools, methods, toys and concepts, all of which are about self-led learning, which goes beyond pedagogy.
Its not without a fight. There are plenty of pedagogy-centric thinkers in the ranks of teachers and administrators, and plenty of methods to support their priorities. For example, pedagogy-oriented thinkers tend to complain when we give kids real world tools like their own DNS (domain name) + hosting + editors. Instead they prefer limiting use-context of tools, so the kids can’t publish online and complete the feedback loop. Instead of letting kids build their own learning portfolio, they prioritize templated tools with limited functions and limited downstream value for independent learning.
DS: Tell me about your approach to business and open source, because I think it’s unusual.
DL: We think open source needs to be free as in freedom, or liberty. Not that a business based on it has to be free of cost. So we’re all about free code, but we charge for our services. And that’s how we’re bootstrapped. Our services provide nearly all our income. Parents and schools pay us because they get value out of what we do. Even though kidOYO is a nonprofit, that’s our business. And paying for value is part of what makes us a community as well.
Meanwhile, we’re up against corporate giants who may or may not be about open source, but they do give away lots of stuff for free, either outright or on a freemium model. Smaller edtech operations with superficially similar businesses also have a FREE come-on.
DS: But some of your services are free, no?
DL: Yes. With codeLI.org and FredXcoders (in Fredricksburg), all content is created by volunteer mentors, and the depth of engagement tends to be exploratory in nature. These communities run cost free live events, and curriculum resources are produced to support independent engagement. Where that model struggles is with sustained mentor engagement. That’s why we have a member:cost model.
In order to have sustained mentor feedback loops, kidOYO runs member:cost communities. Mentors in these are compensated for their support of student learning. This allows increased diversity in learning progressions for students, and has served as the way we’ve generated revenue for our organization, and funded building all these tools and relationships over the years.
Here we have an opportunity for the platform to support “franchise” community groups. Each franchise group can set its own cost, manage community content, and structure mentor-student memberships locally based on permissions and rules set by community owners. As a non-profit, this becomes a business model capable of provisioning multiple services under the membership definition. IRS rules allow for membership fees of up to $75/year without any reporting requirements.
At kidOYO, we are also about to unveil our direct-to-customer model of memberships, which will be priced at $75 per year, plus the cost of curriculum pathways chosen by members. An OYOclass.com account is always cost-free and allows for data access/ownership/downloading, plus project portfolio and badge portfolio. Joining a community has rules set by the “community owner.” So codeLI.org is FREE, but kidOYO has costs.
Membership in kidOYO will come with some additional benefits, such as discounted member pricing for our live Fall/Spring/Summer events and our swag store. We are currently building a OYOclass API to support this across domains .
Schools are currently paying $35 per year per account at a minimum of 1250 accounts. This represents our charity pricing, with zero margin, as an unfunded non-profit supporting tech and live personnel services. We are lowering the minimum to 500 at $50 per right now, and hoping we can do even better as our efforts scale. Our original goal with zero accounts using the platform was to get under $100, and our new goal is to achieve $20 per account. As a combination of tech plus live personnel services, plus data privacy/fiduciary under legal contract, I think this is strong value proposition.
DS: Unpack your corporate structure a bit more for us.
DL: kidOYO is a registered trademark for educational software and first put in use in 2006. It functions as DBA for NoizIvy.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which was founded in July 2001 to empower “entrepreneurial learning with technology through creation of products, services and programs in our local communities driven by peer-to-peer exchange and empowerment.” In that role we founded FredXcoders in 2011, in Fredricksburg, Virginia. We also started CodeLI.org in 2012, LI Maker Fest in 2015 (now official Eastern LI Maker Faire), launched the OYOclass.com platform in 2014 and in our first school district in 2015. That was Mineola. Now we’re approaching 75,000 members on Long Island in New York NY and preparing for national and international launch.
I’m the President of the company. Also a Developer and a Lead Mentor since 2001. Melora is the Executive Director. Also Creative Developer and a Lead Mentor since 2001. Bo Feng is a Software Engineer and our CTO since 2014.
Nine people work at NoizIvy.org currently. The three I just named are the core team. We also have four software developer who are also mentors, plus one maker engineer/mentor and one office manager, administrative assistant and mentor. Everyone in the company learns to code if they don’t know how already.
We also have one print book, self-published in 2006, and available online for twenty dollars.
DS: Tell me more about your business. What do you charge? How do you set your price points?
DL: We actually start with the seventh amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which says “where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved.” We all know that amendment as the one giving us a right to trial by jury. But what it actually presents is a twenty dollar bar against triviality, and a distinction between civil rights and market rights. There’s space there, under that twenty dollars, or the modern equivalent, for you to present a small civil case in a courtroom. Within that space is an existential gain in empowerment. It’s also where we have also evaporated our civil rights. So we look at our market, and mark up from that twenty dollars to thirty five dollars. That’s what we charge per student. Again, it’s pretty simple. And the student gets a lot of value for that money. So does the school, if they’re paying.
Now let’s go back to free-as-in-beer, or gratis-type free. Giant companies are taking huge advantage of free, with services consumers get for free while other value is being extracted from them. That’s one issue. Another is the Trojan Horse of free corporate goods and services to schools. Another, for us, is relevant to Linux and open source. In many cases schools are barred at the union level from accepting free services, at least in New York State. But our service isn’t gratis, so we’re cool with that.
DS: Have you taken in payments from any big companies?
DL: We have taken in ten thousand dollars in funding over past years from two corporate entities. Red Hat gave us five thousand, and a Long Island manufacturer, North Atlantic Industries,which makes electronics components used in military industry applications. That is it. We do everything on our own, in relationship with the community we serve. Parents and education leaders drive kidOYO. And the kids too.
DS: Is there a name for your category?
DL: There are two. One is #IndieEDtech. That’s the hashtag. The other is creative computing, which comes from the MIT Media Lab‘s Lifelong Kindergarten and and their Scratch perspective on CS.
DS: Is there a list of what we might call competitors here? Or just projects and companies kind of in the same business, or with similar goals?
DL: The FreeCodeCamp model exists in abundance, but it’s not really competitive. While it’s a free thing anyone can access, they spend most of their online real estate begging for donations. I’m not really down with the “begging” business model. Ask or beg for twenty dollars and its the same outcome. When you do that, you get trounced on by behavioral manipulation outcomes that distort the meaning of free-as-in-liberty initiatives. Codeacademy, CoderDojo and Code.org all have a different business approaches, but all use FREE-as-in-beer as a tool. When you look at the downstream relationships among their funding sources, however, more meaning is revealed. There’s a big donor status quo behind them.
#indieEdtech and kidOYO stand apart in the creative computing camp. Nobody else has our advocacy for public-benefit technology and skills that individuals own root authority over.
For a long time, our messaging was unlike any other. Only recently has the messaging of Apple turned in our direction on the data privacy side, but still we’re still dealing with “corporate EDU” having different priorities than #indieEdTech. So we do compete, in different ways, with Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, all of which have their own corporatized approaches to teaching kids computing. We compete with all of them as a small, or even tiny, non-profit. And we do go up against these behemoths every year, in every school, in every program offering we produce.
Because we’re independent, we can be very competitive. We are beating the big corps in direct contract negotiations. Their FREE approach versus our cost-with-integrity one go head to head, and we often win.
And, to be clear, we’re not always against what they bring. We’re glad to make use of the iPads and Chromebooks the schools get from big donors. But what we’re about is utterly independent of every behemoth’s businesses and goals for themselves.
DS: How about foundation or government funding?
DL: Something like 1.3 Billion got pledged pledged in support of CS education in 2018, and I expect kidOYO would be rejected by all of these sources of funding. I say that based on experience. We always get shot down. That’s because the goals, whether explicit or veiled, are for corporate expansion of influence and methods. Not for fostering general adeptness of independent learners. So we no longer bother.
DS: Tell me more about how you things are spreading geographically on Long Island, and how that models growth, both geographically and in other ways.
DL: You ask at a good time. We had a meeting with ten school districts yesterday. It involved superintendents, assistant superintendents of curriculum and instruction, directors of technologies, and lead teachers that focus on integrating kidOYO “code, make, own” in various parts of the middle school experience: grades five to eight.
The context was the first inter-district competitive hackathon on Long Island. Ten teams of eight students and coaches will be come together to engage in a social competition framed around “creative computing.” CS, engineering, making, art, game development, math, English, science and data-data-data will all be in the room during this event. And yet, “creative computing” among those peers will own the spotlight.
This is significant because in this area of learning—talent development and discovery, social creativity with imagination and empathy—stands out starkly against the historical basis of “computer science,” which is defined by its focus on research.
In so many ways, creative computing is enabling a different perspective on technology. Old school CS people do not present a developmental pathway I am excited about advocating to my kid, let alone yours. I find that too many people on this path put technology in front of humanity far too regularly. Can’t drive? Build self-driving cars. Can’t cook? Build UberEats. Can’t generate human empathy and personal imagination? Access sci-fi novels and support dystopian narratives of diversity in culture-producing outcomes.
On the other hand, creative computing is a paradigm shift away from that. It opens up a new context for the human-technology relationship: one that pursues framing on the basis of functional outcomes.
As we prep for this kind of event, we talk and discuss the creative computing perspective with education leaders that rarely get exposed to it otherwise. Every opportunity to bring this perspective to institutional players is a powerful step forward.
DS: Tell me more about your pitch. It must be interesting, because what you do is so radically different. And your website isn’t clear enough to me.
DL: Actually, what I have on site is misleading, by intent. Ive been throwing off competitors from swiping our concepts for years. I only have specific things on our sites that we can point at and clarify in personal conversations.
kidOYO.com only processes registrations for live events, which funded our operations for many years. OYOclass.com only sells a narrow description of what our platform can do, and sales only happen face-to-face. Our community of members and active users have a very unique and personal experience within our tools and with our community experience.
In essence, kidOYO is a creative computing and entrepreneurial learning management system. It is comprised of distinct components allowing it to have a multitude of market-based utilities and relationships. These include
- Personal learning tools, curriculum, mentor-feedback loops, and data-management capabilities over portfolios, micro-credentials, DNS, and web hosting configurations used by young learners engaging in “coding, making, owning” subject matter.
- Community infrastructure for entrepreneurial leaders bringing FREE & Cost-based service relationships to their business or charity.
- School infrastructure used for CS/Engineering/Entrepreneurship instruction and Professional Development, as well as for portfolios, micro-credentialing systems (which replaces report cards in some cases) and challenge-based learning.
- University infrastructure for Creative Computing/CS/Engineering/Entrepreneurship, providing every student root creative tools and data control across diverse domains of study, including a micro-credentialing system, portfolios, domains + hosting, and more.
- Mentoring system, for direct feedback loops useful in community education with focus on creative computing/CS/Engineering.
- Micro-credentialing platform, supporting open badges used in K-12, University, and community programs.
- Portfolio system, for use by students/teachers in documenting their own creative learning work for University admissions or workforce outcomes.
- Business model infrastructure—our most aggressive push, to change how community-based groups, businesses, schools and universities consider their evolving relationship with “customers” in a world where all participants own root value.
As you see, our biggest challenge has always been describing what we do. We do a lot, and it’s hard to say it briefly.
I am also fond of pointing out as a 501(c)(3) leader and developer of entrepreneurial outcomes, charity and entrepreneurship start the same way: when someone volunteers to solve a problem. We’re trying the build the creative infrastructure that supports those people, on a foundation that respects individuals as the root of community value.
DS: I’d like to know more about kidOYO’s background. I know you and Melora are from Long Island, and you’re here now; but you got your start with a toy business in Virginia. Tell me how you got from here to there to here again.
ML: I grew up in what many would consider an unconventional household. My Dad was a unique mix of tinkerer, artist, dare-devil and outright crazy person. I am not sure he was prepared to have a girl to be honest. That produced…well…me.
It’s relevant to point that out first, because his unconventional approach to parenting created someone who was never raised with gender “limitations.. I spent a good deal of my childhood immersed in projects in his shop out back. Although he was more than capable, he rarely created for the sake of practicality so there was never any fear of failure mixed into anything he or I did. The freedom to fail and laugh at those failures helped to shape me into someone who jumped into a any project I found interesting without worrying about the end outcome.
I had a tremendous amount of freedom, not being defined as a girl or a little kid in my environment. I could use any tool, any material, any method and make for the sake of making. I was trusted to fail through my own process of exploration when I was with my Dad. I was able to learn by doing and playing and that is how I approach my life still. I love to create new ways to learn through play. I studied Psychology at Stony Brook University, and when I took my first cognitive psychology class I was hooked. Really, everything I have done since then has been connected to the idea of teaching new skills to young brains.
I also learned along the way that I am a visual hands on learner. I think in pictures, so having the power to create digitally and with code has been so empowering for me. It gives me an unique ability to convey complex concepts to kids because I automatically turn problems/solutions into pictures.
DL: So I went to high school on Long Island. Melora and I met there too, though we didn’t get together for good until much later.
In high school, my aim for college was to play baseball and basketball. After a very successful time at that in high school, I hoped to get a scholarship at Columbia, but I got injured. I recovered well enough to get a scholarship to George Mason University, but there my interests became more academic and entrepreneurial, especially around technology.
That interest began with my first programming experience, which was on a Commodore 64 and soon after on an Apple IIe, when I was around nine and ten. Neither of my parents had any technical proclivities, but they put those things in front of me and I took advantage of them.
In high school, I discovered the magazine 2600 and how to hack into phone networks to make free calls using low-tech methods like a whistle to simulate tones unlocking long-distance calling capabilities. In terms of programming, I started in a Windows environment before Linux came around and I just had my own local environment to play with. I also ordered a CD-ROM on programming in C around that same time and played with that.
It wasn’t until 1992, when I entered college in Fairfax, Virginia that I started falling in love with programming on the Internet. Looking back, I was hacking around with ASP, PHP, HTML, databases… never learning in a formal setting, since none of this was covered in the CS classes I enrolled in. I was just playing, and trying to find resources that could help me better understand the dependencies and histories of languages, their ideal uses, and so on.
I learned everything by trial and error, finding others I could ask questions, and playing around with ideas. That was my learning method.
As the Web expanded, my learning expanded right along with it. I count myself lucky to have come of age at a time when the Web was doing the same, and people were making learning resources available online. As a lifelong entrepreneur, I am convinced that learning to code has been essential for me in learning to create in business. As an athlete, I self-taught my advanced skills, but never contemplated the role of failing forward and failing fast in skill development. I simply loved playing, and that was my focus.
As an entrepreneur and programmer, failing was not fun or playful. I had to discover something about my own attitude towards skill development that was crucial in sports and life in order to succeed in both. I never realized that it took personal courage and a productive attitude to overcome failure. I never realized that I had positive expectations sustaining my efforts through failures. I never counted how many shots I missed, or errant balls I threw. I just played with endless enthusiasm.
Becoming mindful of the process of learning to succeed by failing forward changed everything for me. It affected the speed I embrace in creative work: to start, fail, change methods, fail, iterate, fail, shift focus, fail, and keep moving forward with eyes on the objective, which is that I remain interested and enthusiastic about pursuing what I learn. None of this required me to be naturally gifted; it only mattered how I did what I did to improve.
So that is the root message of my own learning that I bring to all our programs: “Fail Forward, Fail Fast.
My non-profit interest traces back to my upbringing in a home that heavily leans left, with lots of social workers, economists, and university degrees in the ranks of my relatives. One of my first jobs was working for a local homeless shelter on Long Island delivering food to their shelters. I met women with Ph.Ds who were homeless, and who changed my perspective on what real poverty was. That influenced much of what I do. I am a big believer in empowering people, and helping them overcome the structural deficiencies that separate the haves from the have nots. At the root of my efforts is a constant interest in understanding entrepreneurial creativity, economics, and personal skill development—and helping people advance all of those.
I founded our non-profit in Virginia after attending the university, and then staying around Fairfax during the time when the Internet and the Web were entering the public sphere of interest and influence. My energies, throughout my entire adult life, have been entrepreneurial in nature, and the non-profit allowed me to bring technology skills and subjects into contact with kids and families in a powerful way. I simply volunteered to teach, to share ideas. And over time that work grew based on the interaction that those people were having with my ideas and methods.
OYO—own your own—has been the guiding philosophy behind our efforts. For young people and families, it resonates in a simple and powerful way. Kids get it immediately. Self-sovereign empowerment, personal data control, and skill development are all baked into of our methods and tools. From the beginning, our kids have always had control of their learning outcomes, their data, their methods, their paths of study, their voices, and their ability to make mistakes: to fail forward. Its all baked in. Kids follow what I talk about. When I visited the United Nations to discuss the role of identity in Human Rights, they knew why I was there. I went into schools and built projects with kids using Scratch and Python languages, explaining the the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and discussing how children are affected by such simple things as having a self-sovereign identity they truly own, and how administrative identifiers given to them is not the same thing.
The toy business grew alongside this. With Melora’s background in psychology, and our own son creating needs that drove solutions, sensory play products, construction play products and technology play were front and center every day. As a Dad, I tested my own ideas about the earliest ages different methods could develop an entrepreneurial mindset about skill development and participation in Society for kids as creative human beings. At age three, our son was delivering eggs from his backyard chicken farm to neighbors, setting prices, tracking expenses on crayon drawn charts, and learning that root authority in this life is personally created, as are the products and services that allow people to make money. Not jobs. That’s a concept that shows up much later. Only now, at age thirteen, and about to turn fourteen (the working age) has this become a subject of inquiry. On a foundation he owns, all possibilities exist for him to explore.
DS: We’ve talked about the effect of your work on kids, and Dr. Nagler talked about those kids’ effect on the world. He also talked a bit about the challenges his schools would face adapting to your methods, and how they tend to rocket kids upward in expertise faster than the existing system can handle. Now I’m wondering where you see this going for formal education?
DL: I see education splitting into two philosophical pathways.
One is old-school CS/E, with roots in research pedagogy. This has all the hallmarks of a lack of gender/race diversity and tends to attract specific types of students, led by traditional types of teachers. Most CS programs cannot support demand from students on University campuses today, and in K-12, the focus on AP CS testing requirements, as context of learning, remains broken. For example, where no computer is needed for final test. It’s all paper and pencil responses. But this is the default system, and it will persist, because it’s deeply institutional.
The other is creative computing in CS/E. MIT leads the way here, with forty percent of their undergrad population studying CS, according to a recent New York Times article. Harvard CS 101 also supports this path by starting students off with Scratch language. It also reports higher engagement by girls/minorities. What matters, as far as we’re concerned, is that creative computing works. It vastly outperforms old-school CS. And at some point, the market will move in the creative direction, because the demand will be there. And many of the kids in our communities today will supply that demand.
DS: What are the larger implications of that, outside the academy?
DL: Mainly ramifications for the future workforce. It will apply everywhere because CS applies everywhere. We live in a digital world now. You’ll see it in physics, applied math, arts, humanities, and social sciences. Anywhere the creative use of data and computing methods will make a difference.
And one of those differences will be empathy for local human conditions. This is sometimes lacking, radically, on the traditional path. We see this in all the ethical arguments against the abuses of people by many typical VC-funded Silicon Valley companies.
DS: We didn’t talk much about what you’re doing with other institutions outside Mineola. Can you give me a rundown of what’s happening in Stony Brook and other places? I want to get a sense of how your fires start and spread.
DL: So far, we are working with less than fifty percent of the hundred and thirty school districts on Long Island. There is plenty of potential, but many of the remaining districts here are not in a position to work with us, either due to their own budgetary planning and pension funding requirements, or due to lack of computing resources, such as laptops and computers for kids and teachers, or even functioning Wi-Fi. Those are real obstacles to progress.
The biggest obstacle is admin-level and teacher familiarity with this type of literacy. You can imagine the looks of confusion we encountered describing what we were doing in 2012. It’s getting better in 2019, but there is still lots of room for improvement. Setting accurate expectations is another challenge. Too often school leaders do not believe this type of learning is accessible to five, six, and seven-year-old kids, in a practical/meaningful way. So they stop waaayyy short of what kidOYO offers, choosing much lower level “digital literacy” pedagogies that make sense to a Facebook/Instagram user, with almost no context of functional literacy. In these cases, parents route around the problem of low-performing schools and bring their kids directly to our programs in large numbers. That can influence schools as well. We don’t need to push. The parents and kids do that.
At Stony Brook, we are actively discussing our own capability to support an “OYO University” self-led model of learning with mentor support on campuses that are struggling to meet the demand of students for this kind of learning. Stony Brook has been a great partner of ours for many years, with around six hundred fifty students enrolled in their Computer Science degree program. The demand from non-CS students to take CS classes is so high that they had to shut out students from enrolling in CS classes. And this is by no means unique to SBU. It’s happening all over the country and the world.
We are about to release OYO University platform deployments broadly as well. We just pitched SBU on our ability to support their 25,000 undergrad students starting in Fall 2019, and we’re looking for a first University partner to provide CS/E/Coding to all students on their campus.
Toward that, to date we’ve donated $125,000 to the SBU Foundation in support of a “Mentor Service Award.” That’s a lot for an unfunded non-profit. And this could scale with help.
This is just a fraction of what we talked about since our visit to see kidOYO at work. And I have to say that I want to be cautious about getting too enthusiastic. Reporters are supposed to be as objective as possible, and not to get emotionally invested in what they cover. But without emotional investment Linux wouldn’t be here, and neither would Linux Journal.
Marshall McLuhan taught that our tools are extensions of our selves, and that they shape us after we shape them. He also said every new medium “works us over completely.” That’s what’s happening in our new digital age, which is still very new.
Not long ago I was talking with Joi Ito, an old friend who runs the MIT Media Lab, about historical precedents for what we might call our species’ digital transition: the one by which we become digital as well as physical animals. Was it as big as the industrial revolution? Movable type? Writing? Speech? Joi said, “I think it’s the biggest thing since oxygenation.” In case you’re counting, that happened about two and a half billion years ago. It’s a big deal.
There’s a dystopian way of looking at what becoming digital does to kids. There’s also a utopian one. Both are polar extremes that surely won’t happen. But after watching these kids in Mineola learn, and help each other, and invent stuff both for fun and because it’s useful, and become so adept, so fast, at creative computing… well, color me optimistic. With these kids, and others like them, the world is on good hands.
