Can you hear me better now?

Yes, a little bit better.

Hopefully, it works. I was calling, because I run an organization called Code.org. We are simultaneously building one of the largest online platforms for teaching and learning computer science in schools. We’re also helping and supporting lots of governments with making computer science part of the primary and secondary education system.

I know Taiwan in general has a larger commitment to teaching computer science, compared to most countries. We’re hoping to build connections with, effectively, the folks in the government who are doing that. It’s probably in the Ministry of Education, I’m not sure.

The connection we got to, they said, given your role and your own personal background in computer science, that you’d be the best person to start talking with.

Well, I’m the Digital Minister in my day job, but out of my day job, I am still maintaining connections with my previous communities. I was part of the K-12 curriculum committee, we did make this competency-based design where ICT, media literacy, and so on are woven into the curriculum.

One of the main thing about the new curriculum, which took effect a few month ago, was that the design of particular texts and particular learning mechanisms is for each and every school to consider by themselves. Just by googling, I can see that there is quite a few primary schools in Yunlin, in Hsinchu, and so on, is making full use of this flexibility to just put Code.org into their classes. They don’t need any approval from the Ministry of Education.

My role would be that of a more promotional or a more sharing experimental results status, because with the new curriculum, the Ministry of Education can no longer force any school to do anything.

Understood. Yes, in fact, within Taiwan, we have more student accounts than anywhere else in Asia. Because of Taiwan’s adoption, Chinese is regularly among the top five languages used on Code.org. That’s not because of adoption within China. It’s more because of adoption within Taiwan. Our goal isn’t to get the government to say, “Everybody must teach using Code.org.”

In fact, if I had to describe our goal, it isn’t for every school to teach Code.org. It’s for every school to teach computer science. We create our curriculum platform as an option, in case people want to use it. There’s plenty of other alternatives, and a lot of people create their own curriculum using a platform such as Scratch. Because we’re a nonprofit, we don’t make money because people use our platform.

In fact, we lose money. [laughs] We only want the schools that want to use it to use it, but we’d love to get help in terms of promoting computer science, breaking stereotypes in computer science. If it’s promoting the Code.org platform, that’s a great positive as well, but it’s not a requirement for us to do things together.

Sure. That’s great. I just add one quick thing. Scratch, before it ported its platform to HTML5, had a more limited audience. After Scratch 3, indeed, it’s gaining a lot of traction.

Yes, as it should. Again, the approach we take is…First of all, Scratch is different than Code.org, partly because they are an IDE, and we are an IDE and curriculum combined. Also, Scratch only does block-based coding, so it’s limited mainly to primary school, whereas our IDE and curriculum cover, they go from block-based coding to JavaScript.

They include data analysis, cybersecurity courses, courses on how the Internet works. There’s a lot more. It’s more of a curriculum than a coding platform, although we do have a block-based platform. We don’t view Scratch as a competitor. We view it as something that a lot of teachers start their students on Code.org and then move to Scratch.

Many move back to Code.org when they want to learn JavaScript. My view towards that is that’s just how schools work. Nobody can build one platform that is the only thing a teacher uses in their classroom, and it’s the right thing for students to learn computer science across multiple platforms. You get a better appreciation, better understanding of how things work.

That’s how professional programmers work, too.

Exactly, exactly. You stand out. My background is as a computer scientists, and you stand out, because both within government and with any role in K-12, it’s rare to have somebody who has a computer science background. Most of the work I do is talking to people who have never themselves learned computer science, and they’re trying to reason with what’s the right way to do things.

I mainly wanted to start a dialog to just learn more about how Taiwan is thinking about expanding computer science in schools. Is there more that we can do to help? In particular, we think that making computational thinking compulsory is an important step, but we’re worried about whether there are enough teachers who know how to teach computer science. Are there ways we can help?

In general, I want to just figure out who are the right people within the ministry to work with. I’m guessing you’d be a great champion for this work, but it doesn’t necessarily directly fall into your current work, because it’s more your previous work.

That’s right. There’s several things. In the curriculum design, we basically said that it’s essential for every student to be a lifelong learning. We see technology, information, and media competencies as one of the three interactive skills. The other two is symbolic communication, the other one is art and aesthetics communication. They all fall into the communication competency.

It’s not like people can skip out of computational thinking and media literacy. While we chose the word competency instead of literacy, mostly because when you talk about media literacy, people mostly mean the literacy as consumers of information, or as viewers and readers of media. Similarly, numeracy or computer literacy mostly means that people are users of software systems.

We chose competencies, realizing that, because we have broadband as human right anywhere in Taiwan, even on the top of Taiwan, which is 4,000 meter high almost, or the southmost Pacific islands, all the students are guaranteed to have 10 Megabits per second. That’s my current work, by the way.

The point here is that, just as the children are becoming YouTubers, and therefore producers of media, instead of consumers, people are also becoming just everyday programmers who just automate away the chores. Instead of becoming a computer scientist, they still have other aspirations, but can just use code to make their word easier, and automate away the various trivial tasks.

Trivial as in a simple instruction, not as in unimportant. Basically, by undergrad now, half of the undergrad students can use programming to simplify the work they do in their studies. We expect that rate to still continue. The municipal governments are free to design their curriculum guidelines so that students in the primary school are required to learn code as a kind of foreign language.

For the rural and non-municipal governments, currently, they don’t mandate coding, per se, but they can, for example, integrate it into their other, like in a more vocational-oriented, maybe people just learn open document spreadsheet formulas. That’s another thing, we prefer to use free software, especially during primary and secondary, but also senior high as well.

By the time they finish K-12, we don’t want the vendor to go away or abandon that product line. They are free to use proprietary software by the time that they graduated, but during the K-12, we strongly prefer free software and hardware. There’s also, for example, as I mentioned, in the non-municipal schools, sometimes, we teach data stewardship first, before anything about programming.

One popular case is the AirBox, which has more than 2,000 stations Taiwan-wide. Each one costs maybe less than 100 US dollars. They automatically report the air quality, like PM2.5 and so on, over WiFi, sometimes over NB-IoT, to a shared distributed ledger that let everybody know how the air quality is across Taiwan.

There are some competencies that cannot be taught until they become stewards of data and producer of information, and AirBox is one of it. We look at it from a more holistic point of view, of basically how to collaborate within the data ecosystem as a peer, rather as only a consumer or a analyst.

We think that important ideas like GDPR and so on, only make sense to be taught in that framework. That’s the kind of three-minute overview of where we’re coming from.

Got it. Can I ask, since you said the ministry doesn’t require anything in terms of specific curriculums, or specific courses, or specific tools for schools…

That’s right. They have to check all the competencies and make sure they are fulfilled, but we don’t specify which way that they fulfill those competencies.

You also said you could do something to promote. What did you mean by that?

Case in point, I have personally translated quite a few games from a designer with the name Nicky Case. I don’t know whether you know of their work. Nicky did, I think, the originally 2014, the Coming Out Simulator, but then after that, the Parable of Polygons, that talks about the Schelling segregation model.

Then the Game of Trust, I think, that talks about the prisoner’s dilemma, then the media framing effect, and then the small world network. Basically, Nicky makes a game, a interactive, out of each and every important competency subjects in the so-called Things You Can Play initiative.

By personally translating that, as well as making sure that the deputy minister of education gets a list of translated and non-translated things that students can play, we made sure that I, both in my talks to the high school principals…I talk to each and every principal in a cross-country meetings, maybe three meetings every year.

We make sure that they are aware that there are resources, such as Nicky’s games, such as Duolingo, such as Scratch, and so on. They are, of course, free to evaluate with their teachers whether they want to adopt it or not. My basic principle is that any school that invites me to speak, I just promote whatever I have learned of, and we publish everything on YouTube.

That is also sometimes used as just learning material by the curriculum development committee within each and every school. That’s the kind of role I’m playing now.

Got it. The combination of that and translation might be something of interest. One of the things, the reason I mentioned it, is Code.org usage in Taiwan is already one of our largest countries. It’s the number eight country in terms of total usage of Code.org, and almost a million students in Taiwan have accounts on Code.org. That said, almost all of our content is still in English.

The primary school content, which is the one that’s used the most, only about one-fourth of it is even translated into Chinese. There may be an opportunity to find a local partner who helps us with the translation. I’m not sure whether that, you could help us with that.

Yeah, sure.

Then to, after the translation is complete, do some sort of announcement or integrate it into things that you talk about afterwards as a result.

Right. You are using Crowdin to translate?

Yes, we use Crowdin. We use Crowdin as a platform. Many volunteers submit translations within that platform. We’ve also had situations where we’ve even worked with a single, formal partner who’s a direct translation contractor to do the work, because volunteer doesn’t always get the highest quality.

Is there an example? If I look only at Crowdin, I also see Arabic as translated. The crowdsourced languages among them still, traditional and simplified Chinese are the highest.

The highest what?

Yeah. For Chinese simplified, I’m seeing 67 percent translated, and in Chinese traditional, I’m seeing 65 percent translated.

That must be up from the last time we checked it, because the last time I had asked, we were at 30 percent. That was when I first reached out to you, so it might have increased over the last few weeks.

There’s something that I wrote way back that systemically translates Chinese simplified to Chinese traditional and vice-versa, with a dictionary lookup method. If you have a complete coverage in one, you can have a, like, 99 percent complete coverage in the other. Of course, I no longer actively develop Encode::HanConvert by now… I did that in 2002.

One of successors to that is called OpenCC. If you have a translation that’s 100 percent in simplified or Chinese, you can use this software easily to make it a 99 percent correct traditional or a simplified translation.

Got it. Thank you for sending that to me.

Of course, I’m happy to help crowdsourcing the remaining, what, 33 percent? We very quickly hit into diminishing returns after 10 percent or so, based on crowdsourcing alone, because people usually translate what they’re interested in.

Yeah. A lot of our translations just happen organically without promotion, just people finding the translate page without somebody proactively calling on it, or calling on it to happen. A more proactive effort to find a translator who’s actually dedicated to it may help get the whole thing across.

Oh, yeah, definitely, definitely. That, I’ll do. I’ll look if there’s any people that are using Code.org as part of their work. Maybe they’re social entrepreneurs that do some value-adding work based on this content. The other thing, why I mentioned diminishing returns, is that by junior high level, people do use English somewhat fluently for the read and write, at least.

Most of the junior high and senior high curriculum designers and teachers that I know probably wouldn’t see this as a high priority.

Yeah, but it’s the primary school curriculum that’s the most important.

That’s right, that’s right. Are there any priorities, like tutorials, or video captions, or?

To be honest, I don’t know offhand, directly. This would be a great area to connect somebody on my team who manages the translations, whether to you or to somebody who you think would be a good person to follow up with.

I actually may know some of your Chinese traditional translators. There’s Franklin Weng from the SLAT, the Software Liberty Association of Taiwan, which brings me back. I think I helped naming. I’ve met Franklin.

Also, Dnowba, who is also the admin of the Taiwan localization community for Scratch.

I would say that you are in very good hands, because these are the people that I would recommend, actually.

I’m happy to reach out and see whether there is any promotional resources that they may need, but your Chinese traditional lead translators are already the ones that I would recommend.

All right, great.

It’s a matter of how much resource or priority they put into this particular translation project, but their translations are to be trusted.

Are you all doing any things in terms of events, whether at the government level, or using any form of media to build excitement around computer science, aside from the requirement inside the curriculum?

To be honest, specific applications of computer science, say machine learning, or distributed ledgers, currently dominate this discussion. There is so much buzz from social sector and private sector that it’s, I’m really unsure what the public sector can do anymore without breaking the hype curve. [laughs]

Most of our work now is making sure that we don’t leave the rural, the indigenous, and the offshore people behind. For that, we do do camps and promotional events. Also, we work with Google.org, or Microsoft, their CSR arm, to make sure that the senior high school students, before they enroll into undergrad, but after they know that they have a university, they can also enroll in camps focusing on deep learning and so on.

We do do this kind of camps and so on. The government always play a supporting role instead of curriculum-setting role. We make sure that it reaches everybody, basically, but we don’t say that, which curriculum or which summer camp vendor is to be preferred. We just make a list and make sure that people constantly gets updated.

Got it. For me, my most important next step is to send the OpenCC thing to my team to see if we can use that and hook it up to automatically do conversions back and forth, so we…

…can double spend — to use a DLT jargon. [laughs]

After we get closer to 100 percent translated, we could circle back with you to see if there’s a way to do something that’s more in the promotional vein, spreading the word, or making announcement of that as an achievement.

Yes. The other thing that I can be sometime of help is, for example, I don’t know whether you know, there’s another not-for-profit called Mozilla Organization, they did a crowdsourcing experiment called Common Voice.

Last November, when they launched Common Voice traditional Chinese, we made sure that, first, that I wrote a Business Weekly article that is widely read, that calls everybody to action, because they have people who record, but at that point, not sufficient people to validate, I think, just a specific call to action in my column. Also, there was an art exhibition in the Social Innovation Lab, which I maintain.

In the close-by Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, I just went there and read aloud the Common Voice contributions as an art installation. That did generate some interest. Just make it part of a cultural event and so on. I’m happy to write a column about Code.org, once we have a call to action. The usual criteria is that a random person that did not have any prior experience can get gratification within five minutes.

Everybody in Taiwan have five minutes of kindness, but if there’s no such instant gratification, then we usually wait until there is something that can give this kind of gratification.

Got it. Thank you so much. I’m glad we spoke, to get a little bit of familiarity. We’ll focus on the translation, after we’re much closer on it, we’ll circle back and talk about the promotion. If there’s any types of events or activities around computer science in Taiwan that you all want our help promoting on our social media, please let us know.

We’re also, just so you know, hoping to host convening of global players that are doing computer science education, whether it’s members at the ministry level or NGOs. We did this just in September last month, so we’ll do it again next year in September. This is basically to bring together thought leaders from around the world who are pushing computer science education in schools.

It would be great to have somebody from Taiwan present there, whether it’s yourself or somebody from the Ministry of Education.

I think the Junyi Academy, as I mentioned in my email, is the team to talk to. They just did a social sector-led K-12 curriculum forum, which is quite high profile. In the computing field, in their autonomous learning curriculum, They are also dedicated to help the people in rural places, which aligns with the public sector mission very well.

In the resources that they use, as you can see here, you are placed before Scratch. You are actually the top suggestion, Code.org, then Scratch 3, then Scratch 2, and then everybody else. I think you’re natural allies when it comes to those kind of high-level forums, as well as localization.

Got it.

As in cultural localization, not just translation.

They seem like the natural partner for driving the localization as well.

That’s right.

All right. Well, thank you so much for your time. I’ll be in touch once we know more about the translation.

I’m a translator in my previous life, and I still enjoy contributing to translation. One of the software that we use regularly called Slido, I’m actually the lead translator, even now. Just yesterday, I caught up with their new features and translated everything. So feel free to reach out to me as a translator too.

That’s pretty incredible. That’s great.

All right, cheers.

Cheers, have a good day.

Let’s keep in touch. OK, bye.

Bye-bye.