Pat Yongpradit on AI literacy and computer science education

What does AI literacy mean for students and their teachers? Code.org Chief Academic Officer Pat Yongpradit—himself a former middle school computer science teacher—joins Reid and Aria for the first-ever live-taping of Possible, recorded at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego. In this episode, they discuss why school-wide bans on AI are a terrible idea and what “always be learning” refers to in an age of AI. Plus, Pat unveils, for the first time publicly, Code.org’s newest tool for teachers: an AI assistant that helps computer science teachers grade assignments. Special thanks to Will Cullen, Colin Faul, Bella Willis, Braeden Rutherford, Whitney Kim, Samantha Urban Tarrant, Hadi Partovi, Debra Quazzo and Little Monster Media Company. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/ Topics: 2:19 - Hellos and intros 2:50 - Pat’s social mission video game homework 4:34 - Pat’s origins with teaching and computer science 6:33 - Making Microsoft Copilot as accessible as possible Code.org’s mission 8:08 - Learning concept tools for real world applications for 9:45 - What do young people need to know about AI literacy work 11:58 - What Pat is excited about with generative AI and the future 13:40 - What are the guardrails for the classroom with AI 16:45 - How does AI enhance teaching and learning 21:31 - Break 22:04 - Using Devin as a lens into the future 24:09 - Multidisciplinary ethics around coding 28:45 - What project would Aria do for Do Something through the lens of AI 34:55 - What you are most worried about when it comes to AI and education 39:09 - Code.org secret sauce and future 41:10 - Rapid-fire questions Select mentions: Cointelligence by Ethan Mollick TeachAI Stanford Accelerator for Learning Amazon Echo skit from Saturday Night Live Demo of the AI engineer Devin Bologna Business School Commencement Speech ASU+GSV Summit and AIR Show Possible is an award-winning podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future. Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with an ambitious builder or deep thinker on a topic, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. These conversations also showcase another kind of guest: AI. Whether it's Inflection’s Pi, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or other AI tools, each episode will use AI to enhance and advance our discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  And obviously, we're going to be talking about AI and education. My favorite usage right now would probably be, actually, it wouldn't be lesson planning. I think my favorite thing might be B-simulation. For example, I simulated this podcast, and I just went to practice and see what it felt like. So the opportunity to iterate with a thing in a safe way for both students and teachers, I think that's super useful.

• 0:31Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:32Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finkler.

• 0:34Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? What we can possibly get right if we leverage technology like AI and our collective effort effectively?

• 0:46Aria Finger?

  We're speaking with technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers across many fields: AI, geopolitics, media, healthcare, education, and more.

• 0:56Reid Hoffman?

  These conversations showcase another kind of guest. Whether it's Inflection's Pi, OpenAI's GPT-4, or other AI tools, each episode we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.

• 1:09Aria Finger?

  In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:16Reid Hoffman?

  This is Possible.

• 1:19Aria Finger?

  Hey, everyone. So this is not our first time talking about education on the show. We've heard from Sal Khan of Khan Academy, Ethan Mollick from Wharton, and Ben Nelson of The Minerva Project. We continue to feature leading innovators and educators because we believe that education is one of the most promising frontiers for AI to benefit people. Today's guest, Pat Young Pradit, spent a decade teaching computer science in American classrooms before becoming the chief academic officer at Code.org, which is a nonprofit promoting inclusive computer science education from kindergarten through high school. This episode also marks the first time we've recorded Possible in front of a live audience.

• 2:03Aria Finger?

  What you're about to hear, so please forgive the sound quality, was recorded at the annual ASU GSV Summit in San Diego this past April. It was in front of an audience of ed tech and workforce innovators. And here's Reid kicking it off.

• 2:19Reid Hoffman?

  Hello, I'm Reid Hoffman. Today, we'll get into the future of education, including what it takes to equip the next generation of students and teachers. We sometimes hear that AI is coming for coding, making it less essential. Today's guest believes otherwise. Pat leads the Steering Committee at Teach AI, a global initiative empowering educators to teach with and about AI. So let's dive in. Welcome, Pat.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Thank you, Reid. Thank you, Arya.

• 2:48Reid Hoffman?

  Yep, I'll start us off. So before you joined Code.org, you spent 13 years teaching middle and high school kids. You also made a point of giving your students assignments with social missions and real-world applications built in. And one example, which I refrained from asking you before because I so much wanted to hear the answer, create video games that involve saving people rather than destroying them. What was one of your favorite final products that you saw come from that? And can you share a little bit more about what the students got out of that exercise?

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Okay. So I taught middle school, so shout out to any of my middle school teachers out there. You know, you know, we know. And so I had my students create games for social good. And one of the student groups created a game called "How to Get a Date with an Environmentalist." And it was basically a choose-your-own-adventure where you had to answer questions to impress this environmentalist in order to, in the end, get a date with them. Now, the interesting thing about that is it took at least two years of programming for them to have the skills to do something like that. And obviously, we're going to be talking about AI and education.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  And it's amazing how quickly you can get to that level of fun and excitement and changing the world now in this age.

• 4:09Aria Finger?

  So, Pat, you know that I used to run DoSomething.org, which was all about getting high school students, college students, involved in volunteerism. So you were at McGill, you were studying neurobiology. I don't know if you had always wanted to be a teacher or what, but a volunteer opportunity changed it all. So tell us, how did you go from student to special education, science, computer science teacher?

• 4:34Speaker 00

  I actually, so I went to a high school that specialized in science, math, and computer science. And computer science was, at that time, like a parlor trick to me. This was before the graphical internet and right when email came out. And it was always a parlor trick. We did early models and simulations as well. And I never thought of it as a career. So I entered into a neurobiome program at McGill University. And about halfway through, I volunteered in a special education program in a neighboring high school, got the opportunity to tutor a bunch of kids, and instantly realized that that was my calling. And then when I told my parents, they almost disowned me. They convinced me to finish my degree and then get a master's in education and then

• 5:19Speaker 00

  start my teaching career.

• 5:21Reid Hoffman?

  Love it. So, you know, part of the mission with code.org is to enable, you know, students everywhere, basically of all ages getting into college, to learn computer science. We obviously have AI coming with this kind of massive wave where you and I have both heard from the same source where it says the programming language of the future is English or other human languages. And obviously, there's a whole bunch of AI efforts, like Devon, trying to create, you know, kind of software engineers. What does this mean for code.org, its mission? What students should be learning?

• 6:06Reid Hoffman?

  What's the kind of view into the future here?

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so code.org's mission is providing every student the opportunity to learn computer science and with a focus on underrepresented groups currently in computer science. And that mission actually has always had even a higher mission, which is providing opportunity, period, for kids to participate as active creators in this digital world. And so that doesn't change because of AI. Now, what might change about what we do is what we emphasize and de-emphasize per the, well, let's just take the coding process. And as a lot of people know here, coding is just one aspect of computer science. And so even though Gen AI could cook up

• 6:49Speaker 00

  basic code pretty well, that doesn't change the need for kids to still practice it to have a hands-on experience with understanding what computing is. Now, it's obviously a little different at the industry level because folks have already learned and they're able to use these tools in super productive ways, but kids still need to learn the basics in some way, shape, or form. And what might change is how they learn the basics or what we emphasize, de-emphasize. For example, kids might not have to learn how to write code as much as read and evaluate, test and debug code, and then even the bigger, more exciting things like user experience and making sure that it actually solves a real-world problem.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  So I'm super excited about the future of CS education.

• 7:37Reid Hoffman?

  So as a follow-up, if you were going to task making a video game or an exercise of making video games as collaborative games together with generative AI, what kinds of mental tools for whether it's architecture or evaluation, it's connectivity to real-world problems, what are the kinds of learning concept tools that are going to be important for the kids for the next decades?

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Well, the computer science education world calls this computational thinking, and that consists of skills like abstraction, decomposition, pattern recognition. And these things are just things that are going to be important, even more important in an age of AI. And so what these tools allow you to do these days, like let's just say ChatGPT, it decreases the barrier between idea and implementation. And so it really democratizes the idea of creating a digital artifact for everyone. And I cannot wait until someone creates the mega IDE that allows you to, you know where I'm going with this, just to speak into it and out pops like a workable prototype of anything.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  I call this thing the Dream Maker. Yes.

• 8:58Aria Finger?

  All right, so let's get to that dream maker. So when you think about computer science and coding, even though not every kid is going to be an engineer, or not every kid is going to be a coder, you still think it's important to learn those philosophies and those thoughts. And I actually have to give a shout out, because my senior year AP computer science teacher is in the audience, and even though I didn't become an engineer. Yes, exactly. Incredible. Just such a dream. I was, I had facility with that language. I knew I understood it. I knew I could do it. So now, in the age of AI, like, what are we talking about when we get to AI literacy and young people? How do we build it in either to the curricula, to the school system, at the classroom level? Like, what do young people need to know?

• 9:41Speaker 00

  Oh, boy. What do young people need to know? Well, I think the goal of AI literacy, whatever it is, because there are a lot of groups trying to figure this out right now. A colleague of mine, Jeremy Rochelle, leads a lot of the AI literacy work at Digital Promise, and they're trying to figure out what AI literacy is right now as well. But I think the goal of it is to create critical consumers and responsible creators. So whatever, however way we decide to define it, operationally, or just principles, or very, like, specific skills, concepts, practices, statements of learning, benchmarks, whatever, the goal is critical consumption and responsible creators.

• 10:24Aria Finger?

  Cool.

• 10:25Reid Hoffman?

  So one of the things that I think most people don't understand about the training of these AI models, which is one of the things we learned early days at OpenAI, is we literally threw code into the training set, just as like we were throwing in every piece of anything that looked like language. Then all of a sudden, it started producing code, and we're like, oh, that's cool. We should do more of that. But what's interesting is, is the training on these things have learned that the, that actually, in fact, you're including code in training of any model. Like, Inflection's pie, we included code because the code was teaching a version of reasoning. And so one of the things that I think is really interesting is you intersect these, you know, LLMs and generative AI and CoderG is that there's a similar kind of pattern

• 11:10Reid Hoffman?

  of, look, yes, we're teaching computer science so you can be digitally native and facile in a world where more and more of the world is digital, but it's also teaching patterns of thinking. And one of the things that I'm super curious to see is how these patterns of how we teach LLMs will also be how we teach humans and what the feedback loop of that is. And so what are some of the things about this, you know, concepts in computer science, this structured reasoning, structured problem solution, what are some of the things that you're seeing in AI that excites you as a lens to the future in how this loop

• 11:51Reid Hoffman?

  between humans and generative AI is actually leading both to being much better?

• 11:58Speaker 00

  It's been an experience coming to ASU GSV and the first ever era show, which is this K-12 educator-focused aspect or prelude to the main summit. And so they, ASU GSV offered it for free and then there were a bunch of early AI ed techs showcasing their work. And I was particularly excited about the ed techs that had really understood teachers and could identify the key needs and pain points that they had and their ability to create very specific features to address these things. So, for example, there's this

• 12:39Speaker 00

  group called Merlin Mind and they created an AI tool to just voice control all the tech in your room. And you would think, well, why didn't they spend their time creating like some kind of tutoring chatbot? Well, that's because humans are way better tutors than chatbots right now. And what teachers need is the ability to do their job with kids and not have to worry about all the tech in their room. So I was really impressed by that and lots of other groups that are doing wonderful work.

• 13:16Aria Finger?

  So I hope this is sort of a thing of the past, but we've seen so many headlines about, you know, ChatGPT comes out, school districts ban it, you know, this happens, universities, no more ChatGPT, no more GPT-4, whatever it might be. What like, what do you think the guardrails should be for AI in the classroom? Like, should teachers say, some classes, it's off limits, some it's not, you can use it for homework, you cannot, like, how do we set those guardrails for the classroom right?

• 13:43Speaker 00

  I want to get a little controversial here.

• 13:45Aria Finger?

  Do it.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  So I was, I stopped teaching in 2013. That was a time when cellphone usage was really reaching an inflection point, meaning that I could tell in my daily, in my day, that I was telling kids to put phones away more and more and more. Nowadays, most schools have just given up, and they just allow kids to use phones all the time, and teachers just are tired of telling kids, oh, give me that phone, or, and then their parents complaining and things like that. So the controversial thing I want to bring up is that we were actually wrong in education back in the day in allowing or giving up and not weighing

• 14:27Speaker 00

  in on how phones should be used and how social media should be addressed in schools. In the same way, right now with AI, I appreciate the fact that many states are leaning in to AI and not just letting it take over and create this Wild West of inequities. So right now, there are nine states that have provided AI guidance for their school districts, which ranges from guardrails, things like, addressing like, the misuse of AI detection tools. By the way, as a teacher, I would hate to create some type of police state in my room where I'm constantly checking whether kids are creating stuff with AI. Honestly,

• 15:09Speaker 00

  that's not a fun activity. Even if these AI detection tools worked like perfectly, no false positives, no bias or anything, I still wouldn't want to use that. So there are a lot of states that are weighing in on that and not just kind of leaving it up for teachers or whatever, just to figure it out on their own. And what that's going to do is it's gonna help level the playing field for a lot of kids who normally would be left out of the conversation because schools are leaning in to figuring this out with the rest of society.

• 15:40Aria Finger?

  I'll just say, plus a thousand, not controversial at all. I have three young kids. Like, all I want is their middle school and high school to ban cellphones and not have them have a cellphone in the classroom. And I absolutely don't want them banning generative AI. And so I think we don't, we don't need to sort of overlearn that lesson. We got it wrong before. Let's fix that now and, you know, let's do it the right way.

• 16:04Reid Hoffman?

  So what would you say are some of the most interesting kind of things you've seen so far using generative AI to help amplify teachers, amplify students, whether it's in a coding context or kind of more general? Because I think too often people say, oh, I need to have it like my old process. I need to have it completely controlled. It's going to disrupt the old process. But hopefully, and I have a very high belief, that you can create an amazing set of new processes using this. What are some of the things you've seen that have kind of surprised and delighted you?

• 16:45Speaker 00

  So TeachAI is an initiative between ETS, Khan Academy, ISTI, and the World Economic Forum and Co.org as well. And, you know, so even amongst that, that small group, there are organizations that are doing pretty amazing things. You all interviewed Sal Khan of Khan Academy, so I don't need to go into what Khanmigo is or anything like that. I love the fact that they're leaning in and trying to figure out this very hard issue of trying to democratize education, create a world-class education for everyone. And, you know, tutoring chatbots right now are very, very difficult to do. And I love, I know that team very well. I appreciate how thoughtful they're approaching it in terms of just, you know, leaning in

• 17:28Speaker 00

  on like the pedagogy, the Socratic method, not just giving answers, things like that. At code.org, we just deployed this AI teaching assistant that helps novice CS teachers grade the bazillions of coding projects that they have to grade. So folks like my colleague Leanne, who was Aria's high school computer science teacher, spent, her and my ilk have spent bazillions of hours going through these projects, trying to grade them. So on the code.org platform, we created this TA, this teaching assistant, to help teachers do what they do. It doesn't grade for them. It actually provides them a bunch of information

• 18:12Speaker 00

  just to give them kind of like a head start, especially important for novice CS teachers.

• 18:18Aria Finger?

  So I was just talking to someone earlier in the week, and they said, so correct me if I'm wrong on this, that teachers spend about 54 hours a week, and only half of that time is in the classroom. Because like you said, they're grading papers, they're creating lesson plans, they're doing so much stuff that isn't the classroom. And like, we all need to appreciate that being a teacher is so hard. It's one of the hardest jobs in the world. So beyond a teaching assistant, what is the other, what advice would you give teachers? Where do you see generative AI actually helping teachers as opposed to making their job more difficult?

• 18:50Speaker 00

  You know, in most cases, I actually don't see it making their jobs more difficult in terms of teacher support. So on the student learning side, obviously, there's the issue of cheating and plagiarism. And that does make their world a little bit more difficult. But actually, it makes it better as well. Let me explain. So, yes, it is disruptive to not know whether a kid created, wrote an essay or whether, you know, some chatbot wrote an essay. But it gives teachers an opportunity to even rethink, should I even be, how should I even be teaching essay writing these days? Is that durable? Why do I even do this?

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Like, what would be an alternative? And so just like, the opportunity to rethink why we do what we do is a positive thing. So it's not necessarily like making the world harder as much as making the world potentially better. In terms of aiding them, my favorite usage right now would probably be, actually, it wouldn't be lesson planning. That's another thing that you hear a lot about. Problem with lesson planning right now is that you crank out one single lesson plan that's not coherent with everything else that you're doing. And so it actually leaves, it looks like it's super worthwhile, but it doesn't really solve the big problems. I think my favorite thing might be simulation.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  For example, I simulated this podcast and I just wanted to practice and see what it felt like. So the opportunity to iterate with a thing in a safe way for both students and teachers, I think that's super useful.

• 20:29Reid Hoffman?

  One thing that I might suggest, and I'd be curious what your comment on the suggestion would be, is, you know, per teacher is having a huge shortage of time relative to giving feedback, like on essays. It would be relatively straightforward to take each essay, run it through an AI tool and say, "Give a commentary." And then go through and go, "Yes, I like this comment. Delete this one. Modify that one." And that's much quicker. And then you can get a much deeper level of commentary on the essay. Would that be a good use? Or would you elaborate or change that use in some way?

• 21:07Speaker 00

  I mean, that's what Co.org's new AI teaching assistant, that's literally what it does. It highlights sections. So it loads in rubrics, and then it highlights pieces of code, comments them for the teacher so that the teacher, you know, knows where to look and, you know, again, doesn't do the grading for them. So, I mean, yeah, I agree. Whether it's an essay or a program or whatever.

• 21:37Reid Hoffman?

  And when you saw Devin, which is a replace or, it's basically create an AI software engineer. It'll actually be added into the team. I actually don't think the replace is likely what's going to play out here. I think it's just going to be, you know, new software engineers added to the team in whatever project way. What did Devin present to you as a lens into the future?

• 22:04Speaker 00

  You know, when I saw Devin, the demo on YouTube, the first reaction was, "Oh, snap."

• 22:12Speaker 00

  Or like, actually it was, "Oh, snap." Like, that's all I, I'm like, and then I thought like, "It's really real now." You know, because you asked the question about what we think about our work at code.org per GenAI and all that. I thought, we're, you know, a couple, maybe, years away from something like Devon. If, people don't know what Devon looks like, just imagine the actions of a software engineer. Well, this is oversimplifying, but yeah, just all the different things that software engineers might do happening like right in front of you. And I think software engineers are going to turn into something like an orchestra conductor.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  And so we all know that, you know, the way AI is moving, we're going to get into this world of AI agents very soon that are going to actually do real things for us, like book travel and things like that. In the same way, you know, software engineering can be kind of decomposed into different AI agents that do different aspects of a software engineer's work. And then software engineers turn into these conductors that kind of guide these different AI agents to do different things. It's gonna, obviously, increase productivity, but it's also gonna change how software engineers think about their work and usher in the real opportunity for software engineers to really think about security, ethics, et cetera, because their job, yeah, you can snap for that, ethics, security.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  It's because it's going to give them the opportunity to think beyond just getting code to work and debugging it and testing it and things like that.

• 23:46Aria Finger?

  I'll actually pivot and say, Reid, one of the things that I think is really interesting is that you, you made your career in Silicon Valley, you've built AI companies, you've built, you know, web 2.0 companies, but you were not a coder when you were eight. Talk about what you think is important in terms of sort of multidisciplinary, whether it's learning to code, but also the holistic thing, as Pat talks about, ethics, morality, et cetera.

• 24:14Reid Hoffman?

  So one of the things I like to do to wake people up. So for example, frequently when giving talks to business schools, I'll say my background in philosophy was much more important for entrepreneurship than a business degree. And that gets like, what? Because you're especially saying it in usually an expensive business school. And so the point is, is teaching patterns of thinking. And by the way, humanist thinking is actually all the more important now that we're kind of in the age of AI. I gave a speech last year in Bologna, kind of remembering the Renaissance on this. And in philosophy in particular, but there's different disciplines across all these humanist,

• 24:59Reid Hoffman?

  you know, disciplines which are highly useful. But philosophy is imagined possibility stated as crisply as you can. And then you parallel that to entrepreneurship, which is, okay, well, what might the world look like with this product or service? How would the human condition evolve? Or how would they engage with this product and service? Those are statements of possibility. The path, the strategy by which you get there, game playing, that's part of the reason I love what you were doing with the collaborative games, Pat, is the game playing is a way of formulating strategy and how to get to that new sets of possibility.

• 25:40Reid Hoffman?

  And so that's part of the reason why kind of call it multidisciplinary or non-disciplinary thinking is really important. Although it's again, part of the thing that I love about what you're doing with code.org. And as important is like, look, even if like the mechanics of code generation, like we're no longer teaching specific coding languages or other kinds of things as ways of doing it, because that's the tactile, the patterns of thinking are still what's really important. And that, and part of what's interesting, of course, about that is, is like, okay, so if we learn that putting in all of the structured code into the LLM's training set is part of how they learn thinking,

• 26:22Reid Hoffman?

  what are the other things that become part of this for learning thinking? And that's part of the reason I think where code.org is not just going to be teaching computer science, but teaching patterns of thinking.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  There you go. And that is actually kind of what we're thinking about. So you mentioned your philosophy background and the importance of humanities and humanities thinking. I think humanities are going to have a renaissance in an age of AI. And I think that it's going to start to reverse the two decades now, a decade and a half long trend of STEM and computer science dunking on the humanities, basically, like over and over and over again. You know, like, if you look at, like, higher ed, I don't know what to call it, enrollment

• 27:16Speaker 00

  or desire or applications for computer science programs across all, like, top-tier universities, all of them have been inundated by this surge over the last five to 10 years. And that's because everyone understands, like, the money involved, the salaries involved in the computer science, but also the innovation, the possibilities, et cetera. I think we're going to start to see, I wouldn't call it reversing, but more people valuing the humanities, which I think is a great thing. So I am not concerned about that per code.org because what you said, there's still a role in just creating patterns of thinking that appear in the humanities or appear in computer

• 28:01Speaker 00

  science fields. I'm going to deploy my single question now. So I told Arya and Reid that I like to ask questions in podcasts where I'm participating. And I have a burning question for Arya about DoSomething. So I was very impressed by what DoSomething is and what you made it and the different projects that you worked on. Like, so Arya, if you were to pick, like, a DoSomething-style initiative right now for AI in education, so this is like a learning opportunity for me, Arya, like, what would you pick? Like, what would that project be?

• 28:44Speaker 00

  What would the goal be? Who would it serve?

• 28:48Aria Finger?

  So because that question was so flattering, you get a second. So feel free to ask or read a question next. One of the things that I feel like we get a lot in our world is a battle of the generations. So even though I was running an organization, it was all about young people 25 and under, and how can we empower them to change the world, I still cared about what we affectionately call old people. My title was Chief Old Person because I was the CEO and I was like 32.

• 29:19Reid Hoffman?

  And I would have been Chief Ancient Person on that measure.

• 29:21Aria Finger?

  But that being said, you know, again, not just young people should learn, not just young people should have wonder and think about changing the world. And so we had this one campaign affectionately called Grandparents Gone Wired. And it was all about young people teaching technology to their grandma, grandpa, great-grandparents, any sort of older adult in their life. And like, obviously, the trick was that your grandparent is going to teach you something, you're going to teach your grandparents something. And so I think that mix between the generations is like even more critical with generative AI, especially when maybe you have new people coming up who are more, you know, facile with the technology. You have someone who's 60, 70, they don't want to learn a new thing, they don't want to know what's going on.

• 30:06Aria Finger?

  But we see, we can see amazing examples of that. And so I think if we can all be teachers, you know, we can all do Grandparents Gone Wired.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  That is super inspiring. It reminds me of this SNL skit, this Alexa SNL skit.

• 30:17Aria Finger?

  Oh, it's so good, so good.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, where, yeah, where they're calling like different names and asking it ridiculous things.

• 30:24Aria Finger?

  Yes.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  And actually, you just brought up something, so this was wonderful that I got to answer, ask that question, because I have to be honest, I haven't thought of seniors and the opportunities per generative AI for them in terms of engaging with technology in a way that doesn't require a Gen Z-er to kind of show them the ropes. And that's really, really interesting. That's super interesting. Thanks, Ari.

• 30:51Reid Hoffman?

  Because part of what we're learning with this is, part of always being learning is formulate the questions, right? And how to do the questions. And so, for example, one of the things that I learned from a friend of mine was his daughter's really into organic chemistry, she's pasting technical papers into GPT-4 and saying, "I'm 15, explain this to me." By the way, that works in any context, isn't just for youth. It could be the, you know, I'm chief old person, explain this to me. It could be the, I'm a venture capitalist, explain this to me, or summarize this from my kind of point of view. And that's part of the kind of always be learning and whether or not it's like you look at something, you know, like, I guess I, you know, can't remember being recorded.

• 31:35Reid Hoffman?

  I won't out a friend of mine, but it was like, oh yeah, that book was too long to read. I just went to chat G P T four and said, give me a summary, right? But that's fine, whether it's volume, technical specificity, mapping to your interests, that always be learning, A I gives us that tool in order to do it. And that's part of the reason why it's kind of human amplification as a way of doing this. And that's part of the reason why, like, when you think about education, you think, how do I get amplified as a teacher? How do I amplify the teaching experience? How do I help my students be amplified in what they're doing? How do I bring parents or, you know, grandparents into the arena? It's how can this be part of the solution in terms of what I'm doing? And part of that, I think, is to begin to learn,

• 32:19Reid Hoffman?

  like, one of the things I think that it'll be interesting to see if, learning how to ask good questions. And the good question, because the asking the good question is part of how we make progress, whether it's scientific progress, like, you know, is the question, like, for example, if you go back to, you know, Ptolemy, you say, well, we're at the center of the universe, obviously, and everything's, no, no, if we ask the question of, no, no, we're one of the things that's moving around in the universe, then what does the universe look like? And it's figuring out how to ask those questions. And by the way, one of the things that current generative A I is actually pretty bad at is asking questions, right? So it's kind of like, and it might, it will certainly get better.

• 33:04Reid Hoffman?

  Will be the dynamic of kind of where we are as adaptive as human beings. Will we always be learning how to bring more interesting questions into the mix? That's one of the things I think is possible and I'm hopeful for. And part of the question, of course, in teaching and education is can we teach that asking of the question? Like, what is the next question that is so interesting?

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we can. There's a colleague of mine at King's College, London. His name is Oguz Akar. And he wrote an article in Harvard Business Review, maybe a year ago, early on, and said, hey, this prompt engineering thing, this is great and all, but again, underlying all this is the skill of problem formulation. And we can teach the skill and we should teach the skill. I would say another skill that kids need to learn these days, which is not a new skill, by the way, is just a return and a re-emphasis is just being skeptical and learning how to evaluate things. And again, this was the issue with like social media.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Like 10 years ago, schools decided that, not all schools, but schools decided that it would be a family thing. Let families figure it out and all that. And if I were to go back in time, I would have said, hey, folks, we need to lean into this and we need to teach kids to learn how to evaluate content, be skeptical, have a healthy skepticism, and we should help kids learn how to, we should lean in and help kids learn how to communicate in these new environments, like where you put a statement out and everyone in the world can see it. And then you're having these discussions where everyone can see your private thoughts

• 34:54Speaker 00

  with someone else or your argument, like, how does that even work? I'm gonna deploy my second question now, Reid. All right, starting with you and then Arya as well, if she wants to answer this question. So this is a possible podcast. It has this very optimistic vibe, which I certainly appreciate. I think that there are a lot of risks per AI, period, and AI in education. But if we are just focused on the risks or lead with the risks, we don't help ourselves in the end. We have to be very cognizant, but, you know, I love how positive this podcast is.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  But I would like to know what you're most worried about, but not AI in general, but AI in education. And this is why, Reid, because I'm an educator and people listening to this are probably gonna be educators, we'd love to get an outside opinion. We talk amongst ourselves all the time, our own little mini echo chamber of the risks. I'd like to get your perspective, I'd love to get Arya's perspective on risks in education.

• 35:58Reid Hoffman?

  I think all three of us need to answer this question, so the question will come back, your question will boomerang back to you as well. For me, what I would say is, you know, part of the actual roots of intelligence is laziness, and it'll become too easy to treat AI as the oracle. And actually, in fact, always having a, hey, what could be better at this answer? Is the answer accurate? Is the answer true? Is the answer partially true? And when you've got this thing that's given you a hundred, you know, like credibly strong answers, you tend to go, oh, the hundred and first, that's a good answer too. And keeping that always at that nimble, like what, always, what could be better?

• 36:42Reid Hoffman?

  And are there parts of this answer that are incorrect? That I think is very important, that'll be easy to slouch off of as the tools get better and better. And that would be a general thing for all use of the AI tool, but also specifically for students, specifically for teachers as well. Because it'll become very easy to just go, oh, that's pretty good, we'll just proxy to it. And you're like, yeah, don't do that. Now, you may say, oh, that's a good enough answer, great. But always have that skeptical edge.

• 37:11Aria Finger?

  I'd say to build off that, and actually, as we were talking about earlier, hopefully, all of the problems that AI creates, you can use AI to be part of the solution. So I hope that is going to happen in this case. But to build off that, I just think there's so many echo chambers now where we're hearing our points of view be validated. And you can, of course, build an AI and, you know, post-train an LLM to make it, oh, always give the opposite point of view, always make sure to, and I fear that in a world of generative AI, it'll be almost easier just to have your points of view validated. And so we need, like, for young people to learn and grow and all of those things, you know, they need to be kicked in the head and told that they're wrong and that they need

• 37:56Aria Finger?

  to think about the opposing point of view. So I think we can use AI to solve that, but it's something that I think is critical.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  And I agree with many teachers. So there are a lot of surveys coming out these days about, well, AI period in different sectors. And teacher administrator surveys usually rank these as the top two risks and concerns: cheating and plagiarism and overreliance, what you said, Reid, overreliance and loss of critical thinking. And so it usually flip-flops between those two depending on the survey. For me, I'm concerned with overreliance and loss of critical thinking because, as adults, we can use Gen AI in very positive ways because we've already learned a lot or we've learned, we have, we'd had a foundation already. Kids are learning things for the first time sometimes, and if some overzealous teacher

• 38:47Speaker 00

  decides to use Gen AI in that process, we might be short-circuiting their learning and not really giving them the experience that they needed to actually create the foundation by which they get to the place that a lot of us adults are at. So that is my biggest risk. And I also agree with Arya that AI could also be the solution to that as well, but we have to be thinking about that.

• 39:14Aria Finger?

  So we have one more quick question before we head to rapid fire. Can you go back and talk about code.org's secret sauce in 2024? Like, what are the unplugged activities? Why are they important? Like, tell us what's to come.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  So, so moving ahead?

• 39:29Aria Finger?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  So, you know, you mentioned this idea of unplugged activities. I mean, unplugged activities have been around for a very long time. For those who don't know, unplugged activities are opportunities to learn about computer science, but without a computer. So, you know, fun, physical, kinesthetic activities that help you experience computing concepts, but again, not by just coding or things like that. Very fun, exciting, not just for kids, for adults as well. Moving forward, we have a project with the Computer Science Teachers Association, so Teach AI, we, with the Computer Science Teachers Association, to kind of explore some of the early issues pertaining to the future of CS education in an age of AI.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  So basically, my answer to your question is, is we're trying to figure it out, and we're working with other people to figure that out and answer questions like, how can AI be used to serve students with disabilities and create more inclusion in computer science? So, things like that.

• 40:27Aria Finger?

  I love that.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, or, you know, like, an age-old goal of computing. Everyone knows that diversity issues in computing. An age-old goal is to broaden participation in computing, and so we have a pretty broad question, right? So, you know, that's, you know, how can AI be used? Actually, it's not even how can AI be used. How can teachers use AI to broaden participation in computing or to, like, turbocharge it?

• 40:52Reid Hoffman?

  So, our next conversation, I'll ask you about what an unplugged activity to teach quicksort will be, but for this one, we will go to rapid fire. And is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Shout out to my colleague Ethan Malik, who is also

• 41:10Aria Finger?

  Love him.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  a possible podcast alumni. Ethan Malik and his wife Leelak Malik are doing amazing things at Wharton. And he just wrote a book called Co-Intelligence. Ethan Malik is, both Ethan and Leelak are advisors to Teach AI. And it's people, it's people. So it's a book, Co-Intelligence, but it's people behind the book. First off, he wrote it, I listened to the audiobook. And like Arya, Arya and I were talking about the audiobook. It's four and a half hours, y'all. It's awesome. And he reads it in his voice. So it's wonderful. It's like you're hanging out with Ethan. And super conversational, super approachable. I suggest it. But it's not the book that excites me. It's the people behind the book.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  People like Ethan, Leelak, people like my colleague Jeremy Rochelle at Digital Promise, Leanne, your former teacher, who's now leading CS for All. All these people who are doing amazing things and working together to figure out this AI and education thing together. The worst thing that can happen right now, and this is why we created Teach AI, is that we split up into these camps and we don't talk to one another. And people are engaging in these turf wars around who's the leader in AI and education. And so far, I'm pleasantly surprised that folks are working together. And we're trying to drive towards a common-ish vision. And in ways where we still disagree, we're disagreeing and talking about it and being open to like other perspectives.

• 42:39Aria Finger?

  I love to hear it. So second rapid fire, what is a question that you wish people asked you more often?

• 42:46Speaker 00

  Well, speaking of turf wars and all that, I wish people would ask me, hey, Pat, did you really say that? And what, what did you mean by that? And can you explain it more?

• 43:01Reid Hoffman?

  Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?

• 43:07Speaker 00

  So I cycle. You know, something weird happens when you hit middle age. I'm 45 years old. Like, it's like this disease where dudes just wanna, like, wear skin-tight clothing and race around on bikes with other middle-aged dudes. It's crazy. I actually broke two collarbones, one after another, in the span of four months, pretending to be Speed Racer. But I'm excited about the recent progress. It excites me, like, all the different changes happening in the biking scene and all the different modalities of biking. Now, there's this thing called gravel biking, which is like road biking, but on safer roads.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  And it's like transforming, like, how people can enjoy themselves outdoors.

• 43:57Aria Finger?

  I didn't think we were gonna go to, like, men in tight pants, but I love it, Pat. Thank you. For our final question that we always ask, can you leave us with a final thought on what could happen in the next 15 years if everything breaks humanity's way? And what's the first step to get there?

• 44:14Speaker 00

  I'll reiterate what I was talking about before, because it has to do with what Teach AI is all about. So the first, we'll talk about the vision first, I mean, the first step first. The first step is that people who are leading different areas of education, so that could be a policy organization, it could be a major curriculum provider, it could be a major research organization, like Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which is a wonderful group doing wonderful things for research and education. But the first step is to get these people together constantly and coordinate around

• 44:56Speaker 00

  who is doing what and how we can work together and what are we driving towards in the first place. And having super open conversations and honest conversations about what we're worried about and what we're hopeful about, rather than people doing different, separate things. I'm one of those crazy people who think, like, you can actually change the education system. You know, co.org has done a lot, a lot of partners have done a lot, to change how computer science education is valued and viewed.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  In global education, there are bazillions, well, not bazillions, I mean dozens of countries who were not valuing computer science, who didn't even have it on the menu, who now have it in the menu because of the advocacy of the community. So folks need to work together. That's the first step. And then the vision is that I'd say, you said 15 years, Aria? That's a good, that's a good, long time for education. So 15 years, that's about the minimum. I'd say that we actually see some of the things that we've been trying to scale for the longest time, project-based learning, active learning, flipped classrooms, real-world learning, authentic projects. We see that at scale in 15 years

• 46:13Speaker 00

  because of the tools that are created to help teachers do those things.

• 46:20Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wondery Media Network. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schlied, Adrian Bain, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 46:39Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sepieva, Ian Ellis, Greg Beato, Ben Relis, Parth Patel, and a big thanks to Will Cullen, Colin Faul, Bella Willis, Braeden Rutherford, Whitney Kim, Samantha Urban-Tarrant, Hadi Partovi, Debra Quazo, and Little Monster Media Company.