Okay. Good afternoon everybody. I'm glad to see you all here. Also welcome to everybody
who's joining online. My name is Analize and I'm a teacher at a free University of Amsterdam
and I'm also working for Haiti and Haiti is a textual programming for kids. Now, to
know I can talk a lot about Haiti in all kinds of different stuff and there's a lot to
talk about but I don't want to know what you want to know about Haiti. So let's first
of all check who's familiar with Haiti. That's almost half. Yeah, that's great. Well, who
if you know who's the founder of Haiti? Yeah, there's a small hand. Yeah, you almost pronounce
it correct indeed. So the founder of Haiti is Felina Hermons and she created Haiti just
because she needed it because she wanted to teach children a textual programming language.
So who if you want to know more about why Haiti is created or are you more want to know
how you can contribute to Haiti? So what we're really looking for contributors. Are you more
about the history or more about into contributing? Who's for history? Okay, and who's for
contributing? Okay, okay, so that's also half half. Well, let's let's get started.
So for contributing, I will talk about the discord and the get-up. Guess you're most familiar
with it. And for the history, I'm going to talk about the gradual part of Haiti, the multilingual
part of Haiti and the classroom with Haiti. So Felina, she's a computer science, so she thought
I can teach children how to do textual programming. And she came up with Python because first
she said like I am let's do scratch and then the children they were like 12 year old, 13 year old
like scratch, we're already over scratch, we know that we want something grown up, you know,
not all these colored blocks. So she said well let's do Python then because yeah Python is
it's a big language, it's a good language, I know Python so I can teach you Python. And there
there was a problem because all these children and she had children who really wanted to know coding.
There were not just a regular clause, it was really a coding clause so they wanted to know it
and still they struggled a lot. They had a lot of errors and they got demotivated about it.
So she was like well if you want to learn Python and you want to learn coding and you really
into it and you get a lot of errors and then still you feel demotivated, why is that? So how can we
change that? How can we change our educational system so that there are less demotivations?
And she dove into the world of how we teach children a language to write because Python is a
language we call it a language but it's a language for the computer but you also learn languages
to write and then she found out that when you learn a language you do it step by step.
First you have your letters your ABCs then you combine them to words and with these words you make
small sentences. Maybe they're not full when you're about six, seven years old but you create
small sentences and then when they move on when they grow up we tell them you need to use
capital and a full stop at the end and some commerce in between. So we really take it step by step and
then they have to write their whole proposals with a title and paragraphs. You don't do that
render six years old. You don't go from ABCs to a whole big proposal. So she thought maybe
we can do the same for learning a textural programming language since it's also a language.
So she wanted to do something with Python and moving on gradual onto Python.
Now here's the first example. So when you go in Python you want to print the whole world
hello onto your screen. You need to use the keyword print. You have this bracket then you have
quotations then you do the words then another quotation and then another bracket. So here there's
a lot of mistakes to do. First of all, these children there were 12 years old. They learned
that they need to use a capital at the beginning of a sentence. But when you write a capital P with
print it's wrong immediately in error but but you thought you do it right because you learn to
capital and then you do it wrong. Then these brackets there's no space in between these brackets.
When you do a space wrong, when you do the wrong bracket we have square brackets, we have
curly brackets, wrong brackets, wrong. When you have quotations, if you miss quotations, it's wrong.
So with a simple statement like this print statement, you can make so many mistakes.
And when you make many mistakes, it's harder to find this motivation that get somewhere
deep inside to want to learn it. But it's hard to get it because there are so many errors.
So in Haiti we start simple. So first you have print space hello just to print hello.
And then in the level further when you when you notice keyword prints, then we add quotations.
And first we add single quotations. Because single quotations is much familiar to students.
So it's less taking less space up in your brain to know what you want, what you need to do.
And then third one at the end, then we add these brackets. Because then you're already familiar
with these quotations and then we add brackets. Another example is the for loop.
Or with the for loop, you also have these columns, you have these four spaces.
Say your indentation. So there's much, even much more things you can do wrong when you want to do a for loop.
So in Haiti we start a for loop just at one line. No indentations just one line.
And for e in range 10, that's really hard to grasp for a child to know what it's really doing.
So we start with the keyword repeat repeat 10 times and then you do something what you want to repeat.
And then in further levels, we go to indentations. So then you know that you need to use for spaces.
And then say what you want to do. And gradually we expand it until we move on to this for e in range 10.
Are there any questions about the gradual aspects of Haiti?
Yes, please.
So your question is when a kid asked like what is correct? Because there are different things I showed you how to do it.
And so in Haiti we have 18 levels and in each level something else is correct.
But it's not 18 times something different of course. So in let's say the first five levels you don't
use quotations. And then from level five to level, then you need to use these quotations.
And for some things, Haiti is it doesn't matter if you lose single quotations or double quotations.
In the end, what we type in Haiti will be translated and then put into Python.
So Python also can handle single and double quotations if you match them correctly of course.
So there it doesn't matter and then the challenge will see it doesn't matter.
Does this answer future?
And so when they move from quotes to quotes from parentheses, how do they conceptualize that?
Do they understand that it's gradual? Do you want to be something easier version and now I'm moving to the
part of version and that's the version I'm going to use now on or how do you explain that there?
Yeah, so Haiti is really based on that a teacher takes his children in these 18 levels and you have to
explain them that hey, first we do it a little bit easier because then you can learn it better
and then we will change it so we can do different things also. And we move on to this grown-up Python language.
But of course with every change you make, the students do have a struggle like, oh yeah,
oh no, now it's not correct anymore. But it's a small change and it's not all these things that
can go wrong. It's only, oh yeah, I forgot these parentheses.
So when Feline tested her Haiti in the classroom, she used these keywords like
brains and repeats and then there were children who said like, well, that's cool, I know English,
but why can't this just be in Dutch? I like that a bit more just Dutch just know English and
Feline said well, yeah, why can't I, so she did it. She localized Haiti and there was really
cool because most of the children in Dutch, they do know English so it shouldn't be that hard
but you also have languages that don't use the letter and alphabet. And then when you want to
teach a child that you need to use this P or I and T and they don't know these these letters that
well and they don't find them on their keyboards on the computer then you must understand that
it's much bigger struggle to learn coding. So you have a disadvantage, much more than in the language
where you notice these letters already. So Heidi is multilingual and all these languages that we have
in Haiti, they're all made by contributors who help us out with these translations and I've got
an example here for our keyword repeat which is in many different languages. Now let's do a challenge
and raise your hands if you see your favorite language.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's sometimes I'm not seeing a hand raised is there some language missing?
No, no language missing, oh that's great. If you go to the Haiti website
you can just click on the button to get your language and as I said before the languages are
really done by contributors. So if you see something where the translation is a bit off please
help us out with a good translation. Now when Fulina created Haiti it turned out that it's not
only that she needed this but there are a lot of other teachers who saw like hey they didn't know
of course beforehand but they saw that they needed it too. They saw that they could use it in their
classroom for the students who are now out of scratch who want to do something else all over the
world. So now Haiti is really a platform that you can use in a teacher based setting.
Haiti is a platform for in the classroom. So as a teacher you can create classes, you can manage
all your students. So let's have a look at how it what we do have. So at our website, Haiti.org
you will end up at this home page and when you click on the left top on Haiti then you
go to the language platform. Now we have a lot of levels so in the left top you see level two
there's a drop down menu where you can select a different level. All these steps
steps are different exercises where you can learn these keywords and try to use them in different
contexts. So here we have an ask and I'm not sure if it's can you read the code right.
Okay well so we have a variable which is choice and you have an ask that you can choose a rock
paper or scissors and then in the second line you print the choice that you choose.
So let's choose scissors we can also use emojis and let and words and letters and then we will
print iTunes scissors. We also have the turtle which is always nice because then you really see
your output of your code so children really like it and then this is the place for teachers so
you can create a class you can have multiple students within your class. You can make your own assignments
so really what you want to do within the class you can calculate to project your doing
and for the teachers to give some presentations for the students to really get this
explanation of what are we doing what does a keyword do we have some slides available.
Now so this is the educational part and the history part of Haiti. Are there any questions about
this part? Yes please.
So the question is how do you use the languages and Haiti so Haiti is a full web browser based.
So you can do it within the web browser. There's only only need a computer and internet to do Haiti.
Any other questions? Yes please.
Is there a question correctly that if there's a lot of things available in Python what
is available in Haiti which things are you learning in Haiti? Yes so variables, conditions,
if statements and functions. So we don't do classes. Is that answering your question?
Okay. Any other questions? Okay let's use the last couple of minutes for contributions
so because Haiti is multilingual we really like contributions on the language on the translations
but there's also a whole world behind Haiti to get it working properly and sometimes we have
a box and there's a small development team so we have a flina. We have kisses in Venezuela
who is helping us out. We have Buriana in I think she's in Bulgaria who helps us out.
I'm working for Haiti and Marlene who's in the Netherlands is also working for Haiti within the
content but that's a small team who's only working a couple of days one or two days per week for Haiti.
If you want to help us out I want to show you what we're currently working on so this is
what I just showed you how it's looking and we want to go to a more calmer appearance of Haiti
and we already have some basics and that looks like this but to go to this calmer appearance of Haiti
and especially on the teacher for teacher website we really want to go more teacher based with Haiti
we do need to develop more of the appearance of Haiti. If you want to get in touch with us
we are on GitHub and we're on Discord the best way to really get in conversation with us is to
Discord that's where we always are and GitHub is a bit maybe that's with a lot of repositories
big and huge and we're struggling to really get to all the issues.
So on Discord if you want to join us I've got here a QR code which is just on the line of
this screen so I don't think you can get it but you will also find this on the gates of page
there's a question programming general question if you put something up here I will probably see it
because I'm every day I'm looking through here on GitHub we have a Wikipedia page
Feline really wrote it down well how it's structured and I'm not really into it so I
I can't give you all the details but we do have a heavy page the heavy development process
Wikipedia we really can see how it's in the in the back and if you're interested in translations
we do this through web late if you're familiar with it so here's a tutorial on how to
translations how you how you can do that very easily. So that's for the contributors part if you
have any small questions I will be around and happily to answer them if you have other questions
I'm very happy to know what you want to know. So that's a good question
I know it's called after a woman who is called Haiti, Haiti Lama but I always forget like who she was
she was an actress but also a little more she had a software engineering and I think it looked
back in 60 years. Yeah it's quite a long time ago so Haiti Lama and an actress and something
in software development. Will you check it out her name and what she did?
Yeah great. We only use their word because it used to be a white line.
Ah did you hear that? So what she did the work of Haiti Lama it's used in wifi so
every time you use wifi you use Haiti. But if you have wifi you go to Haiti or or
and then we have this all together. Okay well if you have other questions and you don't want to
come to me or you can't find me you can always send me an email on the list at Haiti.org
and I thank you all for coming here and it's neat to the stop.
So if you want to check Haiti out and we will be around at four I think in that room or here.
Oh yeah it's down the hallway. Oh tree there will be a good workshop at four o'clock.
Do we see you there? Yes. Yes. Good.