How one TED-Ed producer thinks like an artist to inspire others to ‘Think Like a Coder’

Endless supported TED-Ed’s Think Like a Coder series which uses driving narrative and lush graphics to bring learners of all ages into the world of coding through puzzles created by programmers. 

The launch of TED-Ed’s web series ‘Think Like A Coder’ was met with a glowing response across the web.

“We've been so blown away by how positive the response has been,” says Alex Rosenthal, Editorial Director at TED-Ed. ‘Think Like a Coder,’ a 10 part series of 5-8 minute animated videos that feature Ethic, a mysterious woman who takes on programming puzzles with her trusty robot sidekick, Hedge, in order to solve the mystery of her own life, launched in late 2019. The first episode, The Prison Break, has been viewed over 350,000 times since late September. But Rosenthal is most interested in how teachers are using the series to help enrich computer science learning. 

“We want educators to use our content in their classrooms regularly,” he says. For students, this series helps establish an intuition for what coding tools actually do, so comprehensive coding education is not the goal. “This is a tool for teachers that, if they want to use it once a week or something, it's fun and can work either in supplement of their lesson plans or kind of in parallel to be introducing concepts that they may not have gotten to yet.”

THE ORIGIN STORY

The concept for ‘Think Like a Coder’ grew out of one of TED-Ed’s most successful video series -- one that featured math and logic problems framed through riddle narratives. 

“It's sort of math, but it's also lateral thinking, and there's a clever solution.” Rosenthal says, and  the videos were incredibly popular, particularly for teachers in the classroom. The team set about imagining how to iterate the structure; a puzzle-turned-story, with a pause screen with rules to hold viewers while they test solutions, a hint, and then a solution with explanations of mathematical concepts and critical thinking.

The idea of using the framework for computer science problems came while talking to programmer friends who enjoy tackling coding problems and riddles in story-driven ways. But the transition from logic problems to computer science problems was not one-to-one. 

“With computer science, there's so much information, knowledge, and skills that build on each other that you can't really just throw people into the deep end,” Rosenthal said. 

Rosenthal knew the project’s narrative would have to help viewers reach the conceptual, fundamental level of the problem without getting stuck in the vocabulary. Serializing the series, they knew, would be vital. 

“We've been pretty strategic about having it start fairly easy and slowly ramp up in difficulty. So there's an engagement curve to get people early wins so that they are motivated to stick with it,” Rosenthal said.This format required that the series not start at square one, but instead find a way to help learners be able to solve problems right away. 

“We've sort of broken the usual sequence that concepts are taught in, mostly because if we just taught a variable there isn't a lot of great puzzles you can feature with just a variable. So we started with loops, because it's a pretty versatile tool, and has its own intuition that can be established really quickly.” Episode one features a loop puzzle, and then conditionals and variables are featured in episodes two and three respectively. “But the idea is it all builds, so in the puzzle in Episode Three, you're using loops, conditionals and variables.”

But fine-tuning the structure was only half the battle, building a narrative framework that would motivate the puzzles was just as important. 

“We did a lot of story- and world-building and came to this main character Ethic who wakes up in the situation that, at first she doesn't know what's going on, and it gradually reveals what's happening with this world.” But the characters were just as important as how the story flowed. 

“We were especially thinking about some of the people who are not coding. There are huge underrepresented groups within coding and we especially wanted to make something that was going to represent a different sort of person as a coder than you see in a lot of the traditional media narratives.” The series’ main characters are women of color, and Rosenthal says an important part of the initial development of the series involved talking to organizations like Girls Who Code, and thinking about presenting characters and stories in ways that celebrate people who are not traditionally celebrated in computer science, and in STEM fields broadly. Even the narrative itself, Rosenthal says, challenges the prevailing norms of the tech/computer science space. 

“A lot of the subtext of the series is about programming and unleashing things without really thinking about the consequences, that’s what has led to a lot of the problems in this world. We were thinking directly about the idea of ‘moving fast and breaking things.’ This is, in some ways, a response to that.”

“Ethic as the main character's name is a little on the nose, but this idea of bringing ethics to coding is a really important thematic part of the series.” Rosenthal was hesitant with other details, anxious not to spoil the conclusion of season one, but did tease, “Hedge’s name, I'll just say it has a bunch of meanings and I'll leave it at that. It's a very deliberate choice.” And “I also recommend paying attention to the Easter eggs thrown in like I would recommend people read the signs in the Bradbury or that town in the second, third and fourth episodes.”

The third element of the project? Finding interesting computer science problems that beginners have a chance to solve. Some of the resources Rosenthal used to find these problems can be found at the end of this blog. 

MEASURING OUTCOMES

As episodes continue to drop, Rosenthal is also monitoring feedback. He pays close attention to view counts to learn whether people are engaging with an individual piece of content, but he’s also interested in understanding retention, and whether people are watching all 10 videos. And one step further, the videos also point viewers to additional resources on the TED-Ed website where they can dig deeper (more than 170 teachers have already customized this page for the first episode). 

“Through the TED website, anybody can customize the lesson and basically add their own questions and resources. We see how many people do that. That's a metric that we could apply to all of our lessons and there's direct feedback from teachers with this series.” Rosenthal hopes, after the series is completed in April, to do a larger survey that includes interviews with teachers to gain feedback and better understand the true audience reach.

And from that information, Rosenthal hopes a second season might be in the making. 

“We're still having some preliminary conversations with people about what a second season might be and where it might live,” he says, “we want to understand it and see what we can do better and how to iterate on it before we launch right into a second season, but I'm really hopeful. From the beginning we've been thinking of it as a multi-season concept, where we can keep introducing concepts, keep reinforcing people's learning and keep engaging with them.” Rosenthal thinks there might even be a chance to branch out into other topics, including statistical literacy, another topic that can be hard to learn, though vital. 

Rosenthal says the work of the animators at Turkish KOZMONOT Studios has been a key to realizing the magic of Ethic’s world. Though his team crafted the narrative framework, the lushness of the world and its characters are due largely to KOZMONOT’s inspiration and a hearty iteration process. A phenomenal score is also a part of the series, all of which nods to a core idea of TED: that education can’t be separated from great design and art.

“There's a lot of really great educational media in the world, but we see ourselves as planting the seeds of inquiry, curiosity, and passion.” Giving a lot of different people a reason to be excited about programming (in this case) is fundamental to TED-Ed’s mission, Rosenthal says, and so focusing on really compelling narratives is a great way to spark interest. 

“Great pedagogy, factual information, and empowering people with knowledge is also essential. I'm not sure that I would put one above the other, but we do prioritize just getting that spark out to people that the more people who can experience it for the first time, the better.”

Recommended Resources From Alex Rosenthal:

Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World (Reshma Saujani)

Advent of Code: Eric Wastl (An annual coding competition that takes place in December)

Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions (Gayle McDowell)