The Embodied Runtime - Dennis Heihoff

welcome everyone this is the embodied run time my name is Dennis and I work at lumber and we are software studio with global network of developers we work with various brands including Casper raise e 2zii Patagonia working for work frame for a long time and you might know us from some of our projects back in the day that was Vince achill I worked on duct as well we have zeal which kind of recently got a sneak peak on reddit from the closure reddit we also made a auth0 closure wrapper and then most recently we're working on a generative art t-shirt store where t-shirts are competing with each other based on sales and t-shirts that cell can have baby t-shirts you know it's pretty interesting it's inspired by 3G me to a degree yeah okay back to the embodied runtime so this was all kind of triggered took a long time to arrive at this but I think it kind of started with me organizing to closure bridges back in the day and for those who don't know closure bridge is a two-day cultural programming workshop foreign to represented groups in tech mostly beginners and I think everyone had the best intentions we had more we had more programmers more facilitators that knew how to code then we had people that needed help in in some of them but overall I feel like they were failure and I think most to day programming workshops are a failure it's just you're just not going to teach a beginner to code in two days and you know instead of developing an excitement in programming people developed something like a major headache and impostor syndrome so that stuck with me but I didn't know what to do about it and over the years I just reflected on that and on my own experiences I remembered how much I struggled to code to learn to code I even remember skipping error messages because I just I just couldn't take it that I was wrong this consistently it's too wrong too often so it made me feel but feel better not to read our messages even if they had helped me so you know I got eventually I kind of got the hang of it but the idea that learning could be better didn't let go of me and I started to startup that essentially uses version control as a learning tool that's physical you might have heard about it 20:17 and then while running that startup I started doing stand-up comedy with the excuse that it will make me better at pitching to VCS so it's kind of traumatic to do stand-up for the first time but it was fun and I'm thankful for it and it all that too embodied code or the embodied runtime I then went down the rabbit hole of visual programming making duct ductus 'less and a graphical tool where every node is an AWS lambda and you can just write individual functions and wire them up and I also joined freeform dance communities in New York City some of they're called ecstatic dance and Gaga people don't expect you to know them but the idea is that you can move however you want as long as you don't harm anyone so taking all of this I eventually connected the dots and a new idea emerged and that idea is the embodied runtime so let's look at some code what do we see here just like read it is it big enough yeah okay I just give it a read good so what do you think will happen when we evaluate draw what do you expect to happen does anyone imagine a canvas to pop up like a blank screen anyone okay a few people cool does anyone imagine that there will be points so dots or lines showing up on that screen okay right like this is this is sort of we all as programmers have a mental model of you know seeing a bunch of text on a screen and reading it interpreting it and being able to understand what probably goes on in this code in a way we have a mental runtime right where we run this code and then we run it on the computer and we compare if we were right we made the right assumptions now what do you think beginners see right they just see gibberish they just see it it makes no sense whatsoever right and then we're like okay we will we will teach them we'll figure it out they don't understand we need to teach them the syntax and the words of closure so we take their computers we install closure we download an IDE we talk about the repple we talk about indentation we decide whether we want to use porn for a par at it we talk about key bindings some people might throw in concurrency parallelism immutability right and you just drive people insane with this stuff with beginners you know they don't get it so and then think about that what does what is that all of these steps that I just talked about what does that have to do with the difference between what you and a beginner sees in your mind's eye right sort of the idea that a canvas pops up and that there will be lines drawn between between dots that is actually not about the syntax and the words of the language or any language it's more about you understanding this paradigm of programming what is going on what is the sequence of things that gets formed or was used to do something else that is what this is about and this is also a bit like being taught music by reading or writing sheet music right as a trade trade musician you can probably read this and hear the music in your head but as a beginner it really helps to experience the music and code and music are very similar in the sense that there is a static representation of instructions that is interpreted into a dynamic performance it's really it's so similar surprising it's very strange tennis that you teach beginners to write the equivalent of sheet music without performing much music at all and arguably argued arguably you can learn to make music without any sheet music simply by jamming on instruments and that music doesn't have to be rhythmic or harmonic right you can be fuzzy about it you can make a lot of wrong music but just touch an instrument and a sound will probably come out of it if you can't touch it kind of right there will be some some noise like you can play with that or take a Rubik's Cube you can use a Rubik's Cube without solving it right so you can basically use it wrong forever you can still use it wrong with code however it's like one little mistake and the code doesn't compute or it doesn't compile and if you think about it with code it's it's you can be double wrong right you can write logically wrong code that still needs to have the right syntax to be understood by the computer so you can be wrong in a syntax level just in trying to communicate what you want to do and you can be wrong logically and I think people are actually quite good at the logical level they're quite good at saying like oh yeah I want this collection of things to be transformed but the syntax level is just this this huge barrier of entry that we put in front of beginners makes them feel stupid so if code is sheet music then what is the music right what's the music of code and I think it's code execution it's the process of running the code and that like we said before that doesn't happen in the code in the file right you don't see it in the file it actually happens in the runtime you know it happens in your head and it happens on the computer and in that sense code is actually a performance right it's a performance of sorts there's a process it's not static it's dynamic so if code is a performance why don't we perform it and that led to a workshop called embodied code the idea of embodied code is to learn the basics of programming in physical space through art movement and games as the name implies we embody or enact code it's a little hard to explain so let's have a look at it first we look at some code again here we have a def a vector of dance moves some random dance moves were some dance moves in here then we have a function called person with dance move that takes a person which is a map and a sorceress a random dance move to that person lastly we take people which is defined somewhere take people and we map over it and we assign a random dance move to every person okay so this is what we did here oh just explain firstly in the middle of the basket is the rand and they just have the basket they pick out dance moves out of that basket the person to the right of the black shirt is a sews the whole expression that person assigns to dance move to the person I am now okay I'm walking around and I make sure that the composition of the two is being applied to people individually this guy got a moonwalk okay this guy's doing the moonwalk and that happened excuse the butt and the friend good friend of mine so cool so now everyone has a dance move right basically we we went through the whole collection of people and everyone eventually had a dance move now we want to group them by that dance move okay so let's see what that looks like is he asking who can be who can be dance move and who can be grouped by I we need those great those two this Rachel here she volunteered for dance move and Walter if the orange sweater is group by and then they go Rachel goes and she asks what's your dance move she gets to dance move that dance move is the blow-up thing at like the shopping center you know so that's the dance move they came up with you know there they go yeah she's doing a great job that performance there we go yeah okay cool and what I really like is I like looking at this at high speed because what you see is I mean if you think about group I who knows group by alright everyone knows goodbye if you think about group by right you get you you get back a a hashmap that that contains sequences by your group function you know so the keys are the result of the function being applied to the object and then you have a collection of things in there so you kind of spatially you kind of have clusters you have groups that are separate and then if we look at this we kind of see that you know that all the the shopping center blow-up people get gets sorted and and we see how group buy and the dance move key are moving together to make this happen so get it again so you're gonna move in in all kinds of directions and in the end we have several groups of people that stand together all right so after the dance and movement stuff we started getting into drawing so my friend Chloe did a connect the dots puzzle she came up with a bunch of points so this is basically a vector of vectors of two tuples where each tuple is a point and these the vectors represent lines individually so every participant in the workshop got assigned a line and then it was the same thing we reduce over the canvas and draw the lines one by one so she my daughter gave the final drawing to her teacher and we never got it back so I can only show you the digital version now look like this okay so that's that's the cat and then it was an idea of saying like okay let's do this again but let's get a little creative about it you have two dots what can you do between the dots maybe you can introduce some other patterns so one one idea is to just wiggle your pen right as you go as you go through it and you'll get something that is a little more creative and we wrote the code for that to basically add some jitter add some randomness between I can't relate a few points between points and at that and at least to some pretty interesting result right you start out with a few coordinates and then you get something that's fuzzy and more interesting so here they are in comparison yeah so L&K has this thing he gave it a talk from 2015 he said a problem finding is more important than problem solving and I think if we apply this to education we get that learning environments are greater than teaching environments thank you and the idea is that one is about exploration and discovery and the other one is about filling in something that's predefined and it's kind of bottom-up versus top-down one of my favorite books is a pattern language I think design patterns and programming has been inspired by that book and there's a great quote which I'll read in a society in a society which emphasizes teaching children and students and adults become passive and unable to think or act for themselves creative active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching and that's kind of the idea in embodied code a lot of the programmers that I got involved to do the workshop they asked me what should I do and I said nothing just be there because the idea is that everyone everyone there is at the same level people sort of you know dancers kind of help programmers to move more beautifully or show them give them ideas on how to move through a room elegantly and then programmers have the knowledge to make sure they move correctly and it's also designed to be even though it's very analog it's designed to be very immersive we kind of want to connect the familiar because we're dealing with beginners they don't know code we want to connect what they know with the novelty with what they're exploring so people use their bodies there's a sense of space and time there's music and rhythm actually one of the games in the workshop is about race conditions and unsurprisingly it's a race so we have a race in there I think we involve all senses but smell and taste maybe smell accidentally and yeah and this this all is just there to to use the familiar as a bridge to the new the way we usually teach programming is in this order right we kind of you know in order for the computer to understand us we need to get the syntax right next we need to speak the words that the computer understands so these are pre requirements to get to running code to get to the meaning and that's the order we also teach them because you can't get anything done on a computer without that but I think a lot of people are scratching their head they're like I know what I want to do why can't I just do it so I think what we need to do is we need to flip that we need to go from you need to have that's kind of a teaching an environment approach and we needs to get to a learning environment approach where we started with the meaning with what we want to do and then we discover how we can get there on computers so we're doing the exact reverse in an embodied code cool so that's embody code you saw some videos I will share the get up repo with the current curriculum we're just like ideas towards the end it's still very much a work in progress so we can talk about it later be happy to chat with anyone and I wanted to thank all these people and I think David shmita who you might know it's like one of the first people I kind of shared this with back in Berlin and we just talked about it for three hours and and then and then I applied to conch with just the idea for the talk and it was accepted so then I forced that was the force function it took six weeks I just cranked out the whole thing [Music] cool so yeah please say hello this is the this is our studio number deaf that NYC me on Twitter you on get up the repo for the curriculum and this was actually a very short talk so we have some time for Q&A and if you want you can also run over and catch the tail end of the other talk but yeah I didn't want to fluff it up it's like this is all I have for tonight today thank you [Applause]

When we teach programming we usually start with code. We tell beginners that “it runs” but all they see is static text. Add to that the confusion of symbols, syntax and code editors. Does any of the above have to do with comprehending the behavior of a program? The Embodied Runtime argues that it doesn’t. It’s a new curriculum for teaching programming that uses a few props, physical space and the participant’s bodies to simulate a runtime. People represent data, data-structures, functions etc; they get to experience code by moving in circles for loops and reductions, and from side to side for maps and filters.