Blackbird

We are failing to teach students to code. Last year less than 1% of graduating students passed the AP CS test, and in 2016 we graduated only 75 CS teachers in the entire US. Software developers are 71% White and 92% male. 

We need to make this career option much more available to a much wider variety of students.

Blackbird uses new technologies (including the world's first educational version of JavaScript, a friendly debugger, and others) to make coding accessible to all students. With our online system, any middle school teacher can teach coding while they learn it themselves. 

Because teachers using Blackbird can start teaching quickly and without extensive training, it is now possible to teach coding anywhere students have laptops, promoting equity in the rich world, and enabling millions of young people around the world to enter the new middle class.

We are failing to teach students to code, in the US and around the world. At least 22 states require high school students to study computer science, yet only 1% of graduates pass the CS AP test. But the most extraordinary fact is that in 2016, only 75 CS teachers were graduated -- compared to over 12,000 math teachers. This indicates a complete breakdown of systems to teach coding.

In fact, the field is a state of silent, unacknowledged crisis. State legislatures around the country have been trying to legislate for student success in this area, but to no avail. With so few new teachers bringing fresh ideas, it has little prospect of righting itself in the short term.

Of the small number of students who do succeed in learning to code, the bulk come from the most privileged demographics -- unsurprisingly, since it takes such an enormous investment of time and energy on the part of the student. Those who succeed have an unusual combination of determination and support. (69% of software developers report being at least partly self-taught.)

Innovation is needed, and Blackbird has identified the key link in the chain: educational software.

Blackbird is online software for the classroom, which enables any teacher to teach coding to middle or high school students, while they learn the subject themselves. 

The key innovation is an educational version of a standard programming language, JavaScript. Programming languages are engineering tools, designed by and for engineers. They're not designed for teaching, and they're extremely unfriendly to beginners. 

For example: of the mistakes that beginners commonly make, a large percentage don't produce any error message, just a blank screen. Error messages, when they do appear, are hopelessly cryptic.

Nonetheless, all existing educational software for coding uses unmodified programming languages. This is a central explanation for our failure to teach coding.

Our solution is based on a completely re-engineered version of JavaScript, designed for education rather than engineering. This educational JavaScript includes a large variety of friendly error messages and other innovations which prevent student errors.

It's embedded in a well-designed educational application, including a flexible lesson delivery system with abundant opportunities to practice, gamification to engage students and an LMS for teachers. The system teaches students to write their own games.

Middle school students in our pilots routinely succeed in writing their own games and animations.

A key focus of our marketing effort is selling to schools rather than individuals. This goes against standard advice: middle and high schools are difficult customers, very bureaucratic and difficult to communicate with (because teachers decide what they will teach, and salespeople typically have no access at all to teachers), with extremely slow referral cycles. 

The recommended route would be to sell to individuals -- young adults and the parents of high school students who are already engaged with programming or computers. Once we established ourselves as the best way to learn to code, we could make money that way, and those customers would give us introductions to code camps, clubs and classrooms.

That approach would heavily favor privileged students, however. Girls and BIPOC students are much less likely to understand that coding could be fun for them, and ultimately a practical career option. By selling to schools, we become part of the national (and international) movement for STEM in education -- and that movement is focused on teaching everyone, not just privileged students. This also creates its own sales opportunities as well.

As this new technology enters the world, it would seem that the direction it comes from is important.

In the short run, as our solution spreads, coding will be democratized. With the number of developers, plus the number of non-developers who understand coding and data manipulation, both growing exponentially, the economy will grow and move towards greater automation, which in turn will create more jobs for young people who can work with data, algorithms and automation. 

Of course it might also create disruption and dislocation in any number of ways.

The movement to expose girls, students of color, and rural students to STEM fields will be expanded and made prominent, as it rapidly becomes possible to train all students to code.

In the long run, we hope to make meaningful changes to global labor markets and income inequity. Of course it's impossible to predict the consequences of such huge shifts which happen over time. But when the majority of people in England were able to read, around 1750, this arguably triggered the Industrial Revolution; when a majority of the workforce can code, this might trigger a new industrial age characterized by technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology and nanotechnology. 

A note on consequences for education: As schools adapt our product, this might be expected to further self-paced, blended education, not only in coding.

The purpose of our solution is to equip students throughout the world with digital literacy skills, especially programming. The system is inexpensive to provide and can in principle scale quickly throughout the rich world. In gaining scale, we plan to target rural and underserved communities and their networks of educators and administrators. (Rural states are more likely to require CS to graduate high school.)

Income generated in the rich world should be sufficient to support scaling in the developing world as well.

Over the long term, we hope to redefine digital literacy to include text-based coding and data work.

We're currently working in eleven public schools, serving a total of around 1,200 students this school year. We've begun a national public relations campaign, and we recently hired a full-time salesperson.

Our product has been in development for six years; it's a very technologically demanding project. Since we hired an education person in 2018, it has matured educationally, and we believe it's ready to scale.

We're not yet growing fast because of the problems inherent in trying to establish a new paradigm in a less flexible bureaucracy. The educational model is proven, however, though the plan for scale is still in process.

However, we've recently established a very exciting partnership with a larger school district; we've been invited to pitch at the GSV Cup; and it looks like our customer base will triple again this fall.

It was the partnership which prompted us to upgrade from Pilot.

At its heart, our solution is a paradigm shift. The world of coding education today is based on an apprenticeship model of teaching, in which the master passes on his knowledge to a talented boy from his community. The process is arduous -- the master is a craftsman, not a teacher -- but the student reveres the teacher, achieves extraordinary things, and one day passes the knowledge on again.

With this paradigm as a foundation, it is less surprising to find that the software used to teach coding (aside from the block-based software for younger learners) uniformly uses unmodified programming languages -- engineering tools -- as if they were teaching tools.  

The purpose of our various innovations, beginning with an educational version of a programming language, is to move towards a world where diverse students learn a craft which is freely available to all; where teachers learn along with their students, and share their learning stories; and where students can practice for as long as they need in a safe environment where mistakes are forgiven, and help is forthcoming. In short, an environment based on contemporary educational principles: scaffolding to create a comfortable environment, suitable for learning, and a gradual release of responsibility. As the student masters the fundamentals, they are encouraged to experiment creatively in a more responsible environment.

This approach is comfortable and expected for teachers other than CS teachers, and over time is likely to lead to greater integration of CS into the educational world.

Our solution will teach a meaningful amount to about 1,200 students this school year (including high school students and code camps).

We've formally launched our product and we're doing a PR campaign to get the word out. Results so far are promising. We have begun an exciting pilot project with a prominent district interested in a 2-week curriculum to be included in science classes.

Due to the proverbial slowness of schools, the customers we will be serving in one year will be largely determined by the time this application is submitted, so we don't expect it to be too much greater than it is now -- about three times as many -- although we'll be in conversation with many more schools and districts. 

We plan to attract investment this year. We will spend significantly on PR and marketing, as well as on product development. 

The next few years will be a whirlwind. Once the public becomes aware of the opportunity to teach coding to all students, governments will be eager to bring our solution into play. 

Once we break out, and people and the government realize that coding for all students is possible, we'll start to scale rapidly. In five years, we would expect:

• We'll be in around 5% of middle schools in the US (serving 500,000 middle-school students and possibly as many high school students as well) and scaling overseas. 

• Our customers will lean towards non-White and rural communities, especially if we have social impact investors.
  

The key metrics we currently collect are:

• Number of students per section
• Whether the section is high school or middle school
• Whether private or public organization
• Student success metrics
  • Time spent coding (typing in the code editor), including lessons and creative projects.
  • Progress made through the lesson sequence
  • Lessons completed and repeated
  • Stars earned. When a student completes a lesson without needing a hint, they earn a gamification "star." This encourages lesson repetition, until three stars are earned.
  • Feathers earned. When a student completes a stage, they are asked to do a guided project with less scaffolding than the lessons. Teachers assign feathers for these when students complete them.
  • Warmups completed. Teachers are encouraged to have their students do warm-ups in class: short programs indicating engagement and basic understanding of the material.
• Teacher learning metrics (similar to student metrics).

This is just the information we have access to at present.

The data we’d like to be tracking would include student demographic and income information, student outcomes such as college admission and progress towards various degrees, student employment outcomes, as well as big data derived from student participation which could lead to improvements to the technology. 

We are:

Heather Blackbird (she/her), cofounder and CEO. 

Ness Blackbird (they/them), cofounder and developer.

Bjorn Hansen (he/him), cofounder and developer.

Mike Lynch (he/him), education director.

Sarah Farrell (she/her), cofounder and salesperson.

Bob Vinatieri (he/him), salesperson (part time).

Anders Steele (he/him) works with us as a part-time contractor doing public relations.

Heather and Ness form the core of the team. They previously built and successfully sold Arts People, an online theatre ticketing and donation management system for the performance arts. They provide seed funding for Blackbird. Their lifelong partnership is extraordinarily creative: a calm, mature administrator and an excitable, oddball inventor with Asperger's. They have three children together; it was teaching them to code which sparked this project.

Heather is a very experienced manager, unusually skilled with people and deeply concerned with equity. On a team full of strong personalities, she brings us together.

Ness learned the difficulties of coding the hard way, but unlike many developers, Ness feels coding is just another form of creativity. Ness has a master's degree in psychology and has written a children's novel. It is Ness's obsessiveness and iron determination which created this software project over a period of several years.

Bjorn is a younger developer whose skills have blossomed extraordinarily over the course of his partnership with Ness. While Ness was the original architect, Bjorn has been responsible for the technical maturation of the system. 

Mike Lynch is an experienced classroom teacher and administrator with a deep understanding of the principles of education and realities of the classroom and the bureaucracies we need to deal with. Mike has taught Ness the fundamentals of education, while Ness taught Mike to code and to use the lesson design system.

The team exemplifies the sometimes complicated combination of people skills and technical skills which our product embodies.

We believe in diversity. Equity is core to our vision, our purpose as an organization, and our mission. We very much want to create employment for underserved demographics.

Diversity, in fact, defines how we function -- it's the diversity of viewpoints and approaches that characterize our development processes and our collaboration, and make it possible for us to be as creative as we are.

Diversity, when not properly managed, tends to create discord, disunity and chaos. As a very diverse organization (built around the radically diverse partnership between Ness and Heather), we need to work to maintain equanimity.

Heather's empowered patience and insight into human nature anchor our commitment to diversity and make it possible for us to act as a unified organization. Her deep experience in building teams will allow us to grow in creative ways, and always with diversity as a priority.

Since we're trying to change a paradigm, it would be immensely valuable to us to have the weight and credibility of MIT behind us. When you ask someone to update their view of the world (as, for example, to understand that we have not been succeeding in teaching coding), it's essential to have support from established institutions.

Teachers who hear that MIT has supported us will be much more likely to believe our claim that they and their students can actually overcome the barriers to learning coding, and take the chance on trying us out.

We need an academic study to independently validate the effectiveness of our solution. It seems likely that someone at MIT could help us get in touch with a professor or grad student somewhere who would be interested in it.

We also need an assessment for middle-school learning of text-based coding, another thing MIT might be able to help with, and possibly fund. This will be a key part of our growth.

Another valuable tool for overcoming obstacles would be money for things like advertising. We need name recognition to bring in early adapters across the country. While we understand that MIT might not grant us very much, the backing of MIT would, again, be very useful in convincing investors to take us seriously, given that we don't have much income yet.

We could easily have checked all the boxes above. We'll first address subjects we do have some sense of being in control of.

• Heather has a lot of experience hiring and building teams.
• Bjorn and Ness are holding the line on supporting the technology (though we need to make rapid progress, and we're just treading water).
• Mike is making progress on the educational piece. We need a lot more content.

In terms of things we are more in need of help with (in order of the checkboxes above):

• We haven't really figured out how to make money yet. The strategy we're currently pursuing is not necessarily the problem, but we'd certainly like to talk to experts about it.
• We have no experience pitching investors, and we have a hard sell to make since we're still growing slowly. 
• We need money to spend on advertising and marketing -- and once we have it, we'll need help knowing how to direct it. None of us has any experience with advertising campaigns.
• As noted above, we need a coding assessment, and a study of our effectiveness.
• Overall, expanding our customer base is our primary challenge, in that it will provide revenue and promote awareness of our paradigm shift.

MIT or another university department of education, to study the effectiveness of our solution, and also to develop and certify an assessment to use in measuring progress of a middle-school class in learning text-based coding.

Social impact-oriented fund (such as the Silicon Valley Community Foundation or the Gates Foundation) that make grants or investments in early stage for-profit companies and potentially provide guidance. 

We're open to other ideas.

• Blackbird is intended to be used as part of core curriculum. Coding is considered core curriculum in some states, and while middle-school coding isn't considered core, our solution makes learning coding at the high school level much more likely for students. (We do also work with high school classrooms.)
• Our solution is a project-based learning experience. After each stage, students go to the Guided Projects section of the Workshop, where they work independently to use the skills learned in the lessons and build a project with guidance, but with less scaffolding than the lesson environment. Students can choose between three levels of difficulty for the projects, receiving a corresponding number of gamification "feathers."
• The system is used by diverse students and is actively marketed to underserved communities and to teachers interested in building equity for girls and BIPOC students. Most importantly, it's affordable and accessible enough that under-resourced teachers and schools can effectively use it, even if they don't yet have a coding teacher.
• The system is marketed primarily to middle school teachers, who rarely know how to code, with the specific intention of helping them teach coding and eventually become coding teachers if they choose.
• Our solution is accessible and can be used at the middle-school level, and it makes coding fun for many students. As a result, it is optimally placed to open up career possibilities for middle-school students, especially girls and BIPOC students, who might not have considered the option of working in coding and related fields.

Blackbird is uniquely able to help at-risk populations such as refugee youth learn to code because our solution is so accessible and effective at teaching coding. It is built with a very flexible lesson design system, which allows us to quickly implement curriculum for specific groups.

With money dedicated to reaching resettled refugees in the United States, we would be able to reach out to agencies, nonprofits and schools serving them and offer our services at discounted rates. We would start with pilot projects, funded by The Andan Prize, to determine what educational approaches work best with each refugee community. This would give us time and resources to figure out how to approach the agencies and how to help them get started with coding.

We would ask MIT for help designing refugee-oriented pilot projects and analyzing the results, since that isn't something we've done before.

This experience working with refugees would help us further our mission of teaching underserved populations, while also helping us gain market share and experience, and continuing the development of our product.

Our solution enables young people of all backgrounds (12 and up) to learn coding. This skill is much in demand in the US, so refugee youth will be able to use to gain a foothold in the middle class, thus also potentially achieving financial and political inclusion in the society.

Blackbird is a transformational online educational system, which teaches coding to middle school teachers and students. This will ultimately lead to much greater effectiveness of coding education at the high school level as well.

• Because our system is so accessible and inexpensive, Blackbird creates opportunities for a whole range of under-resourced communities to be included in the prosperity and social status associated with computer programming and other careers which require digital literacy.
• We hope to redefine digital literacy to include text-based coding and data work, and to make them universal.
• Our solution is based on a new educational version of JavaScript. This includes hundreds of detailed, responsive error messages and a friendly debugger.
• By beginning to teach text-based coding at the middle school level (before many students have decided that they're not interested in STEM subjects), and making it much more feasible to teach, we hope to make this kind of digital literacy more acceptable to students in high school, and ultimately make it a required subject, replacing advanced mathematics at the secondary school level.
• The system is marketed primarily to middle school teachers, who rarely know how to code, with the specific intention of teaching them so that they can become coding teachers.

Blackbird is a transformational online educational system, which teaches coding to middle school teachers and students. Our system makes it feasible for middle-school teachers to teach the subject without extensive training, learning as they teach their students.

By training middle school teachers, who are often women, to teach coding, we will provide role models to young female programmers, in addition to providing education. Teachers who are learning to code can appropriately share their own learning journeys with their students; over time, they can share their expertise.

By the time they reach high school, girls have often decided that they're not interested in subjects such as STEM and coding. By reaching them while they're still in middle school, coding classes taught by middle teachers (and especially women) can change the trajectories of their lives, leading them into professional careers enabled by the new literacy.

We celebrate the voices of teachers and students, and by providing vital services to female educators and early support to budding female developers, AI and big data professionals, CTOs and entrepreneurs, we will give them a platform from which to be heard. Their voices are mighty.

Blackbird is a transformational online educational system, which teaches coding to middle school teachers and students. Our system makes it feasible for middle-school teachers to teach the subject without extensive training, learning as they teach their students. This in turn will in time lead to a cascade of educational changes and improvements, from requiring coding at the middle school level, to the universality of coding at the high school, so that all STEM subjects are approached in a coding context -- as they are now by PHD students.

We hope to redefine digital literacy to include text-based coding and data work. This new digital literacy will lead to a blossoming of AI technology, as an entire new coding-conscious workforce expands across the world.

We plan to use AI / big data to inform the development of our educational system. What cohorts of students respond to which kind of communications or incentives? When do they disengage, and how can we appropriately help keep them on track? What can we learn from their habits, the timing of their keystrokes, the particular errors they make at particular times? How can students be encouraged to work together, to communicate appropriately with each other and with teachers. What possible creative projects will they find most enticing?

Eventually, we hope to participate in the creation of a new generation of educational solutions, which use techniques similar to those used by social media, but with socially beneficial goals.

Blackbird is a transformational online educational system, which teaches coding to middle school teachers and students. Our system makes it feasible for middle-school teachers to teach the subject without extensive training, learning as they teach their students. This in turn will in time lead to a cascade of educational changes and improvements, from requiring coding at the middle school level, to the universality of coding at the high school, so that all STEM subjects are approached in a coding context -- as they are now by PHD students.

We hope to redefine digital literacy to include text-based coding and data work. This new digital literacy will lead to a blossoming of AI technology, as an entire new coding-conscious workforce expands across the world.

We plan to use AI / big data to inform the development of our educational system. What cohorts of students respond to which kind of communications or incentives? When do they disengage, and how can we appropriately help keep them on track? What can we learn from their habits, the timing of their keystrokes, the particular errors they make at particular times? How can students be encouraged to work together, to communicate appropriately with each other and with teachers. What possible creative projects will they find most enticing?

Eventually, we hope to participate in the creation of a new generation of educational solutions, which use techniques similar to those used by social media, but with socially beneficial goals.