Educator, Author, and Director of Education at Microsoft’s Makecode Kiki Prottsman describes how her college experiences of being the only female in the room propelled her into her work. 

Prottsman expresses how a single question drove her into her career. She wondered, “why don’t people realize how expressive computer science is?” She became convinced that if people knew how fun and creative coding is then there would be wider interest in it. This revelation led her to build a groundbreaking curriculum to teach kids how to code at Code.org. Yet, the road to bringing a CS curriculum to kids was not easy. She talks about the challenges and the pushback she received when telling others about her initiative to bring the curriculum to young kids. 

As part of the process, Kiki used the four pillars of computational thinking to showcase how the skills we learn from coding can be used to solve everyday problems.

Be prepared to be inspired as Prottsman shares how she persisted through naysayers, explains computational thinking, and expresses her initial fear of becoming an author of CS books.