8 Bits with Dr G!
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Transcript
Chloe Condon 2:01
Hello Hi Brandon, it's it's been a while it's been a while. Back. How What did I miss? Let's recap we had, who did we have on the show? We had Christopher PJ.
Brandon Minnick 2:23
Last week, our guest was sessile Phillips and our guest co host was Christopher Harrison. So awesome, awesome. Episode. sessile has such an amazing story. He was born and raised in the island of Antigua and then came to the US for college and now became a professor at Florida tech. And now he's a senior engineer at at Microsoft. So if you missed the episode last week, you can find it at eight bits.tv definitely go check it out. And yeah, that
Chloe Condon 3:00
settles my teammate. I work on the same team as him. That's right. Yeah. And I didn't tune in because it was on vacation. But B I was like, I know this guy. I know this dude. I don't need to watch. But now I'm thinking I need to learn more about this origins. Yeah, it did not. I had no
Brandon Minnick 3:14
awareness of he used to be a competitive swimmer for the national team. Okay, now I'm definitely
Chloe Condon 3:21
Oh, and if you're watching, if this is your first time watching live with us, um, we also have a podcast version of this. When you go on your walk later, or your run or your jog or your folding laundry. You can go back and listen to those episodes at a pit stop TV for more info.
Brandon Minnick 3:37
That's right. I lost it. We have. Yeah, the week before that. Our guests was Ben Buchi. gag. It's spelled like Budaj edge who, if anybody remembers Mayor Pete from the previous election cycle here in the US, they're not related. Ben's actually Welsh, so not even from the same country. But yeah, Ben has an amazing story as well. We had our guest hosts PJ Metz who is been on the show a couple times. So if you're a fan of the show, you've probably met PJ before but yeah, also amazing story. Then actually started coding working when he was super young. Even before college there was a major telephony company. I forget the name off top my head, but just happened to be this company was down the street from where he grew up. And they gave him a job writing code when he was just a little bit and now he's
Chloe Condon 4:47
love We love to see
Brandon Minnick 4:50
his big bed now. So he's just a clock over by are over in London, you know,
Chloe Condon 4:56
now that journey.
Brandon Minnick 4:58
Yeah, I've been super into photography. drones. And he takes amazing trips to places like Iceland, and he posts all this amazing footage on his YouTube channel, along with being a senior developer at Microsoft. So lots of good stories
Chloe Condon 5:12
is I was gonna catch up on the plane ride back, but I instead watch the new In the Heights movie, which I very much enjoyed and would recommend to anyone. But these sounds like some great apps, I'm gonna have to go back into the archives work, I think we just must have missed our one year anniversary of eight bits coming up here, Brandon. So what a special, we'll have to do something special to celebrate it soon. But for anybody who's maybe new tuning in this time, you can watch all of the many previous guests and episodes and fun times that we've had on the show at AICPA staff, TV, but Brandon, what did I miss in the miss anything in the Microsoft world? What have you been doing? What's your life, Ben?
Brandon Minnick 5:56
Mm hmm. So a friend of the show know that I'm a mobile developer, I used to work at Xamarin, and still do a lot of stuff with Xamarin. Internally, Microsoft, and I've also been working on something called the Xamarin community toolkit. So if there's any Xamarin developers out there listening, you should check out Xamarin community toolkit, it's open source on GitHub, you can add this new gift package into your repo. And it's basically the code that you've probably been copying and pasting from Xamarin app, the Xamarin app, like, if you've been using specific behaviors, or effects, or custom renderers, we tried to bring all those common controls into the toolkit. But with dotnet Maui coming out, I'm leading the initiative to have a dotnet Maui toolkit. And so I can't say I'm waiting on one more approval before we can make the official announcement. You'll find it on the Xamarin blog once it's once it's public. But yeah, working on support. For dotnet Maui toolkit it's going to happen. It's just how we're going to do it is the only thing we're working on internally. But yeah, stay tuned, because there will be a brand new toolkit for dotnet Maui, that will also encourage folks from the community to contribute to, and even the existing toolkit will make sure it also works with dotnet Maui. So even though it's all based on Xamarin Forms, you'll be able to look, we're calling it a Maui compat. So it'll be Maui compatible. So if you want to stay on the older toolkit, you can no problem. But the new toolkit will be very much dotnet maue native, so it'll take advantage of all the new performance improvements that occur with dotnet Maui, but I can't wait to announce this. I'm itching to write a blog post this week if I get the thumbs up. So stay tuned.
Chloe Condon 7:54
So totally exciting stuff in the Xamarin. World. We'll have to see it. Let's see. Well, okay, first, I have a question for you. Brandon. Have you ever heard of a shirt bot? Do you know what a shirt bot is? Have you are you? Do you have any awareness? a shirt? Like a short shirt?
Brandon Minnick 8:16
There's not talking about like,
Chloe Condon 8:19
No, not me. But a short a shirt box. Does this ring a bell to you at all?
Brandon Minnick 8:27
No. Is it a bot that makes shirts?
Chloe Condon 8:29
Well, do I have a video for you slash livestream to watch? I am really excited to be doing a new month long series with reactors starting July 1. called got bots you can check it out@aka.ms slash got bots to sign up for the first one. But this is a series that I'm going to be doing on Thursdays at 3pm. Pacific time I believe. Let me double check. Yes. And it is gonna be all about the different ways that you can create bots. So like at Microsoft, we have q&a maker we have, oh my gosh, we have so many different ones. You can make a logic app bot. We've talked about that on the show many times with my Britney Spears bot or my it's gonna be may bot. We have an API for bots here. But something that I discovered recently, Brandon, when I put I posted a picture wearing a shirt similar to this except it said it's a different words on it. And I someone commented on my tweet and said, I want this on a shirt or where do I buy this shirt? Now I learned very quickly that if someone comments, I want that on a shirt I where do I get this shirt? How do I get this on a shirt, that there are bots on Twitter for these certain you know t shirt sites out there that are sort of taking advantage of this and printing unlicensed shirts taking away credit from artists and selling them at a lower price. Now you know me, I love artists I want people to get paid especially for the art they make So I found this to be really terrible, right? I was like, Oh no, there's these really malicious bots out there but like so I always discourage people from commenting on any posts I do asking where the shirt is from. So I've done a couple experiments on this recently, where I'd say, Hey, I'm doing an experiment, comment, I want this on a shirt. And it's become sort of this fun game to play on the bots. But I've learned a lot in the process. And this series is going to start with a talk all about ethical bot creation, because especially when we're working with AI, and we're working with ml, we want to make sure that things that we're building especially bots aren't harassing people. They aren't going to be hurting anyone in any way that could be financially that could be you know, taking away business. So check that out. If you want to learn more about bots, I make a lot of really silly stupid bots. You can check them out. I tweet I retweet them all the time. Should I a bot that the lovely PJ has made with me and many others? So come learn about bots with me. aka.ms slash bot bots. It'll be a party every Thursday. And yeah, shirt bot shirt bots are bad. We don't like shirt bots. Short box. Shirt bots that
Brandon Minnick 11:08
it's funny got bots. In my head. I picture. It must be the cotton mill slogan. Yes. And so I'm just picturing a bot with like a little milk mustache. Like how the Got Milk campaign used to do
Chloe Condon 11:22
it? Well, I think you're gonna be spending some time in Canada this afternoon. Thank you for that.
Brandon Minnick 11:31
It's funny. So for anybody that doesn't know about the Got Milk campaign, it was the thing to encourage usually, children to drink more milk. And yeah, they would get celebrities and the celebrities would take a sip of milk and then they'd have this milk mustache look like a milk stain on their on their upper lip and just got milk.
Chloe Condon 11:54
cafeteria library magazine that I had had these in them I remember Kermit the Frog and Jim Henson even had little milk mustache everyone everyone was doing Got Milk.
Brandon Minnick 12:05
But do they got bots?
Chloe Condon 12:07
Do they got maybe the first thought that I built is like a Got Milk? I don't know. We'll see. I don't want to put a pin in that. But speaking of 90s and early 2000 histologia. We have a lovely guest today who I'm sure has a favorite. Okay, we're going to give them a couple seconds in this intro that to answer this question to get thinking about it. What is their favorite Got Milk poster we would love to know. So it gives out a thought. But we have a special guest today Brandon who is also a cloud advocate, works on a team with me over our next generation experiences. is passionate about education is passionate about teaching is a freakin doctor. One of the coolest people I know. Welcome to the show. Sarah gosnells. Dr. g. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, if we ever got milk post? Oh, gosh, I don't know.
Sarah Guthals 13:05
Search for them. Honestly. Okay. It's probably a tie between the Olsen twins, because they were just icons. Um, and and they just pulled it off like, I don't know. Anyways, their charisma anyways. And then the Jim Hanson one because I remember that one. Wasn't that one, like black and white? Or like really dusty lighting? I
Chloe Condon 13:27
don't know. It was just art. It was definitely in it in a dusty library for me. So that Yeah. Brandon, do you have a fav.
Brandon Minnick 13:37
The one that always comes to mind for me is Michael Jordan. So you can't think of the 90s without thinking of Michael Jordan in general. But yeah, he did the Got Milk campaign. And if you wanted to play basketball as good as Michael Jordan, you had to drink milk. No,
Sarah Guthals 13:54
sorry, random tangent. weedy boxes. Were also a thing where you know, on a Wheaties box, there would be like an athlete. And I did gymnastics when I was a kid. And they did a photo shoot one day, and then they put me on a Wheaties box. Wow. When I was a kid, I thought that it was soapy, like amazing. And then I look at it now and they literally just like, cut my picture out of a printed picture. And like, pasted it on the Wheaties box and then put the box in like a plastic clear container. Now for people
Chloe Condon 14:28
who are maybe a little bit younger than us, Photoshop was not super accessible back in the day. So it used to be literally a thing at theme parks like six flags, you would go there and you would pay anywhere from 30 to $40 to put your picture on like Sports Illustrated or, you know, Nickelodeon magazine, like and it was just peep I have one right oh famzoo Well, incredible, incredible right here somewhere. Brandon Oh, So I just googled Got Milk and I think my favorite is the Britney Spears one because it's her next to her young whip. Yes. I still don't know how they did that. Yeah, um, I Oh, someone said, Yep, did one in six flags, I definitely have a image of me very young photoshopped onto like a bikini model or something just like looking very cool. But interesting segue from Michael Jordan into something we're going to be talking about a little bit later. There is an reimagining of Space Jam coming on Brandon, called spaceship new legacy. And Sara actually gets to work on all the awesome partnerships with that stuff. But before I get there before, though, we don't want to like, oh, there's a teaser, watching. But Sarah, tell us a little bit. Well, first, tell us who you are, what you do at Microsoft. And then we'd love to get into your Marvel origin story, so to speak, of how you ended up here at Microsoft so tall, we know you, of course, you work with us, we love you. But tell us about your job at Microsoft.
Sarah Guthals 16:01
Yeah, um, who am I, I just can't, I just always think about Zoo lander looking into a puddle. Who am I so basically, I'm someone who is extremely passionate about education, teaching and learning and all things related. That's what my background is in. And I brought that or I bring that to kind of any role that I'm in. I've been at Microsoft for just over two years, actually, like two and a half years now. And I got the opportunity to be on this cloud advocacy team where I get to pair education with my other passion, which is technology and coding and software engineering and computer science or whatever word you want to use to describe it. And so I get to spend most of my days writing content making videos, things like that, that demonstrate authentic developer workflows, like what professionals would be doing with this code or you know, whatever it is, but framing it into more relevant or like culturally relevant or just kind of imaginative narratives. So I like to to have things have just kind of context and storylines and things like that it helps me learn better. And rather than just kind of a series of Doc's, I wanted to have a series of stories where you build stuff through that, because that's kind of how I got inspired to, to join this industry.
Chloe Condon 17:30
I love that. And you have a young daughter as well, which probably makes you very passionate about education.
Sarah Guthals 17:38
Yes, yeah, I treat education. I mean, it's pretty much whether education is essentially effective communication, in my opinion. So whether I'm parenting, I'm speaking with my my partner, I'm collaborating at work, or I'm teaching adults or children, it's all essentially the same. It's about respect. It's about listening. And it's about ensuring that there's kind of good communication between the person with information and the person that's seeking information.
Chloe Condon 18:06
I'm sure a very frequent guest PJ mattes would agree with you on the teaching and educating his communication could not agree more. And as a cloud advocate, that's very much what your job is. That is teach communicate. Exactly. Very cool. So how did you find yourself here? How'd you get here?
Sarah Guthals 18:28
Good question. So okay, I'll do my you know, my whole life story, but very quickly, when I was very, very young, my mom had wrist problems. And one day, I rubbed her wrist and she said, That felt better. Thank you so much. And I said, I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I also have severe asthma I always have and I used to participate in studies, totally legit for new medications. So things like Claritin and Zyrtec. I was taking them decades ago before they were even available as prescriptions. And I just found that whole world of scientific research fascinating. So my whole life I wanted to be a doctor. That's what I plan to do. I was lucky enough to get into the University of California, San Diego and pre med, took my first chemistry and math class and failed them and almost quit. And
Brandon Minnick 19:29
a lot of people does, it does. My college. Those were literally the weed out classes. So intro to Chem intro to physics and like calc one, they made them really hard on purpose for some reason.
Sarah Guthals 19:42
So then they're not even hard. They're just not taught well, right on purpose for some reason. I could go on a whole five hour rant about that. So I almost I almost dropped out of the university to go to community college. My mom started community college when I was two years old. And so I saw the benefit of community college when you weren't sure exactly what you wanted to do, you had more support, you had more opportunity to like experiment around and it wasn't as expensive. And I was paying for college completely myself. My mom convinced me to stay. And I'm glad she did. She's going to speak to say for one year, and I'm glad she did, because I ended up taking a computer science course from the incredible Dr. Beth Simon, who happened to not only be a woman in tech, but also be transitioning into doing research and education, which blew my mind that you could be doing education with computer science. So she cared about how people were learning, she was reimagining the curriculum. I didn't know what the heck I was doing, I would go down into the computer labs, nothing would work to the point where the TA is would hold the solution code next to my code, and nobody could figure out why mine wasn't working. But I loved it. Because the difference between chemistry and computer science for me in those early classes was chemistry was memorization. and computer science was figuring things out. And the math piece, what I realized in in undergrad was there were rules. But but but like they weren't, I don't know, they just they actually weren't super firm. And you had no feedback. Like if you got it wrong, you had no idea if you got it wrong or right, because I couldn't reverse the algorithm because I would get that one wrong, too. Anyways, so I had no feedback. Computer Science was not only problem solving, but I had immediate feedback. So I switched my major into computer science. And then I ended up doing a couple of internships with Microsoft, a company called viasat. In San Diego, I ended up meeting my now husband, an undergrad, he was staying for a PhD, I got lucky enough to be accepted into the Ph. D. program as well. So I stayed. And we both did our PhDs in computer science, him focusing on on bioinformatics and neon education, and started a company while I was doing that, because I can't do just one thing at a time. Did that for a little while we were the company was teaching kids how to code through Minecraft modding which was so much fun. And then yeah, I wrote some books around teaching kids how to code. I started working for GitHub as a contractor to build like a GitHub for kids under 13 made a prototype of that. They decided not to continue working on that while I was eight months pregnant, they didn't know that it wasn't related. So then I got a full time job very quickly, at GitHub, as an engineering manager, absolutely loved that. We were building kind of the integration of GitHub into editors and IDs. And then about two and a half years ago, I got the opportunity to switch over to Microsoft has to go back to more education work. So
Chloe Condon 23:01
that's why I'm exhausted. How many like you're just like, casually read six books. Like, okay, girl. Good question. Not well. Well, I have a question for you, Sarah. So you mentioned that you grew up in a low income family. What was your introduction to computers? Like? Did you have computers around you? Personally, I only had them in computer lab for a while. But what was your relation to computers before going to UC San Diego?
Sarah Guthals 23:37
Yeah, I was not great at computers prior to undergrad. Um, so remember, this was a little while ago. So no, I wrote like, up until probably sixth grade, I was writing literally on a typewriter for anything that needed to be typed for school. Otherwise, it was just the computer lab at school we did. Ours was paused typing town was the software we use. And then also, you know, the Oregon Trail. So that was pretty much my exposure to computers. And then we did get a computer at home when my mom started at a state university to get her teaching credential. And I remember we had, there's this phenols figure math, I remember it now cuz I looked it up. And it was my favorite game in the whole world. And it was just this PC game where you went around this like spooky house trying to make dinner and every room there was like a different math problem. I don't know. It was just absolutely wild. It made no sense at all, and I absolutely loved it. But other than that I didn't really have any exposure to it. In high school was when my space was popular. And back in the day, you could customize your MySpace profile with HTML. I didn't know how to do any of that. I didn't even understand that. That's what I was doing. All I did was like search for MySpace profile. And then copy and paste, which is pretty much how I code today. So but I had no no exposure at all. I could maybe make a graph in Excel. I could answer email, I can make a PowerPoint that was like my technical skills when I started.
Chloe Condon 25:18
It's interesting because you mentioned that now especially with, with the partnerships that you work with, you work on kind of telling these stories and teaching people through stories. A lot of the games that we all grew up with on computers, I feel like I have this one called museum madness, where like you had to go through this museum did I know way too much about the Gettysburg Address y'all and the Panama Canal, like, truly. But it's so true that you but but I remember those things. And I do not think that fourth grade Chloe would care or know if she didn't have to pass that level five or six times with Abraham Lincoln to figure out from the mummy. You know, Brandon, did you have education software like that?
Brandon Minnick 26:01
Oh, yeah, I loved him, but I can't remember any what any of them are called. But yeah, no resume masters,
Chloe Condon 26:09
Mario? Oh, yeah.
Brandon Minnick 26:12
There was one where you were, you're playing this character in a third party view. And you basically went around, like solving these physics puzzles. And you would collect parts. And so what are the things you would collect is like, like, at the end, you would have this bossfight. But it was basically like, you would build something. So you would build a plane, and you would fly your plane against the boss. And so you'd have to learn about like, drag and how drag affects your play and or, like, get propellers versus jet engines and how that affects your speed. And yeah, they did all those. And I wish I remember what it was called, because I spent hours days of my life. And I loved it. And like, Yeah, when I arrived at my first physics class in high school, I at least knew a couple of these terms. So I was totally, totally confused. But yeah, let's see.
Chloe Condon 27:03
I feel like I was doing that wrong. Because whenever I played Carmen San Diego, instead of actually learning the facts, I just run into the kitchen to my mom and be like, who is known for making empanadas. Like, I didn't have the cultural significance of what I was learning.
Sarah Guthals 27:17
That's, that's an important point. Important point, Chloe. Because I'm so in my, in my PhD, my, my focus was on, can we, so my dissertation was called designing learning experience setting culture eight novices. Okay. And we culture and culture it Yeah, it's not really word, this word. It's a word, because it's in the title of my thesis. So there you go.
Brandon Minnick 27:45
We are and I
Sarah Guthals 27:46
think, right. Yeah, yeah. And so essentially, what what, what my goal was, was there was a difference between math blasters and final figure math. The difference was, and finals figure math, she would go into this room and need to, like fill a certain number of jugs of milk from this cow. And you literally had to figure out, you know, how many squirts from the cow to fill up the jugs. And it was it was the math problem was related to the storyline. Math plasters, on the other hand, is what we'd like to call chocolate covered broccoli. Yes, that is I wasn't good. Exactly. And essentially, what what you were doing was, you would play and then you would stop and do some math problems in a gamified way. And then you would play some more and stop. So like your physics one, Brandon sounds more like an inculturation of physics with gameplay. So like, in my in my doctorate, we built a video game, where you played a wizard, and you were in this 3d world, and you would walk around and there were these gnomes who needed help, they'd lost their magic. But they used to rely on magic. And now they needed your help. And you're like the last word or wizard. So then you would write spells in your spell book that were actually Java methods to help them solve their problems. So the code that you were writing was directly related.
Chloe Condon 29:11
You just answered a question for me that is that is been in my brain for so long, which is, why did math blasters give me intense anxiety? And that is because it was chocolate covered broccoli. I today I learned. Yeah. But that's interesting. Because games where I didn't know it was math, where it was like, hey, figure out the change. Like when it's in this scenario. I feel like my brain connects to that more. Yeah,
Sarah Guthals 29:35
this is really fascinating. And that's what I bring to what I do at Microsoft too, is like, um, to kind of bridge over into that I've gotten the opportunity. I'm super lucky that I've gotten to work with NASA and Netflix and Warner Brothers, and take some of their rich narratives or experiences or or storylines and To discover ways in which our authentic developer workflows might match into that. So when when we were approached from Netflix with the over the moon film, which came out last year, it's a gorgeous film about a young Chinese girl who builds a rocket to fly to the moon. And there's this huge storyline around it. And then I got the opportunity to watch the film. And while watching it, I had this huge notebook of like, all the ways I could see tech show up, right and, and, and all the ways that it would authentically show up and, and I don't want to give too many spoilers, but at the, towards the beginning of the film, she's flying and she's making it she's flying up to the moon, and then all of a sudden her rocket starts to fall. And the reason her rocket starts to fall is because her young stepbrother snuck onto the rocket, and she didn't account for his weight. And that is a very real problem when making rockets, like NASA has to think about not only the weight going up, and the amount of propulsion that they have, and all of that, but then are they going to land? Are they going to collect samples? Are they going to bring that back? What's that weight? Exactly? You know, how much food are the astronauts gonna eat all of that. So we tie all of that narrative around Fei Fei and her journey to the moon, with what NASA actually does, and how data science and machine learning can actually fit into it. And like, I don't know, it's just my favorite thing to do.
Chloe Condon 31:19
That is so cool.
Brandon Minnick 31:22
It's fun. absolutely incredible. And now, you shared some links with us before the show. I'm going to pull up one now this is aka.ms. Slash learn in space? Yes. Is this also corresponding the same movie?
Sarah Guthals 31:36
Yeah. So if you go to that link, there are three learning modules at the top of that page that are related to the over the moon film. And then there are three learning paths that are inspired by NASA. And I got the opportunity to interview literal NASA scientists, and get inspiration from them. And so we wrote some some modules around that. And that first learning path for NASA, which is an introduction to Python, inspired by NASA, that one actually you can do completely in the browser also, which is awesome.
Chloe Condon 32:11
So cool. Incredible. It's fun.
Brandon Minnick 32:18
And this one has anything to do with space, but we also have aka.ms slash learn with basketball.
Sarah Guthals 32:25
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Michael Jordan, basketball space, I do think there might be some correlation. Yeah. So it next month, actually, the new Space Jam, a new legacy film is coming out. This one is going to be a reimagining of the original film. And you might have seen some previews, or some trailers come out recently. But LeBron James is the star of this one, along with his movie son, who's played by Cedric Joe. And we got the opportunity to work with Warner Brothers in the Space Jam, a new legacy film to make learning modules, some of which we launched in December, you can find two of them that we launched in December at this link, aka.ms. Slash learn with basketball. And we're launching three more this month. So I'm really excited. The inspiration behind these was, again, kind of that tie between what do we care about when it comes to basketball. And Fun fact, player efficiency rating is the statistic that is often used in the NBA for how you know, good a player is the NBA player with the highest player efficiency rating, or P er is Michael Jordan, and the NBA player of all time, and the NBA player with the highest player efficiency rating that is still currently playing with LeBron James. So it's kind of cool. So we kind of centered the the, the modules around kind of data science and P er, and you build some web apps, and then the ones coming out are going to be mixed reality.
Chloe Condon 34:04
See, this is math, I can get behind this. My brain wants to solve because Exactly,
Sarah Guthals 34:10
yeah, we we predict what the tune squads p er would be based on some some data. So
Chloe Condon 34:19
I'm super excited. I've been helping Sarah get ready for some of these events. And I got to say as someone who still has their original purple Space Jam basketball from childhood, I could not be more excited to be helping bring Lola bunny into the Microsoft. Lola Bunny is an icon. And sweet player efficiency rating is what exactly it's how often they make a shot.
Sarah Guthals 34:49
It's a huge formula that they take with a ton of different stats. So it's not just how many shots they've made. It's it's like assists. It's How many minutes they've played, it's so many statistics that get put into this huge, huge formula. And yes, you could get all those statistics and put it through the formula. What we do is say, What if you wanted to get some like quick changes or something like that, and we actually use machine learning to predict what that might be. So we built a model based off of the P er scores of current NBA NW NBA players. And then we use that model to predict what the two squads p er would be in that same kind of universe.
Chloe Condon 35:33
Can't wait to figure out which member of toon squad has the best PR,
Sarah Guthals 35:37
if I remember, right, I'm pretty sure it was Lola. But, um, yeah, yeah, you'll have to check it out.
Chloe Condon 35:45
So exciting. And oh, my goodness, I, I'm just so excited for a reimagining of Space Jam. Like, if anybody, we talk a lot about tech nostalgia on this show. And I have to say, I'm very happy that so I don't know if y'all know this. Those watching out there. I'm sure my guests know this. Space Jam kept their original 1996 website up until recently, they still have a legacy version of the website that you can check out on the current Space Jam nulegacy website, and it is quite a time capsule of nostalgia. I think they have Comic Sans. Read on bolded font on a star story background definitely worth worth checking out. Oh, yeah, drop the link here in the chat. It's It's lovely. It reminds me a lot of Brian Benz's, a lovely Geocities page that we share it on a previous
Brandon Minnick 36:42
question from yen's friend of the show former guest on a bits, our ratios between players correlated and can be used to predict trends for upcoming players.
Sarah Guthals 36:54
It's a great question. I did not do a huge deep dive into all of the stats of basketball because we were mainly trying to focus on again that authentic technical workflow, but generally speaking, yes. From the the amount of research that we did do, that is what we saw is that that that the the data from all of the other statistics that would predict p er, given that data and those trends, you could potentially predict that and that's that's kind of what we wanted to do with all of the learning modules I write they are not the complete story. They are the, like springboard, they're the starting point. Because the goal is that, that you know, you hear about this, or you try that learning module and you ask questions exactly like this one. And then now you have the skills to go answer that question and contribute to the broader kind of sense of this knowledge. So generally speaking, yes. But I can't answer that with like, 100%. Confidence.
Brandon Minnick 37:55
Yeah. Reminds me of the the movie Moneyball, which, yeah, used similar statistics kind of obscure at the time statistics for baseball, to kind of hack the game. And yeah, it sounds like basketball starting to pick up pick up on that, too.
Sarah Guthals 38:10
Yeah, yeah, we kind of we kind of do that in the second module, we build a an app for coaches, where what we are doing is we're simulating if your your statistics get updated based on gameplay. So you would choose your first five players for the first quarter. And then because they've now played an additional quarter, their PTR might change, as you might want to swap players out to make sure that if you have a really great player, but they're getting tired, so their PR, you know, average is going down, you might want to give them a rest. So then that way, they can come back in the fourth quarter and like help you win, right. So again, that is not actually how a basketball coach would do it necessarily. But it's giving an insight into what data and what expertise a coach might have, and how we can kind of simulate that with with machine learning.
Unknown Speaker 39:00
Now this gets tricky with tune squad, because we got Tweety Bird who can fly like there's a lot of
Sarah Guthals 39:05
variables here. But I know I tried to be honest, I tried really hard to get information like that from Warner Brothers. Unfortunately, we were so early and they you know, this was back in December. So the film doesn't come out until now and they didn't want to give too many details away about each of the two squads like so you want to keep
Chloe Condon 39:24
them in you're like Does someone have an injury? I literally
Sarah Guthals 39:27
was asking that but then I was like, you know, what's someone like better at scoring like and I literally said that Chloe, I was like 20 can fly so does that mean 20 can like totally, you know, get a lot more, you know, like layups or something. Tell me about this, but um, they didn't want to divulge too much information, which honestly, I'm just really excited to watch the film now. So yeah,
Brandon Minnick 39:49
we have a nother question in the chat about PDR. Could they be related to health condition so maybe your body temperatures increasing or perspiration rates are decreasing
Sarah Guthals 40:00
I love this. This is exactly why I wrote this module because this is all of the stuff I started to think about too. So P er is based off of just kind of traditional basketball stats. So like I said, like, how many minutes? Have you played things like that? But 100%, you could add this type of data into maybe not player efficiency rating the official one but like, you know, an augmented aper. Yeah, yeah. I 100% could imagine sensors, maybe in both of the shoes to see like is all of a sudden, you know, are they running with maybe like, a little bit more pressure on one leg? Is that? Is that knee already injured? Do we want to take them out? Are they not even realizing it? Because it's such a subtle difference? Or maybe like you said, centers maybe like in their jerseys? Are they? Are they sweating more? Are they getting more tired? Can they feel like, you know, they're chivay, hydrate heavier. All of you could put sensors in their water, like so many things that you could neither just send surveys things. But you could also have like information from the like medical staff on the on the team to say like, Hey, we need to watch for this 100% you could totally add this stuff in. And I think if we had more people who loved basketball or loved sports, who also understood and were interested in tech, you don't even necessarily have to be the one to make the tech. You could be talking though, with the people who do make the tech and and and you could get more information that keeps your players healthier, and happier and keeps your team winning more.
Chloe Condon 41:34
I love the idea of the Internet of basketball is Yeah,
Brandon Minnick 41:39
I love it. I feel like it's all it's gonna take is one NBA coach, one college basketball coach, high school basketball coach to do this. And then everybody else is going to copy because this would give such a huge competitive advantage to a coach that knows, oh, this player based off the sensor readings needs to take a break. Like, I don't have to guess anymore.
Sarah Guthals 42:04
They do this in football to an extent I know that they have helmets now that have sensors to check for concussions. So if a player gets hit too hard, yeah, sorry, American football. If a player goes hard, they can know whether or not they're at risk for concussion, which is extremely important in football and American football, because that happens so often. So yes, 100% I'm sure they use some things but but the more we can intersect tech into as a tool. And as just like a part of general knowledge, the more people who go into any industry can see how they can slightly transform it. I wrote a paper called computing as the fourth R. Right? Everyone should have it. You don't have to become a developer. You don't have to become a computer scientist, you don't have to go into a tech career. But if everyone had at least some knowledge of reading, writing, math and computing, then we could be transforming industries in ways that help people and not just, you know, make money.
Chloe Condon 43:07
Wow. I'm literally sitting here thinking like, this is so inspiring, I think especially the kids who are going to be consuming this Space Jam, do legacy type content and thinking about it. I'm even thinking like, if young Chloe had known about this, I would have been measuring the telemetry of my slip inside to make sure I was getting the right amount of water and the angle. Like there's just so many cool things that that when you put these things in practical situations you start thinking about and I love to see it. You love to see the tech. Oh, we've got a nice comment here. Let's see Danish soccer player. Christian Eriksen died briefly in a game against Finland in the European Championship this Saturday. He's had he had the sensors on it.
Brandon Minnick 43:56
He's still alive in Yeah, yeah.
Chloe Condon 44:00
We had a student who worked with us with big project, who had never worked with IoT before. I had never worked with Azure before. And we did the serverless boot camp. And it was during the pandemic. So we were in quarantine. And he was away from his grandmother or Yeah, his grandmother. And he built a sensor that she could wear that was integrated with Azure Functions and Twilio. And he you know, he demoed it for us by doing jumping jacks on himself. But essentially, he wanted to be able to get a notification on what his grandmother's heart rate was if it went below or above a certain level, and he would get a text to his phone. So the fact that a high school student can build that And literally, we just handed him the resources of Azure credits and the knowledge of Azure like there's so many amazing things that when you put them in context, you can build and I think his inspiration for that project was my fake boyfriend app. So you never know where technical inspiration will strike
Sarah Guthals 44:56
well and your context of your fake boyfriend app. Give Other people context for things that they care about, or that are problems in their own lives. Right. And that's why I think it's not necessarily about writing curriculum or giving examples with every context, but having some context to to kind of ignite that that initial thought I think is so critical.
Chloe Condon 45:19
Sarah, you very, very quickly breezed over the fact that you've written seven books. What? When do you find the time man? Good question.
Sarah Guthals 45:37
Most of them I read wrote, pre daughter being born one of them I did right after she was born. But honestly, it's whenever I'm in a role where I'm not writing curriculum. I just have this like itch to write curriculum
Chloe Condon 45:52
flows out of you.
Sarah Guthals 45:54
Yeah, so I wrote a couple that were for kids. So building a mobile app, for example, or, or just like learning basic sprite programming for kids. And then I also wrote a what a GitHub for dummies book. That one was a ton of fun, I got to write that with my old manager from GitHub. And then I also wrote a helping kids learn how to code book with another PhD in education in tech. And her and I wrote this kind of like, if you are an adult, whether you're a parent or you know, or an educator, any kind of adult where you have children in your life, and you want to help them learn how to code. We wrote that book for you.
Chloe Condon 46:38
Okay, so Sarah, I noticed in our pre show notes that you dropped, you dropped a very interesting fact in here, which is that when you were doing your PhD in computer science, you got to go to Disneyland, Paris. Please tell us about that. And also, tell us your favorite Disneyland, right. It's been a while since we've talked about favorite theme park rides on the show.
Sarah Guthals 47:00
Alright, so favorite theme park ride is definitely Oh, gosh, it's so hard. So it's either Thunder Mountain or Space Mountain, those who are just my favorite. These a roller coaster girl. Okay. Yeah, the Thunder Mountain in Disneyland Paris is so incredible, you actually go underground. And so like you start in this mountain over here. And then you go underground, and you end up in this like little island for a little bit and then go back over, it is so cool. But it is a little bit more jarring. Like, it's it's definitely more of like a roller coaster. Whereas I don't know that the one in Disneyland in California is a little bit more smooth, I think. Um, but yeah, my so for those of you who don't know, which I did not know this, again, I come from a very, very, very low income family. And I paid for college by working three to four jobs throughout undergrad. And when I was thinking about doing my PhD, I was like, I can't, like I can't afford this. And I had already also taken out loans and gotten grants and scholarships and others. And I was like, I can't afford this. But most PhD programs in computer science, at least and and most worldwide, but you know, it definitely depends. They actually pay you a stipend, and pay for your school. Now the stipend is not big, it's, you know, back then it was, it was about $20,000 it was way more than enough, right? It's not, but I'm just saying it's not like, you know, a, like a job job. in tech. I mean, it's it but it was way more than enough to live on, especially if you didn't have to pay for school. And that was just incredible. I never knew that that was a thing. I felt so lucky. And the neat thing about it is that in addition to that you're often put on you often write grants with your faculty advisors. And those grants include funds to travel to conferences when travel is appropriate. And those conferences tend to be worldwide because we are a worldwide, you know, field. And so yeah, I got the opportunity to on kind of the university's dollar fly to France for a conference that I had. And then since it was the same price in terms of flights, I just made my flight like a little bit later, a few days a few I think it was about a week after the conference and ended the university did not pay for the time I was in France when I wasn't at the conference to be clear, they did not pay for my housing, nothing like that. But the flight was paid for. And that was just huge. So I got the opportunity to stay a little bit longer and go to Disneyland Paris and check out a couple of the castles and we got to do that in New Zealand. We got to do that in London, Scotland. And then you know, around the United States some some places in Canada I think those are the ones that I've been to It was incredible. It's the only time I've ever been out of the country has been on on research trips.
Chloe Condon 50:04
And I feel like Disney has done such a great job at educating through entertainment content. And I know Sarah and I have a shared love for 90s nostalgia, of course. What are some of like, when you think back on your time, you know, learning about computers and things like that? What kind of Was there anything that kind of like stood out as far as education wise, that was really an important, like, for me, I think back on learning about a lot of things from the dinosaurs about like, the prehistoric ages and things like that. Are there? Is there content like that, that really speaks to you from your childhood that inspires you now to create the content you do now?
Sarah Guthals 50:48
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to give away too much about a secret project that we're working on. But honestly, literally, everything from the 90s had to do with like, detectives and spies, like everything had to do with like, figuring things out. And that's what I realized. When I got older, when I switched from pre med to computer science, and I realized what I love is problem solving. What I love is that there's a mystery, whether that mystery is, you know, like fibl got lost and can't find his family. And he needs to, like, you know, explore the world and try to find them. Or that mystery is that this error and the error message makes absolutely no sense. It's still a hunt for clues. It's still a well, let me I have a hypothesis. Let me try this. Let me see what the result of that is. And then let me adjust my hypothesis, you know, as a result, and that kind of like detective spy, you know, problem solving hunt for clues. That's what I loved. There was this incredible from highlights magazine, which was a kid's magazine back in the days, I think. Yes, yeah, they, yeah, they had this, they had this adventure spy series where they would send you like a book about a country and then some like player cards for like, who the characters were, and you had to like discover something. And there was like a workbook. And then you had like, read about the country. And it was just all of that like that. All of that is is is what I realized now inspired me,
Chloe Condon 52:31
you're now making me realize that American Girl, although it'd be an adult that I very, very much wanted and begged for also came with books that taught me about historical time period. So I got the Great Depression through American girl and I knew about all these different areas, Brandon, I don't know if you've seen but there's a new American Girl doll. That's an 80s American Girl doll. And she loves to play video games. And she programs them, which is so amazing and cool to see. I wish I had that one.
Sarah Guthals 53:01
amantha Barbie does vlogs and they're amazing. She's an icon Just saying.
Brandon Minnick 53:11
Barbie makes videos.
Sarah Guthals 53:13
Yeah. She does. vlogs I mean, they have like an animated Barbie. But she talks about racism. She talks about like being insecure. She talks about trying new things. She talks about like everything, and it's gorgeous.
Chloe Condon 53:29
It's very cool. I'm one of those, I would say weirdos. But it's one of my hobbies. I go to Target. And I spend most of my time walking up and down the toy aisle because I'm very fascinated with like, what kind of games and toys like children are interested in getting educated by and I always get so so excited when I see just like you said that, that I guess what do you call the opposite of anti chocolate broccoli, like delicious cake? is learning experiences. It's not like yeah, I can climb but it's it's technically stem because you're learning about all the ingredients that make slime or even just seeing. There's a game that I play on Nintendo Switch called human resource machine, which is actually just doing little algorithms and figuring them out. So I get so excited when I see the type of stuff that you're working on Sarah that makes it just they don't know that they're learning and it's just a fun experience and you learn something along the journey.
Sarah Guthals 54:31
And even something again, even if it's not teaching something actively. My daughter loves to play Minecraft. I do too. So that's where she learned it from. And lately, she's been playing the how to drink How to Train Your Dragon World in Minecraft. It's not intentionally teaching anything. It's not an educational thing. You know, technically, but she loves the film. She loves that world. So she'll be playing the film, and then playing in the Minecraft world and she tells She's like, Mom, can you please play The film also be or she says movie? But like, can you also play the movie? Because I want to see what I need to do in the game? And like, I'm like, Yes. I mean, it's not directly correlated. She doesn't that doesn't matter, though, right? The point is that she's gathering information from the film that has all these details, and then she's experiencing it in the 3d immersive game, and like applying that knowledge back and forth, and I just, I think that that's just so important. Yeah.
Brandon Minnick 55:29
Yeah, it's we only have five minutes left, this has flown by. Amazing, thank you. But there was there's one more link, I actually forgot about this one that you shared with us. It's pronounced Yankee fan. ky.com.
Sarah Guthals 55:47
Speaking of kids, and kind of tying things all together, bannock is this incredible organization. They have a sister organization called Beyond the ball dotnet. And both of these organizations, they're all around tying together eSports like gaming at a professional level, technology, sports and entertainment. And banchi in particular, has students, high school and undergraduate students who make content for younger students or their peers in partnership with educators, but that are relevant to what those their peers and this generation cares about. And so we're partnering with banchi on June 26. Two to just have this incredible all day event, where we're going to have folks if you're into eSports, and gaming from the FaZe clan. skeptic, I think I'm pronouncing his name right.
Chloe Condon 56:43
We're always successful. It's good. Yeah. My name is Izzy. I don't remember gonna be in a different event. JJ.
Sarah Guthals 56:52
No, yeah, you're you're gonna be joining us but Xbox producer Gabby Ponce is going to be joining us. We're going to have it's Cassie April Speight and Sana. Honey, they're all going to be joining us. And then we also have Ian Brock. And if you haven't heard of him, Brock, I suggest you look, look him up. He's absolutely incredible. hosting the whole event. It's going to be amazing. We're gonna have technical content, we're gonna have eSports content, we're gonna have sports content, entertainment content, and chances to win Xbox controllers, x, potentially some x boxes and surface books. So check it out. It's free. It's public on Twitch. Just go to Vanek comm slash find your seat. It's gonna be such a good time. Yes, yeah. And
Brandon Minnick 57:41
that's spelled b a neky.com. Slash find your seat. Yeah. Amazing. Do 26 Yes. See that?
Chloe Condon 57:50
I will be there. I'll be speaking. I'm very excited. It's gonna be really cool. And I think also, you know, just like we've been saying this whole episode, it's a great blend of like, gaming sports. Kids. Yep. Adults teaching kids. It's bunnies teaching kids. So great. Very nice. And Sarah, where can people find you on the internet and follow all the awesome things that you do?
Sarah Guthals 58:18
Yeah, I am Dr. bethells on everything, pretty much. Which was annoying when I had to switch my GitHub over but it's fine. It makes it easier. So yeah, I've doctor got those on Twitter is where I'm most active. But you can find me on tik tok, Instagram, LinkedIn, GitHub, all of them are at doctor grapples.
Chloe Condon 58:38
me saying and also, we will be having this video live afterwards. So you can check it out at eight bits.tv on YouTube. We also have a podcast you also check out the podcast add us on your favorite podcasting app. We have lots of awesome, amazing episodes with lots of folks that we mentioned on the show today, actually. Very cool. Well, y'all, this has been another episode of eight bits. And we're coming up on our one year anniversary here. So check out some really awesome posts we're going to be doing on our social. Check us out at eight bits pod. We're going to be posting a lot of fun stuff on there. And until next time, we'll see you next Wednesday. Thank you for having me.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
