A couple months ago, my grandmother received a brand new iPhone as a present for her seventy-fifth birthday. Her reaction was priceless: surprise followed by confusion followed by absolute terror. As our family looked on at her with encouraging smiles, she instinctively grasped on to her old Nokia Lite Phone, sliding the glossy iPhone case away from her.
"I already have a working phone. Why do I need a new one?" My brother and I exchanged furtive grins across the table at my grandmother's horrified face and I put my arm around her.
"Don't worry Dida (the Bengali word for Grandmother), we'll teach you everything." Carefully, I guided her arthritic fingers in opening the box and, while explaining the features of her new gadget, helped her gently press the white home button.
***
Fast forward a couple of months and I find myself in a similar scenario.
I am standing at the front of the "Workshop Room" in the Sunnyvale Public Library with a laptop, a broken projector, and an easel board (our hasty substitute for said projector.) The room is packed with people--about 40 I would say--except not quite the audience I had expected. Occupying every seat in the classroom sits a man or woman around my grandmother's age, their nose buried in a chromebook or mac with an open notebook and pen laid out to the side.
Let me start at the beginning. A couple weeks prior to the workshop, I had eagerly approached my public library, asking to host a workshop to teach people how to make a basic Android app. The task was to build a simple app--a fortune teller. When the user shakes the phone, a random previously inputted fortune spills out: easy enough for any middle or high school student to make. Knowing that providing a supply of donuts and Caprisun for the workshop would be crucial, I drove over to Krispy Kreme and Safeway the morning of the workshop. I arrived two hours before the workshop, laid the food out on the back table, and helped set up chairs in the empty room.
"Only 20 chairs," I stated conclusively. "I didn't invite that many people."
What I didn't know, however, was that the library had done its own form of advertising. "Building Your First Android App Workshop" had been advertised on the library website. In fact, any unsuspecting soul who was borrowing a book or paying an overdue fine would see the blaring advertisement on the billboard inside the main lobby.
And, so, there I stood, facing a set of eager wrinkled faces, waiting to see how they can build their very first android app.
My mind was racing furiously with a myriad of unanswered questions.
Did I really forget to specify an age limit? How am I supposed to teach people my grandmother's age how to code? Where do I even begin?
I closed my eyes momentarily and listened to my grandmother's voice in my head.
"Amru, first teach me the basic things."
I opened my eyes and regained my composure. I smiled at the crowd of people and introduced myself, the purpose of today's workshop, and of course, a reminder that there was plenty of delicious yet diabetes-inducing food on the back table. As I talked, I began brainstorming ways to spontaneously revamp the workshop, seeing that more than half of the audience was unfamiliar with coding, much less how to work a computer. With the limited wifi that the library offered, I threw aside my plan to download the specific IDEs and software in order to code and app, and instead found an old Expo marker, grabbed the easel, and drew a picture.
"An app has two parts. The part that you see--I call it the skin--where all the buttons, labels, and text is. And then there is the part you can't see--the bones--which handles the logic behind all that."
And so, as I stood next to the easel, I found myself teaching a condensed, simplified version of an Intro to Java class to a set of people I would have never anticipated. I would pause here and there and look around, seeing if I was making sense or if I had completely lost them. I walked around the room with the app I had built in hand, and point back to the easel to show how the front-end and the back-end of the app worked together. The workshop quickly transformed into "How to Theoretically Build Your First Android App Without Really Coding It" and--through the questions they asked, the nuances they pointed out--found myself learning while teaching.
It was an incredible experience: teaching a set of people without any prior knowledge a new, relatively difficult skill that they were unfamiliar with. By explaining the concepts on the easel (comparing arrays to rows of boxes, the skin and UI analogy), I too felt confident in my own knowledge. As everyone began filing out at the end of the workshop, I relaxed on an empty seat, exhausted. Several men and women came up and shook my hand, thanking me for taking the time to teach them something they didn't know. As I looked at each one of their faces, I saw a vision of my grandmother smiling back at me, and felt a sense of swelling pride and fulfillment. Even though the workshop had started off as something haphazard and improvised, the attendees had learned something. And so had I.
My inspiration for this article actually came a couple days ago when watching one of my favorite Pixar movies with my younger brother: Ratatouille. Although the premise of the movie is a little absurd--a rat turned food-connoisseur helps a garbage boy land a job at one of the finest restaurants in Paris--the message remained poignant: Anyone can cook.
That day at the workshop, I learned perhaps one of the most important lessons in my seventeen years of life.
Anyone can code.