This summer, a coding class offered by a private school in Austin, Texas, was led by an unusual teacher.
The PreK-8 school, Paragon Prep, offered a series of optional, self-paced, video lessons that were automatically generated from a textbook. In them, an animated avatar made to look like the 19th-century computing pioneer Ada Lovelace taught the basics of the Python programming language.
“We’ll also look at basic concepts of data analysis, using NumPy as well as Pandas,” said the avatar in a female computer voice that sounds more like the iPhone’s Siri than like a 19th-century British mathematician, her mouth moving clumsily as she speaks. “If you have no idea what any of that means, that’s perfectly fine, good and normal. This course was meant for anyone interested in becoming a future software engineer or data scientist, not someone who is already one.”
