Special Episode: Enabling a New Generation with Technology and Hawaiian Cultural Values

Blaine: Who wants to actually kick things off about how we all got involved in Purple Mai'a and what we're going to be talking about today?

David: That reminds me, Blaine. In your introduction did you mention that you're on the Purple Mai'a board?

Blaine: Actually no, I haven't. I'm a longtime Salesforce employee as well as a recent couple year alliances manager for Heroku. I got involved with Purple Mai'a as a board member because I felt passionate about the idea of bringing technology skillsets to the native Hawaiian community through child programs as well as adult programs through Purple Mai'a. That's why I'm here.

David: At least from my perspective, the way I've been ... I've learned the history of the company. The founding team felt like there was this question of why aren't there more tech startups in Hawaii? Why aren't we seeing more kids growing up in Hawaii launching their own companies, working for big tech companies? Additionally, why does it seem like tech education has to be so separated from cultural education?

David: Here in Hawaii, there's such a rich history of innovation and technological development in ancient Hawaiian text, in modern practices. As an organization, how can we bring those two things together? The love of culture, promotion of culture, exploration of culture as well as exploration of technology; using technology for cultural reasons, sustainable reasons, economic reasons. With that in mind, how do we get started with students early? Some of our programs start as early as elementary. Most of our focus is on middle school. We do have high school programs. We do have more college-level programs, post-grad programs. But a lot of ... It's that mixture. It's that mixture of culture, that mixture of technology, that mixture of entrepreneurship.

Jennifer: The thing that attracted me to volunteering here is that I just love the mission. The fact that you have a group of people who are so passionate about their culture and about what they're doing and trying to enable the next generations to not only keep that culture alive but to also bring new technology and more skills that aren't necessarily the natural things that get taught in school so that you're able to keep sustaining things for your future. To me, that's just so inspirational and something that I'm passionate about is bringing new technology and new thoughts and new ways of doing things to education. I just love the mission and that's really what attracted me.

Blaine: It's funny, Purple Mai'a came about, at least with one of the co-founders I grew up with. We went to college together and we had this idea of empowering the native Hawaiian community with skills and technology. It lent itself back to even my own personal experiences. I've been in the technology industry for the last 20 years but prior to that from an education perspective there was little exposure that I got, at least in my generation of education back then. Whether it was middle school to high school to high school to college, there wasn't a lot of programs out there at the time that exposed local kids in Hawaii, let alone native Hawaiian kids, to \technology. Everything from coding applications to basic productivity apps.

Blaine: That was really early on in my time of education, but coming out of that and then also now getting into the industry itself and, really, climbing my career in the last 20 years, I really wanted to get behind the idea of contributing to a program that would make it easier for native children to learn about these types of skills for a variety of different reasons. First and foremost, culturally there's a lot done in our culture that is predicated upon our use of sciences and things like, for example, in our native Hawaiian navigation and our migration across the Pacific Ocean. We learned astrology and the study of stars to help us migrate our way across the planet, basically.

Blaine: There was a lot of synergy to the idea of us utilizing technology as part of our culture and some of that maybe had slipped a little bit. And so, I saw this as a cultural connection. Then I also saw this as an economic situation that would help native children, native families, actually, thrive in the islands. Based on ... Unfortunately, demographics in the islands, native Hawaiians tend to be on the lower echelon of the spectrum. And so, again, I saw technology as a way to better provide these skill sets, especially in a global marketplace, be able to compete, take those skill sets that are globally exposed and even bring them back into Hawaii and allow these people to perpetuate their culture but also in a sustainable way economically.

David: And you know, there's the idea of brain dream, right?

Blaine: Yep.

David: And that's where the entrepreneurship and remote work skills come in, too, where it's like ... Even if someone was growing up here in Hawaii and even if they did get great coding or design or whatever skills ... I've turned from my students and I've heard friends here ... They feel like they're forced to move away.

Blaine: Yep.

David: To get a job, they want to go work for some big tech company or even a small tech company, they got to move to the West Coast or something.

Blaine: Yeah. I certainly did.

David: Yeah. I think there's ... Hawaii being so remote, I think there's an opportunity to change mindsets. We can start remote companies here. We can help people learn about the opportunities of remote work here. We can build up the skill sets.

Blaine: Absolutely. I think it ultimately boils down to information access and exposure. One of the things I decided to get involved in with Purple Mai'a was actively helping bridge the gap between industry leaders like Salesforce and Purple Mai'a to contribute; to provide opportunity to volunteer, to get involved, to expose these kids to individuals like Jennifer, for example, and learning about what they do. The art of the possible.

Blaine: When you look at the evolution of tech, especially maybe in the last 10 years, there's really no reason why you can't have a growing tech hub out of Boseman, Montana or Boulder, Colorado or some of these other smaller towns that have, now, technology sectors that are starting to thrive. There's no reason why you can't have the same thing happen in the islands. And that's kind of the end goal of why I got involved. And really trying to, again, get Salesforce more involved in helping our larger, what we call 'Ohana, or family.

David: The organization has a lot of initiatives, but really, like I was saying, the main focus is on middle school-aged students in classrooms. Some of our programs ... A lot of our programs, I should say, are either after school or on the weekend. We work with partners at different locations. Maybe some ... For example, Boys and Girls Club or some charter schools. We're lucky enough that we have a couple locations where we can be there during the school day. For example, either we are sharing part of an elective with a host teacher or in some cases, like for my classes here on Maui, the school contracts Purple Mai'a to be there as an elective. Before us, they didn't have any coding class at school.

David: And so, now us as Purple Mai'a teachers can go in and offer that as an elective during the school day, which I think is a great opportunity for the students. There's a lot of challenges, pros and cons to things like after school programs or in school programs, but I feel lucky that we can be there during the school day and be a full class to teach coding and computer science fundamentals and user experience design and graphics design and things like that.

David: Part of the question in the organization is what's our educational philosophy? How do we want to teach and what's the tooling to get there? For myself, personally, when I first started teaching for Purple Mai'a, we were in a very small classroom setting. I think in that case ... Like I said, it was four years ago or so ... It was six or seven students, really small class. I was there in person. We had one other Purple Mai'a teacher assisting remotely, so we had a great teacher to student ratio. The students were a mix of age range, which I think was kind of a cool thing; not something you'd normally get in a regular classroom. We had some middle school students, some high school students. And they all knew each other pretty well. It was a non-traditional school. I guess the school system terms it the at-risk population. But they all knew each other really well and they were really open to the idea of trying coding and trying something new.

David: We had great success at that location and students really poured their creativity into the projects. We always looked for what each individual student was passionate about in order to pursue and that worked really well. For me, the next year I went into a much bigger classroom. I think that next year was 20ish students. And I was the only coding teacher there. And in that year, the organization and that particular partner location we were working with, it was a different school location. It was a lot stricter on what our curriculum needed to be; what skill sets the students were expected to practice and come away from. It was really interesting to look at the comparison of those two pretty different settings.

David: I was there and we were using a lot of the same skill sets of things like this is the basics of syntax or this is the basics of variables or loops. This is how you would ... These are the elements of HTML you would use and CSS for a basic webpage. But the student outcomes, the student engagement, the projects, the creativity we saw going in was very different. What we wanted to do as Purple Mai'a educators was different; was a different style of education. We wanted student choice. We wanted personalized learning. We wanted student-centered design. We wanted project-based education. And we wondered if this educational philosophy can work so well in some cases, why aren't other teachers doing it? Or why aren't other classrooms doing it? That led us down this path of exploring learning management systems, student management systems. What are classroom tools? How can software help teachers be more efficient with their time while at the same time providing a richer experience for students?

David: If I remember correctly, Jennifer, you got to come out to Hawaii. This was several months ago, right? With your team-

Jennifer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

David: -To be in a classroom? What was your experience with the classroom?

Jennifer: I have to say, I was really excited because I've been ... About going out there and actually seeing the students because I had been helping out a little bit. I don't want to oversell how much work I've been able to contribute, but I was able ... I was helping out on the backend, so I was seeing some of the applications you were creating, some of the code that you were ... The ways that you were teaching the students code and intermixing some of that with some of the Hawaiian pieces and I just loved what I was seeing.

Jennifer: We had an off-site where we went to Hawaii and there was a volunteer activity. One of the things Salesforce is really big on is enabling volunteerism, which is one of the best things, in my opinion, about the ... There's great things about the company. Lots of them. But this is one of my favorite things. We had a half day of volunteering where a number of folks on my team and my extended team actually went there and we got to work with students. And I have to tell you, I was so impressed with how humble these students were. But the level of questions that they were asking and the depth of knowledge that they wanted to learn and what they already knew, I was really impressed. I came away from that with such a wonderful feeling of hope for where this whole program is going and the value that it's bringing to the students.

David: Yeah. It's interesting. Like I said, we think about what's our educational philosophy? We're always experimenting with different ways of running classes or validating that what we think works, works. And when we were first thinking about how should ... What kind of classroom tools should we build? Or what kind of classroom tools do we need? I think in that first year of thinking about that, maybe our version zero of our classroom tools, we were trying out things like Google Classroom. Very popular, widely used tools. We tried out SeeSaw over the years. There's a few other learning platforms that we tried, but it didn't quite match the way our teachers wanted to run things.

David: A lot of them seemed pretty teacher-centered or teacher-led and that has advantages for sure, pros and cons. Different classroom environments, different personalities of students and teachers. But what we wanted was a more flexible tool in a classroom where it made sense; to pretty much put the students in charge of the learning path. And so, we called our tool that we started working on ... I think we started building our version one in, I want to say, 2017. And we called it Haumana.io. In Hawaiian, Haumana is student. We wanted it very personalizable, both for students and for students. We wanted it to be a tool we could use for students to learn through their passion; learn through what they're motivated about.

David: Part of what we do with Purple Mai'a is we explain to students that in making an app or making a game, there's a ton of skill sets. It's not all just hardcore programming. There's artists and writers and testers and marketers and all of that. We try to let students practice skills in a variety of areas and focus on skills that they find most exciting and most interesting. That was just really hard to do in existing tools, at least that we were trying. That very first version ... It's always ... In any organization, in any kind of project, you always have to think about resources.

David: At that point, several years ago ... I was running my own company as a software consultant but I was also teaching part-time for Purple Mai'a and I started working with a ... We had an outsource team that came in and built our MVP for Haumana. At every stage, every version, we're always looking at that classic question of buy versus build. What are some off the shelf tools we can use? What can we customize? What can we add on? Do we approach it like services? This app will provide this part of our overall piece or this other part will do this way.

David: But really, we were trying to make the experience richer for students. We were trying to make the classroom environment more sustainable for teachers because a lot of times, like I said, we'll go into a school or go into a location and our principal or our coordinator or whatever says, "Okay, this is an elective so here's 20 or 30 kids." And we say, "Whoa. In our style, things work best if we have a class size of five or 10." It's just figuring out ways we can use tools to provide that rich experience for a larger group of students and help them with things like project management, help them with learning the skills of self-directed learning just benefits everyone from the student side to the teacher side to the admin side to our partners.

Blaine: David, you mentioned connecting with Jennifer and not to lead the witness here, but how did ... Jennifer, how did you end up getting connected with David, at least at this particular stage?

Jennifer: Actually, it was your fault, Blaine.

Blaine: Right.

Jennifer: You sent out a message asking for people who were interested in volunteering and you suggested types of volunteering work and as I said earlier, I really love what Purple Mai'a is doing and so I said, "Sure, I'd be happy to get involved." And so, I've been working with David on a variety of things. Most of what I do is just weekly check-ins, see how things are progressing, provide any thoughts that I might have. I've played with a bunch of the code, so that's been fun feeling like I'm a student learning to code again.

Blaine: Nice.

Jennifer: Yeah. It's been a lot of fun. I've also done some volunteering with some of the students in the classroom remotely. Myself and someone on my team named David have listened in on some of the presentations that the students have done-

Blaine: Right.

Jennifer: -As they're pulling together things and they show their apps and they talk about why they created what they created. That was not only a huge amount of fun but also really impressive to see the quality and thought of work that went on and in to these projects that the students did. And then I've done things like talked about LinkedIn and be available. I feel like I don't do that much. I wish I could do more, but I really love what time I am able to spend and how I do contribute a little bit here.

Blaine: Yeah. It's pretty awesome. What I would say is help can take place in basically two ways. It's either time from Jennifer, herself, or more Jennifers, which ... Part of my involvement has been trying to find more people willing to spend time to give back to the community, get involved with this particular community. I know it started out ... At least for me ... Was just providing the kids perspective on ... Okay, you're learning these particular skills and developing applications or gaining tools but here's where your skills can go tomorrow if you continue down this path today.

Blaine: There was a point where I was running ... Alongside these courses, volunteers would spend time speaking to a day in the life of their work in tech. And this is where I reached out to other Salesforce employees saying, "Hey, if you're interested in just spending a little bit of time with these kids to give them some perspective about your career, that would be awesome." One, it gives them the art of the possible and two, it lets them know even if by chance you're struggling here with developing, there are skills that you are still taking away from going through instructions with David and the rest of the Purple Mai'a teaching staff. But also, there's other roles within the technology industry that you can potentially explore and utilize. And it's still the, hey, we don't want you to give up on ... In the event that you don't feel that this might be the opportunity for you but here's some people that have been maybe not so tech-centric but still in technology.

Blaine: The general idea is a lot of people within Salesforce took an interest in saying, "Hey, we'd love the opportunity to help Purple Mai'a. We'd love to talk with the instructors and see how we can assist in different curriculum. Everything from curriculum to actual coding and really getting their hands dirty in administrative work to co-teaching alongside." It's been a pretty amazing experience in that sense. And now it's just a matter of, as I said before, trying to continue down that path of finding more Jennifers to get involved.

David: I just wanted to jump in and say I think Jennifer's underselling her involvement with the Haumana project and her value to the Haumana project. We set aside time to chat every week and for me being all of the project manager/project developer/whatever on Haumana, having that time set aside once a week to say, "Well, this is what we actually got done in the last week. This is what we're hoping to do in the next week. What do you think about this? Or what's your perspective on this?" It's hugely helpful. Jennifer's brought a lot of really great insights into things like, "We heard from students that we should build such and such feature." We built such and such feature. They're using it. And then Jennifer said, "Okay, how are you tracking feedback?" It's always such a good reminded that yes, we should always be collecting feedback and yes, we should have a system for ... Someone keeping track of that and that's been really useful.

Blaine: David, when you've gone through this exercise of developing Haumana, bringing it out to market for the students, and obviously, it's also interesting because given the state of affairs with this global pandemic it almost seems that a solution ... Everyone seems to be trying to find tools to utilize for distance learning as we are all under the shelter-in-place or under certain restrictions for safety and health purposes but all still trying to operate in our normal daily lives from an education standpoint with students. But what would you say has been the biggest successes that you've had with Haumana so far? And where do you see that going from that point?

David: Yeah. I think that's a very relevant took set for these days for sure. I don't know if the listeners will know what date we're recording this. This is April 1st and so, In Maui at least, we've been under stay-at-home orders for I think two weeks now? Something like that. I know other parts of the country and the world are on similar things.

David: For the history of the project, it's interesting. When I was first teaching my first class with Purple Mai'a or second class and thinking about what should Haumana be, in my mind, at first, I was thinking the ideal thing is our own massive online course software. I had the idea in my head that we just need our own type ... Our customizable, personizable way of something like Udacity or Udemy. But I changed my mind, basically. As we talked to teachers, as we developed the tools and talked to students, I kind of went more in the other direction of no, what we really need is more tooling to help in-person classes or at least hybrid classes where maybe some of the class is remote and some of the class is in-person.

David: And now, given the stay-at-home ... Or the shelter-in-place orders, the stay-at-home orders, given the fact that at least here in Hawaii state all of our students are off from public school. Some of the private schools are doing distance learning. All of Purple Mai'a classes are now online only. I've kind of ... What we're going for is a tool set that's customizable, that's personizable but supports this idea of the Purple Mai'a way of education in either distance learning situations or in person.

David: To the question of what are the successes, as you might imagine with this very relatively, at least in the case of Hawaii, abrupt decision to move everything to distance learning, move everything to stay-at-home, we've been getting a lot of good data, a lot of good testing on our distance learning systems, on our Haumana system. We launched a online-only class last week, last Tuesday, and we are using our Haumana systems plus Zoom live video to deliver the entire class. We're meeting with students live, we're recording the lecture video, and then we're having students solve challenges and they can work through material in a self-directed way. And then we meet again with them ... We basically meet with them over video conference once a week and they can work through challenges and basically code while playing games for other days of the week as they choose to.

David: We just had the second class of that ... Or the second meeting of that, I should say, yesterday. We had a ... When our organization sent out the email blast we had 60 or so parents or students, basically, express interest. And then, in our first class we had about ... I think 31 showed up. About 50% of the people that said they were interested actually came to class, which is cool. And of course, there's always minor technical hiccups. Everybody's adjusting to distance only learning and everybody has to adjust really fast. So, that's going well.

David: One of the private schools ... As I mentioned, some of the private schools are moving all of their classes online, so we've got a couple teachers that I'm supporting that teach at the private schools that are using our Haumana platform. Basically, our version three, the stuff we had in alpha or beta we're now using live and it's working. The teachers are liking the tool set. They're feeling like it's easy to use. The students ... I think the students right now are under a lot of pressure to learn a bunch of new distance learning tools, too. But so far, so good. They're completing assignments, they're using the tools to ask questions, communicate with the teachers. We're collecting feedback. Yeah, basically, we've been working on Haumana for a few years and testing out each version year by year. But now, suddenly, everything is ... It feels like everything's in the spotlight, at least for Purple Mai'a is basically going online. Everybody is switching over to this new tool that we've been ... Had in beta and now is live.

Blaine: Yeah. I think it's timely and obviously you've had some existing activities as a recent ... That showcase the power of the ... The potential power of the application, especially over time as it continue to skill. I would say that, yeah, I think we're all going through a little bit of a learning curve of while some organizations, for example, are very used to remote access or remote work ... But when it comes to distance learning or any of that remote activity where we're not physically in an office, we're not physically interacting with an instructor, there's going to be a little bit of a learning curve. But in light of that, I think some of these recent events are really going to create some new opportunity for innovation, of which Haumana could be on the forefront for, especially with the local kids in the island community.

Blaine: I think as we start looking to try to wrap up, is there any thoughts that either one of you have in mind based on what we've shared today around the topics and talk tracks around culture, around the technology, around volunteering that you'd like to share as an end note?

Jennifer: I think that there are some great opportunities, whether it's with Purple Mai'a or any other group. For me, it's just ... An important part of my life is to be able to give back in different ways. I encourage people to look around at what's out there and even if they're not aware of it they might be able to find something like a Purple Mai'a that speaks to something that they're passionate about. I don't spend a huge amount of time with it. I have a full-time job so I do it around that and I think ... Any amount of time you give, I think, is definitely valuable.

David: The thing I think about that the teachers talk about and the founder talks about is this idea of experimentation. Our organization ... I feel like our organization runs itself like a startup. The organization's still pretty young. I think the organization, itself, is only five years old. And so, we're always trying out new tools or trying out new methods. It's also important to think about alignment. We have a certain vision that we want to go towards. We have a certain mission we're pursuing. And our experimentation should always be in service of that. I think our organization is maybe more experimental, maybe, than others. But I guess that's just maybe to be expected with a tech startup strand of our organization's DNA.

Blaine: Yep. And even that unto itself is something you're teaching. There's a huge lesson learned for the children in terms of the ... From a startup perspective, just the things like the ability to adapt and innovate and the intuitions to change and embrace change on the fly. It's pretty amazing. With that being said, as a native Hawaiian, myself, I do want to say thank you to both David and Jennifer for all your work in helping my community excel with the work that you've done. I certainly find that incredible valuable that you make the time to share what we call ike, or your knowledge, with these children and sincerely appreciate all that you do.

Blaine: With that being said, I do want to say thank you everyone for joining today's podcast session. Again, we will have links in our show notes to valuable resources as it relates to our session and I want to thank everyone for their time. Aloha.

Jennifer: Aloha.

David: Yeah. Thanks, everyone.