Felienne Hermans a professor of computer science education at the Free University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Believing strongly that programming, like math and language, should be a core subject taught in every school, Felienne teaches a weekly computer science course to high school children in the Codasium program. The program helps students solve problems methodically, deal creatively with issues and think about the consequences of digital technology for our society.

Her work led her to create Hedy, a new, free, open source platform that helps kids learn textual programming in multiple languages. The platform is built for the classroom, allowing teachers to fully customize how their students learn programming. Hedy has around 500,000 users a month, has been translated into 54 languages, including Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish, and is continuously improved and maintained by 400 plus volunteer programmers, translators, and
teachers.

Felienne is also the author of the book, The Programmer’s Brain, and holds an MSC From Eindhoven University of Technology and a Ph. D. In software engineering from Delft University of Technology.

In this episode she discusses Hedy and why we need to radically transform how we teach kids programming languages if we are to adequately prepare them for the next wave of computing.