[Music]
If you're a camera, a 3D camera
and you're looking at her, and she's
pointing in that direction. The question
is What do you call 'x'
What do you call 'Y' and
what do you call 'z'.
I would want to take all of the knowledge
that I've learned throughout this camp.
Using Quorum and maybe develop my
own game. Maybe later down the line.
I really want to teach others.
That's sort of what I like to do.
And with Quorum I can
do that much easier.
Technology jobs are in demand.
And an understanding of computing and
coding are important for anyone pursuing
these opportunities. But learning
programming languages can be difficult for
any new student, including
some students with disabilities.
That's why Quorum was created.
My name is Andreas Stefik.
I am an assistant
professor of Computer Science at The
University of Nevada Las Vegas.
I invented the Quorum programming
language, at first, then my wife and I
actually created several
versions of it together.
It was originally designed to help blind
and visually impaired students learn to
program more easily.
The reason was because at the time
a lot of computer science
was moving toward
a very visual content.
And that in general makes a lot of sense,
however, not if you're blind.
I'm Richard Ladner,
professor in computer
Science and engineering at the
University of Washington.
So you really need similar code
to what you have there already.
Children who are blind, who can't see
can actually program in Quorum.
And make things that talk,
or have sound or have music.
So they're not
always so visual.
If you look at almost all
the tools that are out there
for children, they're all
super visual.
And this one is visual and auditory.
So that makes it much better for every
body.
I am Lauren Milne, I'm a graduate student
at University of Washington
in Computer Science.
I work with Richard Ladner
and I do a lot of research
in programming languages
specifically for blind students.
It has full support for
screen readers and braille displays
and it has a lot of features,
it's very easy to incorporate
audio in programs and a lot
of things that you can play
around with in audio
so it means you can
make really accessible,
you know, you can
quickly and easily
make accessible games
or whatever you'd
like using Quorum.
Quorum's features are
universally designed
Making it an easier language
to learn, in general.
One of the reasons
why Quorum is easier
in some cases, for people
to learn and grasp,
is because the language is simpler.
Which impacts people
with learning disabilities.
For example, if I were
to tell the computer
to do something over and over again,
in a language like Java, I would say
(language on screen)
Which obviously means that we should do
something 10 times. In Quorum,
I say repeat 10 times.
I find, personally,
reading Quorum programs
a lot easier than reading
C programs or
Java programs.
I can understand them more easily
and so I feel like there's some major
advantages from the get go.
Just that simple elegance.
Most languages,
after every single line
you have to put a semi colon.
Why do you have to put a semi colon?
It seems to be just tradition.
It doesn't need to be there.
And Quorum has no semi colons.
They hypothesized that it
would be really good
for certain students
with learning disabilities.
Quorum doesn't use braces,
it uses indentation
and it uses keywords instead
to indicate the end of loops.
I want you to type
the word model,
and then I want you
to type the word box.
Now there's a red underline here
because we haven't added.
Over the years,
Quorum has gained popularity.
I'm Dominic and I'm really into computers,
and really enjoy using Quorum, and have
used other computer programs
before like C++ and Java.
One of the things that stands out
to me in Quorum is the punctuation.
And it's like really easy because you
don't have to add in all the semi colons
and all the annoying like #'s and @
symbols and everything.
You just use words basically,
which is way easier than using
all those confusing symbols
and I think that makes it
easier for me to program
in Quorum than in other languages.
Hi, I'm Alyssa.
What makes Quorum easier
is the way they wrote,
the way they program
for us to write the code.
So we don't have to add
semi colons and brackets and
paranthesis and all this stuff.
They made it easier.
You can just type in a
word "output" lets say for example and
then you can write in quotes
whatever you want
the computer to say.
And that's what makes it
a lot more unique than other
programming languages like Java.
I'm Mary. You can do
a lot more things in
Quorum with less lines
of code than in
some other things that I've used before.
Quorum is evidence based.
Using the results of
Scientific experiments to
determine how to make
the language easier to use.
Quorum provides two primary benefits.
One is everything is free.
And then number two,
at the end of the day,
all of the materials that
we use and that we give
to people are vetted
both by teachers and
students and are
vetted in experiments
through the scientific method.
The result is a programming language
that is creating a more
inviting environment
for computing students.
A lot of people,
I have seen this
in intro classes that I've taught,
they come in and they get
really intimidated when
they start programming.
There's all sorts of bugs,
and it can be very frustrating.
People drop out, and very often
the only people who stick around
are people who come into a
college course with previous
programming experience.
Anything that lowers that initial entry
is going to bring a lot more people,
a lot more diversity because of that.