[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.