[music]
>> Instructor: 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?
>> Student: I would want to take
all the knowledge that I've learned throughout this camp using Quorum
and maybe develop my own game maybe later down the line.
>> Student: I really want to teach others.
That’s sort of what I like to do
and with Quorum I can do that much easier.
[music]
>> Instructor: We’re now going to say "box."
>> Narrator: 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.
>> Andreas Stefik: My name is Andreas Stefik.
I'm an assistant professor of computer science
at the University of Nevada at 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 try to help
blind or visually impaired students learn to program more easily.
The reason is because at the time a lot of computer science
was moving toward very visual content
and that in general makes a lot of sense,
however, not if you're blind.
>> Richard Ladner: I'm Richard Ladner,
professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.
>> Richard to student: So you really need similar code
to what you have there already.
>> Richard: 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 everybody.
>> Lauren Milne: I'm Lauren Milne and I'm a graduate student
at the 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 you can play around with in audio
so it means you can make really accessible,
you can quickly and easily make accessible games
or whatever you'd like using Quorum.
>>Narrator: Quorum’s features are universally designed,
making it an easier language to learn in general.
>>Andreas: 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 was to tell the computer
to do something over and over again
in a language like Java I would say
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
Which "obviously" means that we should do something 10 times.
In Quorum, I say
repeat 10 times.
>>Richard: I find personally reading Quorum programs
a lot easier than reading C programs or Java programs.
That I can understand them more easily and so I feel like there are some
major advantages from the get-go.
Just that simple elegance.
Most languages after every single line you have to put a semicolon.
Why you have to put a semicolon, it seems to be just tradition.
It doesn't need to be there and Quorum has no semicolons.
>> Lauren: I hypothesize it could be really good
for certain students with learning disabilities
that Quorum doesn't use braces; it uses sort of indentations
and it uses the word, keywords instead to indicate the end of loops.
>> Andreas to students: 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...
>> Narrator: Over the years, Quorum has gained popularity.
>> Dominic: 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 really easy because you don't have to add in
all the semicolons and all the annoying hash tags 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 other languages.
>> Alyssa: 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 semicolons
and brackets and parentheses and all the stuff.
They made it easier.
You can just type in a word, "output" let’s say, for example,
and then you could 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.
>> Mary: I’m Mary.
You can do a lot more things in Quorum with less lines of code
than in some other things I've used before.
>> Narrator: Quorum is evidence-based,
using the results of scientific experiments
to determine how to make the language easier to use.
>> Andreas: 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.
>> Narrator: The result is a programming language
that is creating a more inviting environment for computing students.
>> Lauren: A lot of people - I've seen in intro classes that I've taught.
They come in, you know, and they get really intimidated at first
when they start programming and 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 have come in, who come into the 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.