Sparking Tech Curiosity with Cassandra Chin at KubeCon Paris 2024

This is Textron tv Everybody. Welcome back to KubeCon. Mitch Ashley here with Textron Group, Textron Research.

We're in Paris 2024 at the Hopin kicking active. It's, it's happening here if it's anything to do with cloud and Kubernetes and microservices and everything else, but there's a lot of other things going on too. And we're joined today by a very special guest, Cassandra Chen, who is a student, an author, a workshop leader, all kinds of things, working on some white papers.

A lot of great stuff around technology. Welcome, Cassandra. Hi.

So I'm Cassandra Chin. I am doing a computer science major for my school, and I'm doing online college. So that lets me go to cool conferences like CubeCon.

And I'm a recent book author. So one of my recent projects is your book writing this book called Fifi's AI Friend. And since we're at CubeCon, the FPI is one of the mascots for Cloud native.

So I wrote a book inspired around it so more people can get interested into cloud native technologies. It's a great book. The illustrations in it are amazing.

Did you do the illustrations too, or you have those done? I had an illustrator do the illustrations. He, he, his name is Ramon and he actually lives in France.

Oh really? Okay. It's an international And it's really closely with him to create this book.

Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a great book. Very cool.

What's, what's sort, what's the theme? Kind of what's the lesson behind the book? Um, there's a lot of things going on, but I think the main priority is teaching kids technology.

And with all this AI hype, of course we wanna teach our kids AI as well. Mm-Hmm. So can you pass it again?

Oh yes, yes. I'll let you hold it. So this book, it's a as beautiful illustrations.

So on the surface it looks like a normal picture book, but it's also a workshop. So this is a really high level introduction of the workshop and it tells you to go to a website and it with instructions. The workshop is all done in scratch.

I think a lot of kids are familiar with Scratch or parents know of Scratch and they have this conception that scratch is easy for kids. Mm-Hmm. Don't they use it in school a lot?

I think that's a pretty common school. Yeah. Schools use scratch a lot.

Yeah. So for the workshop, I have a AI extension for Scratch, which lets you use AI ML with Scratch. The extension is written using the tensor flow, like AI library.

Mm-Hmm. There's this scanning page for this, the workshop. So you hold the page up to the camera and you take pictures to get the, the algorithm to recognize the characters.

Very cool. So is that part of the workshop is getting it all working together enough that they will detect which image you're looking at and Yeah, So the goal is if you wanna the computer to see fpi, you just hold the book up and the computer says it's fpi. That's really cool.

A a nice sense of accomplishment too, right? Hey, it did. It worked.

What I did work And I think for parents, there's a lot of AI going on, like probably their boss just tells them to use more AI in their daily work. And it's difficult to explain AI to your kids sometimes. So this is a good way to connect the parents' work to the kids.

We talk a lot about ai, but we don't really say what it is very much in TV shows. And, and oftentimes they don't always describe it right either. It's kind of, yeah, that's sort of ai but not really.

Another goal of the book is to teach kids, but maybe also parents about what AI actually is. 'cause as you said, this word gets thrown around a lot. A lot of my friends use Chat GPT and Google Gemini, but they don't really know how it works.

So I think with this book, when you train your own machine learning model, like you learn the best how it works if you actually do it yourself. Mm-Hmm. There is that kinetic learning they that doing and seeing how it works and, and then it starts to make sense as opposed to just a concept.

It's a great way to learn. Very. When did this come out?

Like a week or two ago. Okay. I just finished writing this book and I started working on it in January.

So two and a half months of really intense work. I highly don't recommend writing a book that fast. Please give yourself more time.

They, yeah. I've, I've never written a book, but I've talked to many people that have, especially do it in that short a time period. You have to really have, it's kind of a labor of love.

You really have to want, this is a passion of mine, I really want to complete this. I want to create this book. And what, what was your inspiration for doing this?

I think my inspiration is there's other FPI books at CubeCon. If you go to the CNCF store, there's the Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes. The goal of the book is to teach kids about how Kubernetes clusters work.

'cause parents have a really hard time explaining how that works. I'll bet sometimes, you know, simple is hard. Really breaking it down to fundamental, you know, concepts and easy ways to understand things that could be really difficult, especially if you're steeped in knowledge about something.

Some people have that talent and others of us struggle with that. So having, especially a visual learning tool like this, you know, it's a medium they're very familiar with. Right.

Kids see that kind of thing all the time. Whether it's books or cartoons or shows or, um, characters. They're, uh, you know, Pokemon and everything else.

Right. We're all familiar with animal characters like that. I'm also teaching the workshop at CNCF Kids Day.

Tell us about that. Yeah, It's the Saturday after CubeCon. We're expecting about 70 kids, which will be a really good turnout.

And I'll be teaching the book workshop to the kids so they get to learn hands on and it also gives me some visual feedback of how they perceive the book and the instructions if they're easy to follow. Very nice. Yeah, that'd be great feedback for you.

So either second edition or your next book, you can fine tune it based on what you learned from it too. I have a lot of experience teaching kids. Like when I was a kid at 13 years old, my dad told me to just teach a workshop to kids.

And since then I've kept going at it. I've been teaching kids workshops at international conferences. And who's your dad?

Oh, my dad is Steve and Chin. Steve and Chin with Jfr. Yeah.

I think he's a familiar, familiar face around here. Um, what, what was it about why do a workshop is something to take on and teach kids? It's 'cause you already had a real interest in you enjoy teaching.

Um, I think doing workshops. I like working with kids and it teaches me how to teach others. Mm-Hmm.

And when I go to conferences, like I wasn't quite ready to give my own session to adults yet. So as a kid, what can I do to contribute back to the community? And I think the answer for that at the time is teaching kids workshops.

Mm-Hmm. Fantastic. What year in school are you college are you at Right now I'm in my third year of school.

Okay. And what, what's your plan? So are you gonna keep going to school for a while?

What do you want to do when you get out? Um, I'm actually not sure yet. Mm-Hmm.

I should try to find an internship. So I have job experience. Mm-Hmm.

But I think it would be nice to write more books on the side just as a hobby. Yeah. And it's a passion.

Um, so, so you're are, are you interested in getting into cloud native and computing and doing software development? Or do you think you want to do something else with a computer science degree? I think I'm pretty open.

Been, I'm more into like combining technical coding with communication. Mm-Hmm. Like, I like working with people.

Mm-Hmm. Yeah, there's a lot of ways you can create podcasts. You can do YouTube videos and TikTok and all of that kind of thing.

A lot of mediums to, to reach out to people as well as teaching workshops. Hope your workshop goes well. I'm sure it will.

It definitely will. It definitely will. Good And 70 kids in one room, It's divided up into four workshops.

Oh, okay. Okay. So that's, that's, that's a lot of kids in one place.

They get some good one-on-one time because the classes are smaller. That'll help. Definitely help.

Well, Cassandra, thanks for stopping by and sharing your book with us. If somebody wants to get ahold of that book, where, where can they find it? Yeah, so they can find this on Amazon and there's also a French version of the book.

So if you know French better, you have kids who speak French, then you can find a French version on Amazon France. Great. And I don't think we said the title, it's FI's AI Friend.

Right. Pys AI Friend Story and Workshop for Kids and Parents. So I recommend doing the workshop with your parents.

Yeah. Do it with your pa. That's a great thing to learn together.

Really good idea. Well, thank you Cassandra. Appreciate you being with us.

I told you we have fantastic guests on uh, Textron TV here at Coup KubeCon and Cassandra is yet another, uh, knowledgeable and, uh, assist and aspiring, uh, compu computer scientist and educator and learner herself. So thank you for tuning in. We're gonna have more interviews.

We're don't go away. Got more good content coming. We'll see you in a few minutes.