As a bonus article this week, I’m sharing an interview with Karlie Kloss. Karlie is such a thoughtful mother and champion of young people. Now she has a new project and it is fantastic. Karlie’s debut picture book, Spaghetti Code: A Story About Problem-Solving, Pasta, and the Power of Big Ideas, arrives TODAY, and is inspired by the young innovators she’s met through her work in STEM education.
Congrats on your picture book debut, SPAGHETTI CODE, out this week! What inspired this project? Thank you! The idea really grew out of my experience building Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to watch thousands of our scholars discover these new skills and one of the most rewarding parts about the journey has been seeing the confidence that comes with learning something new. It sparked an idea of how I could help introduce that confidence even earlier. I’ve seen firsthand with my own kids how important it is to nurture curiosity from a young age. Kids are so quick to form opinions on whether they are ‘good’ at something or not and I wanted to get ahead of that. My goal was not to write a book that teaches kids how to code step by step, but rather show that roadblocks and problem-solving aren’t the end of the world, in fact they can be creative, playful and even a little messy. What better way to introduce this than through a story about spaghetti - a play off of a real coding term for tangled code: ‘spaghetti code’. At its heart, this is a story about curiosity, resilience and discovering that making mistakes is often how we figure things out, a lesson we can all use whether you are a tech person or not!
SPAGHETTI CODE fits right in with your history of tech advocacy, particularly through your organization, Kode with Klossy, launched in 2015. What prompted your nonprofit, and how has it evolved? It all started because I wanted to learn something new myself. I followed my curiosity for technology to a coding bootcamp and quickly fell in love with the process. It wasn’t just a technical skill I was learning, it was a whole new way to think and approach problem solving. I loved the creativity and challenge that it brought me and knew I wanted to help make these learnings more readily available for young people the way other extracurriculars were. And so began KWK! What started as a small number of scholarships to the bootcamp I attended has now grown to 12,000+ scholars across the country. It’s become a community where kids build confidence, make friends and learn new skills that they can take with them, whether they continue into a technology-specific career or not. With I really just want kids to feel like they’re allowed to be curious without having to be perfect. So many of us grow up thinking mistakes mean we’re bad at something when in reality, mistakes are just a part of how anything gets built and how we grow our toolbox of skills. I want them to know that they’re capable of tackling big challenges even when they don’t have all of the answers right away. And for the parents, I hope it’s an easy & comfortable way to spark conversation around problem-solving and resilience without it feeling like a lecture! Well definitely all the advice I’ve ever received from you! I always enjoy our monthly group calls, and I find the shared experiences about the different real-life day to day challenges to be SO helpful!! Having a parent community to be on this wild ride with is the greatest gift. And also, my mom told me from day one to take as many pictures and videos as possible, because time moves too quickly!
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