Ken Jennings (left) faces off against supercomputer Watson (center) and his fellow Jeopardy champion, Brad Rutter (right).

Perhaps you know Ken Jennings by name, perhaps you simply know him as “that guy with the winning streak on Jeopardy.”  In 2004, this trivia enthusiast won an incredible 74 consecutive times on Jeopardy, setting the record as the classic game show’s most winning contestant and securing the Guinness World Record at the time for “most cash won on a game show.”

Ken Jennings: Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-allIn today’s talk, he shares how he became obsessed with trivia as a young child.

“I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents and hold my own,” says Jennings in this talk, given at TEDxSeattleU. “There’s a weird sense of mastery you get when you know some …. Beattles factoid that dad didn’t know. You think, ‘Aha. Knowledge really is power.’”

In 2011, however, Jenning’s legacy changed when he accepted a match against the IBM supercomputer, Watson.

“I was pretty confident that I was going to win,” says Jennings of how he felt going into the match. “I had taken some Artificial Intelligence classes and I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on Jeopardy. People don’t realize how tough it is to write that kind of program that can read a clue in a natural language like English — to understand the puns, the red herrings, to unpack just the meaning of the clue …  I thought, ‘Yes I will come destroy the computer.’”

But that’s not exactly what happened. To hear how the match what down (interestingly, Jennings said it had an energy far more like a basketball game than a game show) and the profound lessons Jennings learned from it about the state of knowledge, watch this hilarious talk.

Shortly after the Jennings-Watson showdown in 2011, TED hosted a panel of IBM experts and insiders about the supercomputer and its Jeopardy victory. Below, see the discussion between Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine author Stephen Baker, Watson’s principal investigator Dr. David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow Kerrie Holley and Columbia professor Herbert Chase.

So how did it feel to lose to Watson? Jennings shares in this talk.

“I felt obsolete,” he reveals. “I felt like a Detroit factory worker in the ‘80s seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line. I felt like ‘Quiz Show Contestant’ was now the first job that had become obsolete under this new regime of thinking computers.”

Teens, tweens and kids are often referred to as “digital natives.” Having grown up with the Internet, smartphones and tablets, they’re often extraordinarily adept at interacting with digital technology. But Mitch Resnick, who spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet in November, is skeptical of this descriptor. Sure, young people can text and chat and play games, he says, “but that doesn’t really make you fluent.”

Fluency, Resnick proposes in today’s talk, comes not through interacting with new technologies, but through creating them. The former is like reading, while the latter is like writing. He means this figuratively — that creating new technologies, like writing a book, requires creative expression — but also literally: to make new computer programs, you actually must write the code.

The point isn’t to create a generation of programmers, Resnick argues. Rather, it’s that coding is a gateway to broader learning. “When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it’s the same thing with coding: If you learn to code, you can code to learn,” he says. Learning to code means learning how to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively. And these skills are applicable to any profession — as well as to expressing yourself in your personal life, too.

In his talk, Resnick describes Scratch, the programming software that he and a research group at MIT Media Lab developed to allow people to easily create and share their own interactive games and animations. Below, find 10 more places you can learn to code, incorporating Resnick’s suggestions and our own.

1. At Codecademy, you can take lessons on writing simple commands in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Python and Ruby. (See this New York Times piece from last March, on Codecademy and other code-teaching sites, for a sense of the landscape.)
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2. One of many programs geared toward females who want to code, Girl Develop It is an international nonprofit that provides mentorship and instruction. “We are committed to making sure women of all ages, races, education levels, income, and upbringing can build confidence in their skill set to develop web and mobile applications,” their website reads. “By teaching women around the world from diverse backgrounds to learn software development, we can help women improve their careers and confidence in their everyday lives.”
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3. Stanford University’s Udacity is one of many sites that make college courses—including Introduction to Computer Science—available online for free. (See our post on free online courses for more ideas.)
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4. If college courses seem a little slow, consider Code Racer, a “multi-player live coding game.” Newbies can learn to build a website using HTML and CSS, while the more experienced can test their adeptness at coding.
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5. The Computer Clubhouse, which Resnick co-founded, works to “help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies,” as he describes. According to Clubhouse estimates, more than 25,000 kids work with mentors through the program every year.
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6. Through CoderDojo’s volunteer-led sessions, young people can learn to code, go on tours of tech companies and hear guest speakers. (Know how to code? You can set up your own CoderDojo!)
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7. Code School offers online courses in a wide range of programming languages, design and web tools.
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8. Similarly, Treehouse (the parent site of Code Racer) provides online video courses and exercises to help you learn technology skills.
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9. Girls Who Code, geared specifically toward 13- to 17-year-old girls, pairs instruction and mentorship to “educate, inspire and equip” students to pursue their engineering and tech dreams. “Today, just 3.6% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women, and less than 10% of venture capital-backed companies have female founders. Yet females use the internet 17% more than their male counterparts,” the website notes.
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10. Through workshops for young girls of color, Black Girls Code aims to help address the “dearth of African-American women in science, technology, engineering and math professions,” founder Kimberly Bryant writes, and build “a new generation of coders, coders who will become builders of technological innovation and of their own futures.”

“You can imagine the joy of playing with a Tetris game that you wrote in Jack, and then compiled into machine language in a compiler that you wrote also, and seeing the result running on a machine that you built,” says Schocken in his talk. “It’s a tremendous personal triumph.”

Even though “From Nand to Tetris (aka The Elements of Computing Systems)” took their team five years to develop, Schocken and Nisan made the decision to put all parts of it online — from the chip specifications to the software tools. Thousands of people jumped at the opportunity to take the course online, some making their way through it on their own and others organizing classes with friends. The year was 2005 and “From Nand to Tetris” became the first of what are now known as MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. Schocken was surprised by the wide participation, and was thrilled that students remixed parts of the course, making video tutorials in other languages and creating their own games within the computer’s parameters (some examples after the jump).

To Schocken, the message is loud and clear. Educators don’t always need to teach per se — they can also provide a framework that allows students to experiment.

“These people could not care less about grades. They are doing it because of one motivation only — they have a tremendous passion to learn,” says Schocken. “Grading takes away all the fun from failing.”

To hear how Schocken’s parents fed his belief in self-study, and to find about his newest project making K-12 math classes all about experimentation, watch his talk. Below, find out how you can take “From Nand to Tetris” online and build your own computer.

In this introductory video, Schocken gives a detailed overview of what you’ll learn if you embark upon “From Nand to Tetris.” The course is divided into 14 topics, beginning with “Boolean Logic” and building through “Operating System.” Each topic has a lecture — available in both PowerPoint and PDF format — as well as a chapter to read and a project for the student to work on at their own pace. Get started at the online hub for the class >>

Below, some of the games students have created as their final projects.

Ben Craddock, a student at the University of Georgia, designed his computer to run entirely in “Minecraft.” His project was covered in Wired magazine.

This student incorporated letters into Tetris for their final project. The goal: type the letters before they hit your city.

And here, a Tetris-like game calls “Blox,” also created in the course.

Below, in a TED Blog exclusive recorded at TED2010, Sankar explains how his company, Palantir Technologies, helped create software to solve a mystery: Who hacked the Dalai Lama’s email?

Here is the story.

In 2008, an unnamed country received an email from China warning them not to host the Dalai Lama for a scheduled visit. The email was startling for a single reason: The upcoming visit was not public knowledge yet. And so the country brought in a team of data experts to find out where the message had come from and how this sensitive info had been leaked. The team used Palantir’s data analysis tools to help crack the case.

As it turns out, the Dalai Lama’s email had been targeted by spies using a practice known as “spear-fishing” — in which hackers do research on a specific person to create an email that looks like it came from someone they know well. The email includes an attachment that, if opened, gives hackers access to the target’s computer without their knowledge. As Sankar explains, hackers can not only read your email, export documents and send emails as you — they can even turn on your webcam and hear every word you say.

In this case, the hackers had downloaded negotiation documents off the Dalai Lama’s computer.

“These guys literally took the goods while sitting at home in their pajamas,” says Sankar in the talk.

But in the hands of a team of human data experts, Palantir’s technology helped showed something even more sinister at work. About 1,300 computers in 103 countries had been infected in the same way. The computers belonged to both individuals and companies with interests in Southeast Asia. And this network had existed for a shocking two years before it was made visible.

It’s a story that should warn us all to be very careful when it comes to opening attachments.