This week the Middle School was honored to host a panel of amazing technology entrepreneurs, programmers, and artists who spoke with our students about the wide variety of ways they solve problems, create products, and use computer programming to redefine our relationship to our phones and social media streams.

Many of the panel members were Friends Seminary parents who work in technology fields, and several amazing parents inspired the idea for the assembly and worked with me to plan the panel and find contacts in the industry.  We saw a photo of the birth of Twitter (before it was known as Twitter) and viewed maps of GPS phone data, visualizations of Instagram health-related hashtags, and devices invented to re-power cell phones during Hurricane Sandy.

Our students impressed me by asking questions about the privacy of their information online, preferences for programming languages (Java or Python, anyone?), and how wireless networks work.  Based on the resulting conversations this week, many students walked away with a broader idea of how technology might be used in their future lives, and more questions about how it is changing the world around them.