5-E CLASSROOM STEM ACTIVITY: BEHIND VIRAL VIDEOS. Ellen Egley Education Content Manager, STEM Jobs

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1 5-E CLASSROOM STEM ACTIVITY: BEHIND VIRAL VIDEOS Ellen Egley Education Content Manager, STEM Jobs

2 SOCIAL MEDIA // TWITTER WHO MAKES TWITTER WORK? Engineers Work Hard to Keep Twitter Tweeting BY SUE HAMILTON You need to on Twitter. As you read this magazine about the great STEM jobs out there, your Twitter feed is probably rolling on your cell phone, keeping you up-to-the-second in tweets with friends, media headlines, and celebrities. You and your friends all have Twitter accounts and you re following over 00 others, just hanging out with almost anyone you choose, no matter where they are in the world. But who makes Twitter work? Almost 4,000 employees in 5 offices worldwide make it work for the more than 0 million monthly Twitter users. Two of those employees are engineers who work in different ways at the company, headquartered in San Francisco. JAN CHONG: DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING FOR THE TWITTER MOBILE APPS AND THE TWITTER WEBSITE The organization she heads is responsible for new features for Twitter for Apple s ios, Twitter for Android, and Twitter.com. New features added under her leadership are the ability to add stickers to photos or to tweet hashtags that generate custom emoji. A lot of people are involved, Jan reports. Getting tweets to your phone or web browser is harder than it looks, especially since tweets show up in real time! She is especially proud of a system she helped to create at Twitter that balances their testing time with rapid releases for the company s mobile applications. Several teams worked on the new plan that allowed development of apps on a large scale by many developers at Twitter using a shared code base. They have met their goal of getting new functions to their users quickly while making sure that the app is of high quality and doesn t interfere with a Twitter feature you already have and like to use. Jan s interest in computer science began when she took an AP class in high school at the suggestion of her father. It taught me to not be afraid of programming, she explains. But the most challenging part of her job is that technology is ever-changing. Even her father, who encouraged that computer science class, warned her: If you choose that field, you ll have to constantly learn everything all over again. Jan admits her father was right. When I was in high school, the idea that you could, from anywhere in the world, pull a phone out of your pocket and post a 40-character message with photos and emojis that people everywhere could read would have been crazy! Although Jan earned a bachelor s and master s degree in computer science, as well as a doctorate in management science and engineering from Stanford University, she got a clear sense of what she wanted to do through a series of internships at start-up companies, Microsoft, and a consulting firm. If you are interested in a social media career, Jan advises you Play! Do! Try! Build a simple website. Write a simple mobile app. Then keep going. Don t worry if it s not perfect. Doing something simple is the first step to doing it well. MEGHA BANGALORE: SOFTWARE ENGINEER ON THE DIGITS TEAM FOR TWITTER S FABRIC ORGANIZATION Fabric is Twitter s mobile developer platform, and Digits provides user verification and phone number login. Megha s role with Twitter is to create technical designs for company projects. 8 EARLY FALL 06 // STEMJOBS.COM

3 She implements and maintains backend services - the server side of applications - using Scala, a general purpose programming language, and also frontend services, using Android to develop what is seen on your mobile device. My entire job, explains Megha, could be considered problem solving - from figuring out what to build, how to build it, to fixing the bugs and errors that come up along the way. She also values her skill at experimentation, which taught her the importance of metrics. The best way to prove to yourself and others that something works as intended is to get the numbers to validate it! Twitter keeps detailed records and uses that data to make decisions about their technology, sales, and hiring processes. STEM roles at Twitter, according to Megha, include the hardware engineers managing the data centers and other physical infrastructure, software engineers and data scientists who analyze the data collected to guide new features and improve user experiences, and machine learning experts who help to improve automation. Megha worked for a tech start-up company right out of high school, working with user interface design and server applications. Her education followed and she earned both a bachelor s and master s degree in computer science from Oxford University. She was drawn to her career in social media because of the technical challenge of dealing with both extremely large-scale traffic and real-time delivery to users. SOCIAL MEDIA S FUTURE: DO YOU SEE YOURSELF TAKING A STEM ROLE IN SOCIAL MEDIA? Both Jan and Megha envision it bringing people even closer as they stay in touch through Twitter and other social media throughout the world. I think (social media) will become a crucial way in which we interact with our world and become much more mainstream to minimize physical distances between people, says Megha. Jan agrees. As technology advances, people will embrace forms of expression to increase shared experiences that transcend time and distance. They see the challenge for social media companies as searching out the relevant content from the everincreasing large data pipelines with new programming languages and new technologies that don t even exist today. When you create your next tweet with a catchy hashtag, know that those in STEM roles at Twitter work very hard to make it easy for you to do it. Oh - and follow MEGHA BANGALORE SOFTWARE ENGINEER DEGREES: BA COMPUTER SCIENCE MA COMPUTER SCIENCE YEARS IN THE INDUSTRY: 0+ STEM TYPE: EXPLORER AND MAKER JAN CHONG DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING DEGREES: BS COMPUTER SCIENCE, MS COMPUTER SCIENCE, PH.D MANAGEMENT SCIENCE & ENGINEERING YEARS IN THE INDUSTRY: 8+ STEM TYPE: EXPLORER TWITTER, TWEET, RETWEET and the Twitter logo are trademarks of Twitter, Inc. or its affiliates. STEMJOBS.COM // EARLY FALL 06 9

4 5-E CLASSROOM STEM ACTIVITY: BEHIND VIRAL VIDEOS Here are some ideas for how high school teachers could use this story as a launching point for integrated STEM learning. Our activities follow the 5-E Learning Cycle Model. Part : Engage Have students read the article Engineers Work Hard to Keep Twitter Tweeting in STEM Jobs magazine. Discuss with students: Because of the invention of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, people are more connected and have more access to each other s lives than ever before. One result of this is the phenomenon of viral videos. What does it mean for something to go viral? What are some examples of viral videos? Is there anything these videos have in common? Show students the 7-minute video that can be found at edu.stemjobs.com/teacher-resources. Part : Explore 4 5 Split students into four equal groups. Two groups will study the spread of the Double Rainbow video, while the other two will study the spread of the Friday video. Share the graphs of each video s views, which can be found at edu.stemjobs.com/teacher-resources, with each group. Groups will calculate the slope of the two steepest parts of their graphs. When did the greatest increases happen? How many views did each video accumulate in its first four weeks of real activity? Have each group look at the shape of their graph. What type of function does it most closely resemble and why? Have each group extend their graph by another 0 data points. What do they think happened to the number of views over that time period? What does the shape of that part of the graph look like? Part : Explain Pair the Double Rainbow groups with the Friday groups. The two groups will present their findings to each other. Groups will discuss how their graphs are the same or different. Which traits are unique to each graph and which are shared? According to the slope of the two steepest parts of each graph, which one spread more quickly? According to the number of views in four weeks, which video was more viral? Pair the two Double Rainbow groups. Pair the two Friday groups. Which type of function did they think their graph most closely resembled? Have them compare the extensions they created. Are the parts of the graphs they created similar or different? If they are different, have each group discuss and defend their reasoning. STEMjobs.com Behind Viral Videos

5 Part 4: Elaborate As a class, discuss other sites that could have similar graphs of their views. (Examples could include, but certainly are not limited to, SAT prep sites right before the SAT, fantasy football sites before and during big games, tax prep sites approaching April 5th, Amazon between Black Friday and Christmas Eve, etc.) What is the difference between the causes of the popularity of these sites and the popularity of viral videos? What are the implications for social media? Part 5: Evaluate Give students the following prompt in their math journals: A viral video used to be considered any video that was viewed at least one million times. In recent years, that definition had to change to videos that were viewed at least five million times because so many videos were reaching the one million mark. What can explain this huge jump in the number of views? What does this say about technology trends in our country and around the world? If desired, the following rubric can be used to score individual students contributions to their groups in the Explore and Explain activities. 5 4 The student contributed to the group s analysis, understanding, and discussion in meaningful ways. The student contributed somewhat to the group s analysis and/or discussion. The student did not contribute to the group s analysis or discussion. Standards Addressed: Common Core State Standards - Math CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSN.Q.A. Use units as a way to understand problems and to guide the solution of multi-step problems; choose and interpret units consistently in formulas; choose and interpret the scale and the origin in graphs and data displays. CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSS.ID.A. Interpret differences in shape, center, and spread in the context of the data sets, accounting for possible effects of extreme data points (outliers). Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills - Math MMA.9.A interpret information from various graphs, including line graphs, bar graphs, circle graphs, histograms, scatterplots, dot plots, stem-and-leaf plots, and box and whisker plots, to draw conclusions from the data and determine the strengths and weaknesses of conclusions STEMjobs.com Behind Viral Videos