Spikey Workloads - AWS Symposium 2014 - Washington D.C. - Partner Presentation - Code.org

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium
Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014
NaNoWriMo: 20 Billion
Words (and Counting)
Dave Beck
dave_beck@nanowrimo.org

Pop Quiz: What is This?
A. Mount Everest
B. NaNoWriMo’s November
user sessions
C. The iceberg that sank the
Titanic

Pop Quiz: Answer
A. Mount Everest
Hah! Most of you guessed B,
right?

NaNoWriMo Traffic Fluctuations:
Steeper than Everest

What is NaNoWriMo?
National Every November,
hundreds of thousands
of writers gather
virtually and in-person
to write 50,000 words
each.
Novel
Writing
Month

It All Started in 1999…
Our founder, Chris Baty,
challenged 20 over-caffeinated
friends to write 50,000 words each
in a single month.
Six of them finished.

Explosive Growth

NaNoWriMo Now
Four important web properties
• NaNoWriMo Main
• The Young Writers Program
• Camp NaNoWriMo
• NaNoWriMo Store

November in Detail
• Nov 1: ~500k sessions as people begin
• All month: ~50k forum posts per day
• Nov 30: Last chance to post word counts

Annual Site Crash
• Every year from 2003 to 2011 the site would crash on
November 1.
• In 2012 we migrated the sites to Amazon Web Services.
• The result: No more outages!
• Naturally, this is how our participants reacted…

Outrage!
They wanted the site to crash; it was
considered a rite of passage. Oh well.

Keeping NaNoWriMo Online
• Ruby on Rails on EC2 instances
running Debian “Wheezy”
• MySQL on RDS instances
• Domains and subdomains on
Route 53
• Image assets on S3 instances
• Other technologies: Puppet,
Vermeer, Resque, Sphinx

The Year in Instances

Next Steps
• Considering moving our email systems to SES
• Move from an event-based model to a year-round model
(so our usage isn’t so low in the off-season)
• Unify databases and codebases
• Simplify, simplify, simplify

A Final Pitch: Go Novel!
• Build your confidence: Writing a whole novel encourages self-discipline,
self-belief, and mental toughness
• Find your tribe: NaNoWriMo is 690 regional groups and thousands of
sub-communities of passionate writers working together world-wide
• Have ridiculous fun
“As a child, I was extremely shy, and it wasn’t until I did NaNoWriMo that I
found my tribe. Quite literally, I would not be able to speak in public if not
for NaNoWriMo.”
-- Kira Del Mar, teacher, author, and NaNoWriMo winner

Thank You
Dave Beck
dave_beck@nanowrimo.org

Hour of Code: Scaling Quickly to Teach Next
Gen Computer Science
Cameron Wilson
cameron@code.org

Our Vision:
every school
everystudent

The Challenge for the 21st Century

What is Computer Science?

Source -- Code.org analysis of BLS 2010-2020
employment projections (we have not yet analyzed
the BLS 2012-2022 projections released at the end
of December).
Projected New Jobs in STEM

CS is Fundamental
• This is fundamental knowledge for the 21st Century
• Two trends:
– Faster computing
– Cheaper storage
• Personalized everything
“Knowledge of computer programming is as
important as knowledge of anatomy when it
comes to medical research or clinical care”
Larry Corey,
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

AP Participation
Of this tiny sliver, only
15% are women.
Only 8% are Hispanic
Americans or African
Americans.

Educate
Advocate Celebrate
Bring CS education to
all K-12 schools in
the US.
Remove legislative
barriers to broader
CS education in US.
Combat stereotypes
preventing more students
from studying CS.

Celebrate
• Change attitudes toward computer science
• Address stereotypes:
• “Only white males can learn computer science.”
• “You have to be a math genius to learn to code.”
• Leverage celebrity (videos, social media)
• Host annual “Hour of Code” to introduce kids to CS

Celebrate - Hour of Code
• Started with a simple idea: Can we get every school in the US
to at least try one hour of code for their students?
• External Call to Action: 10 million students to take an Hour of
Code online
• Internal Goal: 3 million will actually do it.

Celebrate - Hour of Code
Results:
• 38 million students have
participated. Still growing one student
per second!
• +15,000 teachers polled; 97% said it
was "good" or "great" and asked us to
do it again next year.
• Follow-on 20-hour on-line/unplugged
course for K-8 already has 26,000
teachers, 1.2 million students. ~10%
completion rate

“Best educational product I’ve ever come across” – Marc
Bodnick, parent
“I have NEVER, EVER seen my students so excited about learning”
– Michael Clark, teacher
65,000 tweets for #HourOfCode

How Did We Do It --
Partners
Particularly:
• Microsoft
• Google
• NSF
• ECS
• CSTA
• NCWIT
• ACM
And: our teachers

How Did We Do It - Plan
• Recruiting:
• Every teacher in the country got multiple e-mails
• Prizes:
• Incentives for schools to sign up to participate (cheap for us,
massively scalable)
• Viral:
• Direct to teachers and teacher-to-teacher spread

How Did We Do It – Cloud/Platform
• Blended learning
• Making it easy for school is critical
• Making it fun for students equally critical
• Using AWS platform
• Response time for blended platform critical
• Scalability for discrete event (Computer Science Education Week launch) critical
• Dealing with multiple partners and multiple tutorials
• Engineering team partitioned servers for front end (read) and back end (write) to
optimize delivery
• Even at spike from 0 to 20 million during the week, we realized that that partitioning
was optimized so well, we spun down AWS instances

Educate
• Work directly with schools & school districts to introduce computer science
curriculum
• Elementary:
– Blended courses – unplugged classroom projects + online
• Middle:
– Curriculum for middle-school math & science using CS
• High school:
– Exploring CS & AP CS Principles
• Code.org provides professional development workshops at all level
• More information, see: http://code.org/educate/districts

Thoughts on blended learning
The holy grail: Learning CAN feel like a game
• We can make teachers’ lives MUCH easier
• Web-based models significantly reduce IT hassle
BUT, we have a LOT to learn
– Bridging traditional curriculum -> game-design
– Evaluating results: traditional evaluation or web analytics
– Amazing new opportunities (wealth of data, usage at scale)

Thoughts on blended learning
The holy grail: Learning CAN feel like a game
We can make teacher’s lives MUCH easier

Advocate – Make CS to Count!
Nine states finalized similar policies 18 months year:
• Alabama (Math)
• Maryland (Math)
• Tennessee (Math)
• Kentucky (Math)
• Arizona (Math)
• Florida (Math)
• Washington (Math/Science)
• Wisconsin (Math)
• Illinois (Math)
Rep. Drew Hansen (WA): “In Spokane, we’ve seen AP CS enrollment double because we now count
AP CS as math or science, rather than as an elective.”

Thank You
Cameron Wilson
cameron@code.org

Spikey Workloads - AWS Symposium 2014 - Washington D.C. - Partner Presentation - Code.org

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