Brent Warner 0:00
You’ve always wanted to have EdTech tools do something specific, but you knew the company had no incentive to build out that feature. So what do you do? With Vibe Coding, you can do it yourself. Today, we’re talking about how. This is the HigherEdTech podcast, Season 7 Episode 18.

Tim Van Norman 0:29
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Interim Assistant Director of Technology Services at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.

Brent Warner 0:39
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:47
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So two episodes ago, we talked about accessibility, and a new, new ruling has come down. And so I just wanted to give a quick, very quick update. When we did that episode, we talked about how we had an April 24 deadline with regard to title two, and that deadline has been extended, but we’re getting the impression that might mean it’s even a harder deadline, meaning this time it was, Hey, have a plan in place and and be making things happen. We’re feeling like it’s going to be a okay, you had a year do it. Are you done? And so I would suggest paying attention to whatever your organization is saying, but keep working hard to get your whatever it is you’re working on, courses, documents, all that stuff, get it accessible and stuff, because this is coming down, and I highly doubt it’s going to be pushed back much more than a year from now.

Brent Warner 1:56
Yeah, basically, do the work you’ve already been doing that you’re kind of pushing forward so that when that year comes, you’re not like, oh my god, now I have to do everything now, right? We already know what needs to be done. So So go back and check that episode. And if you if you need any advice, but talk to your school. Talk to your your IT team, whoever it is, and don’t be, don’t be fooled by the extended deadline, I guess is what we need to say exactly. All right. Well, Tim, today, we’re actually kind of, so that’s an extension from Two episodes ago. We’re kind of, today. We’re extending from one episode ago where, you know, last, last time we talked about, you know, the possibility of AI and gamification and all these things and so and we mentioned vibe coding in that episode. We said, well, maybe we should do a future episode about vibe coding. And so here we are, a future episode about vibe coding.

Tim Van Norman 2:50
Yeah. And I mean, this really hit it for me when we had our AI task force meeting the last one, and you brought up vibe coding and showed how to do something pretty quickly. And then we had somebody else do some stuff for their class and show us that. And, man, the juices started flowing. I hadn’t. I had heard about it, but I hadn’t seen it, and that was really amazing to actually see that and try it. So I thought, hey, let’s take advantage of the time and talk about it.

Brent Warner 3:22
Perfect. Yeah. So a little bit about vibe coding. If you haven’t done it, right? What is vibe coding? Basically, it’s like, I don’t know how to code at all. So let’s, let’s imagine, you know, I know some basic HTML, a few simple things, right, but I don’t know anything about deep level vibe coding, or how, or, sorry, coding, real coding. But basically what it is is you can ask these AI platforms to build anything you want based on your natural language description of it, right? So you so you’re just, you know, sharing your vibes. Hey, this is roughly what I want, and then it builds out based on what you explain to it. Does that sound kind of about right to you, Tim?

Tim Van Norman 4:03
Absolutely. I love to call it a prototyping or rapid development tool. So this is not necessarily the final product that’s going to be and by the way, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to be beautiful, but it’s not going to have all of the detailed stuff that you want, but it will do an amazing amount of things very, very quickly, like in 10 minutes. It built a game for me that I’m looking forward to playing. You know, it just, it’s amazing how quick it can do stuff. But understand you’re all you’re going to be wanting to tweak it then. But also there’s going to be a reason for full fledged programs still, yeah, we’re not getting we’re not getting rid of programmers. This is just helping with that rapid prototyping. Imagine, for instance, if you were trying, I was your programmer, and you’re trying to describe something to me. How much easier is it to describe it? If you could say, I want it, this is what I want it to do. But now, can it do it at scale?

Brent Warner 5:06
Right. Yeah. And so I think you gave it when we were talking pre show Tim, you gave this interesting idea to where you’re, well, basically saying all of these companies started firing a bunch of their programmers, going, hey, well, AI can just cover it now. And now they’re like, on hands and knees begging those programmers to come back, because they’re realizing, hold on a second. Yes, it can do a bunch of things, but I don’t, you know, we don’t know how to make them do it those things. We need people with expertise to figure these things out, right? And so and so, I was kind of thinking of it like, you know, we had this restaurant conversation, right? Tim is, which is, you can always make food at home, right? It might be really good. It might not be. It might just cover your basic needs. Or you can go to a restaurant and you can get something made for you. Maybe it’s a nicer restaurant. Maybe it does. You know, really great service. There’s a reason you choose to do one versus the other right? Sometimes the time and effort is worth it for you to do it yourself, and sometimes it’s not right. And so, so these kind of conversations around, like going to the restaurant, is kind of the same thing that I think we’ll see around coding and vibe coding, which is like, hey, I can build out this simple little thing. It doesn’t really have to be super special. I can do that for myself. I can build out something actually pretty good if I if I know what I’m doing, but there are always still going to be times that I’m going to go to a restaurant and be willing to pay for a meal. And I think the vibe coding thing will be, you know, roughly the same as that. You know where we can choose when, and we make decisions about how the choice to do that is best for us or not best for us, absolutely.

Tim Van Norman 6:41
I like that restaurant analogy, especially because at home, I don’t know about you, but when we eat at home, everybody basically eats the same meal. At a restaurant, everybody orders something different, and there’s different features that that each person wants. So that’s the type of thing that can be a distinction. Vibe coding will get you. Everybody gets the same the same thing. Yes, it might be customized to them, but it’s it’s really a set set of features versus the other. It is set, a set number of features, but it’s a bigger option, yeah, and it’s more developed and more thought through, and you’ve got experts that are telling it how to do something, versus me saying, Oh, well, hey, you know, I’d like to do something with language, and I’m not very good at language, but I want it to tell me how to do it. So, yeah, yeah.

Brent Warner 7:37
I mean, and you think about that, like some of these bigger tools, like Canva, for example, it’s like, Well, okay, hold on, I’m not going to build a tool that does all the different things that Canva does, right? But I might build something that you know helps me design text in a way that you know, or you know, rearrange this, this picture in a certain way, whatever else it is, right? So, so those are really useful. So Tim, let’s just keep it real simple today. So this idea here, I think the other part that I’m going to say about the vibe coding is like, essentially, you can build a little app, right? A little service that is and it doesn’t have to be little. It can get bigger and bigger, but you can build this app that does all these interactive things that you’re looking for. So when we’ve talked in the past about chat bots. It’s always been kind of this idea of, like, I talked to it, it talks to me. That’s kind of the back and forth. Maybe I ask it to draw a picture. It draws a picture, makes a video. It’s kind of a one to one relationship, but here you can ask it to do many interactive things. So I was kind of thinking of the idea of the game Minesweeper, right? Like, where you’re like, hey, if I click this button, then this happens. If I click on that, if I click on that square, then the bomb goes off. If I click on that one, it opens up a bunch of squares. So, like, so you can have all these multiple features that come into it into a single thing. So you can build things like you were talking about, like games or opportunities for students to make different choices and see how those choices kind of work out for them. Maybe have it make multiple outputs on a certain thing that you’re looking for. We’ll give some examples as we go into it, but it is worth kind of saying like, Okay, what if, one way you could look at it is, what if I could make my own single purpose app that might be a way to think about how you’re using vibe coding.

Tim Van Norman 9:22
Absolutely, absolutely. So first of all, let’s talk about what tools you need to get started. Yeah, and you mentioned, you mentioned a program just a moment ago, Canva. Canva, yeah. Can it do amazing things. Yes, yeah.

Brent Warner 9:39
So a lot of people aren’t aware of this. They have access to Canva for different, you know, for their own access. But when you go and click on Canva, you go and click on Canva AI, right? So I think it’s canva.com/ai and then you can click on a button that says, code. It looks a little bit intimidating. So it’s like, it’s just like a blank screen with like. The little brackets, you know, the HTML brackets, or whatever, the carrot brackets. And it’s like, well, what do I do? What do I do, right? But, but really, all it is is, that’s where you just say, This is what I want you to do, right? This is what I want you to build. And so the example that I gave Tim in our in our presentation last time was basically, you know, draw, create a drag and drop game where a word comes up and the students have to put it into a bucket that is, you know, tell it tells us what part of speech it is. So, is it a verb? Is it a noun? Is it an adjective? I just did those three simple ones, right? And then it’s like, okay, and then it took about a minute, or two minutes, maybe, like, while, to build this whole thing on the background. And then it just pops it up, and it’s like, Here you go. And then it even built a gamified system on top of it, right? So it’s like, okay, if you drag the word into the correct button, you get 10 points, right? If you don’t get drag it in, you don’t and then your goal is to get 100 points, you know, whatever. It just kind of did some of those things on the back end. I could still then have a second conversation and be like, I don’t really like the scoring system, or, you know, I don’t like, you know, I want to add in adverbs on top of these things. So it’s like, it’s fully flexible, even in the building. It’s not a done product. It’s a it’s a workable concept. And then, and then, with Canva, you can simply click on Publish, and it will create a page in Canva that people can publicly access to interact with that that simple game, right? And they already have a number of kind of basic ones that they use as suggestions, so that the drag and drop into categories one is already one that people are doing so much they’re like, let’s just make a default one that works for that. But, but, you know, there, your imagination really is the limit. So Canva is a cool one to play with. But Tim, I know you played with some other options, yeah.

Tim Van Norman 11:50
So I was playing with Gemini and ai studio.google.com, uses Gemini, and it’s got that same type of thing where you can hit publish, you can also share it as as well. But I gave it, literally a prompt, and it ran for, I don’t know, 171 seconds, I guess. Creating it was have a user start, then run a business over the course of six quarters. They can choose the business to run, but each quarter they need to make decisions, and they will see what happens to their business based on those decisions. The game should include a budget, resource management and competitive elements. It must also include business reports, such as income statement, balance sheet, forecast, market analysis and competitor analyzes. And like I said, it ran for less than 10 minutes, and it was, it actually built out this venture quest. And it, it’s kind of cool because it said, I’ve built venture quest six quarter tycoon, a deep business simulation game designed to give you a realistic taste of running a company. Key features, boom, boom, boom. I didn’t give it all that stuff. I didn’t give it a name, yeah. And it created all of this stuff. And now, you know, I can, I’m looking at it, I’m like, oh, okay, I want to add this. I want to take this away, but I’m in, I’m can be engaged in this. And my hope is that I can develop something that my students could play

Brent Warner 13:16
with, right? Yeah. And so then you will have to spend time going in and actually playing the game or interacting with it to see if it’s doing all the things that you want, right? Almost like, just like video game testers, right? They have the they have to go in, they play the game, look for the glitches. You’re going to have to be responsible for that, or perhaps, you know, send it off to your students and say, get, you know, extra credit for finding glitches or whatever else it is, right? But, but you can play with these So, so the AI studio in Gemini is great. Canva works. A lot of people are doing stuff in Claude and Claude code. I know that well, Claude is, like, really powerful coding features, and so a lot of people are really enjoying using it that way. All to say there are options out there for you to play with and figure out how to do this. Those are just a few. But Tim, I thought we’d talk about maybe just a few different possible places to play with this, some some fields and like teaching and maybe, maybe, you know, it doesn’t only have to be the classroom. You could use it for your out of classroom needs, for your staff. You know, staff might find places to use these. So we’ll talk just a little bit about some of those. I know you just gave one like, as a possible business simulation. I had given one, you know, again, that drag and drop option is fine. There were other ones that I had built just, just for fun, for exploration, where it’s like, I did one that was a different drag and drop, but it was drag and drop to label a, you know, label a flower. I kind of did it as an example for a science class, but also with language stuff as well. So it’s like, okay, you build a flower, and then your job is to drag and drop the names of the parts. The flower on to the proper part. And so you could do that. And then when I was doing this in in a session, one of the people said, Well, hey, what if my students don’t know all those words in English? And I said, Well, let’s add in a an option to have it flip, be able to flip the card and give the same word in Spanish and click the button and be able to hear the word spoken, right? And so that’s kind of what we had come up with together. In the session. We asked it to do that, and it totally did it right. It’s like, okay, now you’ve got and it’s cool. It’s, you have these little things. You clicked on the little corner of the the card, it would flip it over, you know, it would say the Spanish word for pedal. And then you could click on a little speaker icon and it would speak it out loud. And so, you know, you can really get into these multi, multi features that you really want to dig down with and help your students, you know, figure out ways that are going to be better or more useful for them to build their language skills or whatever

Tim Van Norman 15:54
else it is, absolutely. And the fun part is, then, when you talk to somebody else, they go, Oh, instead of Spanish. Can you prompt for what language? Yeah, right, yeah. And now, now your little applet gets bigger and bigger and better and more useful, because, you know, not all of your students speak Spanish, that’s right.

Brent Warner 16:13
So, yeah, so very good.

Tim Van Norman 16:15
That’s great. Study aids are amazing for this. Yeah, for sure. I think

Brent Warner 16:19
you could do tons of study aids. And here’s another thing, Tim, I think, what if students built their own study aids and then shared them out with each other? And it’s like, okay, let’s take a look at these things, and then if they had these study aids, you could then go in with them and take a look through their work and see, well, what are the problems in here? What are the things that might be missing? Right? Because we still want to help our students develop the critical thinking skills around understanding what they’re talking and you know what their their field is, but like, if they’re building something like a study program, that’s also an opportunity for them to show their expertise and build it into the app as well.

Tim Van Norman 16:54
Right? Absolutely. So stepping outside of teaching specifically for a moment, so a feature that you might not have used in an outlook is in their calendar, you can do an invite and add everybody into the invite, and then you can hit a button and it’ll go through and tell you when everybody’s available, so that you you don’t have to send out invitations over and over again until somebody finally, everybody says yes. So that’s that’s built into Outlook. But thinking about that, what about a class, schedule or availability?

Brent Warner 17:31
Yeah, for sure. So I thought about this as you know, department chair right is like in our department, I’m not chair right now, so don’t, don’t send me emails. But in the past, you know, we’ve had, we have like 80 people, 8080 teachers in our program, right? And so, so it’s like everybody sends in their information. They say, Hey, this is my availability next semester. You know, I prefer to teach in person, or I prefer to teach online, or some level of that. I, I I want to teach this level of class, right? Whatever else it is so, so they give us all this information, and we can kind of compare it against what they’ve done in previous semesters. But in theory, all of this information, like this, all we have to sort through all this stuff to figure out how to give them the schedule. But there’s nothing inside of that that is unique to me as a human right like the computer should be able to figure all that out. When we would say, here are the classes that we have available. Here are the time slots. And so in theory, you should be able to say, Okay, once everybody has turned in their their availability, we click a button and it will auto populate five different possibilities that could work for all of these teachers, or the best, you know, the best possible fits for all of these teachers. And here are the people that you have to deal with as exceptions, right? They’re they’re not quite fitting into those needs. And then you could also have it, have a second part where you say, Okay, now build it out as a drag and drop calendar, so I can move the people around into different slots, and then click one more button, and then it will create offer letters for everybody, telling them the classes and the times and all the information that’s going on, right? And so all of this I am I was always shocked that nobody had already built a system that does this right, because it seems so obvious and to as a chair, like, there are some little things. There are some things out there that existed, but they weren’t, you know, whatever. But it seems so obvious. And this seems to me like something that you could build on the back end and just go, like, okay, it’ll take me a little bit of time to sort this out. But if it can get me 80% of the way there, 85% of the way there. And I know that this is going to be, you know, three, four work, weeks of work, of going back and forth, talking to everybody, seeing what’s going on, right? I mean, it’s just a lot of work, depending on how many teachers you’re interacting with in this particular scenario, but you can absolutely save a lot of time and a lot of stress and headaches if you just got, you know, most of that work automated, which. You know, again, to me, when I’m looking at computers like that’s the whole beauty of them, is to automate a lot of these tedious tasks that don’t really end up providing a lot of value to to you in the end. I mean, there are certain parts I want to be clear, because it’s always worth talking about both sides. When you do that work, you get to know what teachers need, right? You get to pay attention to their specific, you know, their their qualities, their things going on with it. And so I do. I don’t want to just throw that away, but I would also say, like, you can you with that time saved, you can spend more time thinking about the teachers instead of like, how to move them around and what’s going on. So worth paying attention to on both sides, there might be other uses as well. Here for this particular setup,

Tim Van Norman 20:42
absolutely another one that I’ve seen a bunch of people do is setting up something to write, business letters, press releases, recommendations, anything like that. Where you’re writing something, you give it a series, a piece, a bunch of information, and it organizes it for you, then you can just go in and tweak it to be your language. But it allows you to to put things, order things, in a way that makes a lot of sense. And I’ve been starting to use it a lot more, AI, a lot more for that, but it’s nice to literally just have an applet so it knows your how you write, rather than it just being how it how everybody else might write.

Brent Warner 21:27
Yeah, and there are some back and forth. I mean, some of this could be done with, like, just, you know, just tech spots, you know, it’s like chat bots that you could interact with. But if you start imagining, well, hold on a second, here are the, the six most common things that I’m doing. And if you’ve already, if you’ve got it now as a kind of a WYSIWYG, like what they used to call WYSIWYG, the What You See Is What You Get layout, right? And so you’re, you’re already seeing it visualized, and you’re and you could click on a couple of options and be like, hey, this one’s going to be, you know, for informal, this one’s going to be for a letter of recommendation, and it’s going to be for a student go like, you know, who I’ve really, I really, really worked close with, right? And so you kind of set up your own parameters without having to type that in every time. If you know, hey, here are the variables that I tend to need to make different types of letters for. You could build that out for yourself. Have it be visually interactive at the same time as interacting with text, but again, totally customized to your needs. So yes, you could absolutely write it all in text, but like remembering each of the little things, each of the variables that you have, and typing that into your prompt every single time does get a little bit tedious. And so if you knew I’ve got a little check box inside of this visual thing, right? Then it’s just going to automatically customize it towards those needs.

Tim Van Norman 22:44
Absolutely.

Brent Warner 22:47
But Tim, we have to talk before we wrap about problems, right? Because there are definitely problems around vibe coding, and so we want to make sure we’re not just sending people off to destroy the systems they work inside of, I guess,

Tim Van Norman 23:01
Oh, especially. I mean, how many times have we talked about FERPA and stuff like that, security in general? So one of the cool things about it is it fundamentally bypasses the Well, one of the cool things, and horrible things, is that it fundamentally bypasses traditional secure development, lifestyle, life cycle. So basically, what that is, is, as you’re developing a tool, part of what you’re doing is you’re making sure it’s secure the whole way through. This doesn’t care about security. Yeah, it has no concept of security. Even though you say, make sure that this was FERPA compliant and all of those things, it really doesn’t really have a lot of understanding of what we’re talking about there. Plus, how can you prove that it is? Yeah, if you don’t know anything about you don’t know anything about it –

Brent Warner 23:51
Go and check it.

Tim Van Norman 23:52
Yeah, exactly. So just, it’s something to be very aware of. And there’s a whole bunch of vulnerability patterns that we’re seeing in this vibe, first approach. So one is the logic of convenience. Ai models prioritize working code over secure code. They just want it to work and move on package hallucinations. But also often it will suggest that you get a library or get something do something that doesn’t exist or used to exist but doesn’t anymore. So one of the things that we’ve seen ourselves is that when we use Copilot to to code things and it says to use a Microsoft tool, we then go to Gemini and find out that that tool doesn’t exist and hasn’t for five years. And and that goes back to that to the next one, which is the cryptographic Time Machine. Some of these are, well, they’re trained on legacy information. So it does, it’s not necessarily completely updated. I. Especially the larger llms, so make sure that everything is working properly before you release it.

Brent Warner 25:07
Which is specifically one of the major ways that hackers exploit systems, is they go and look for older code and older systems that haven’t been patched or updated, and then that’s what they use to go and break into your system, right? And so. So most teachers who are going to be vibe coding, or most faculty or staff who are going to be vibe coding don’t know what hackers do, and it’s like, hold on a second, this is exactly what they take advantage of, because, you know, the AI is going to be only so far up to date, right? Like they like to say it’s up to date, but then you never know totally and so. So really be aware of that.

Tim Van Norman 25:42
Well, and understand, even if it’s completely up to date, it also has legacy information, and it doesn’t necessarily know the difference. Yeah, a human goes, Oh, that was 20 years ago. Maybe I should look for an update to to AI, that’s only three years old, right? There is no 20 years ago. There’s also accidental secret leakage. So this is what we’re talking we’ve talked about, where Be careful uploading FERPA compliant information, even your code. If you’re if you’re doing code yourself, you update, you upload your code. That code now can show up someplace else. It often will get reused. There have been times when code gets changed and now, all of a sudden, it doesn’t work anymore it used to. So just be careful about stuff like that. And the last one I’ve got here is they’re calling it adversarial blindness vibe. Coding focuses on the happy path, the sequence of events where everything works. AI generated code is notoriously bad at handling failure states, so as long as everything works great, but what if somebody hits, somebody holds down shift and hits a button? What happens then, or or whatever, I mean, when I was, when I was back in school, learning about coding, one of the things that I would do is I would take my hand and pound on the keyboard one time and see what would happen. Because, as much as, Oh no, that’ll never happen. I’ve actually seen that happen, and I’ve because somebody gets angry or whatever, and they or something drops on a keyboard and a whole bunch of characters get hit at the same time. Is your program going to blow up? Ai doesn’t know that. It can’t figure that out. It hasn’t developed the history to do that. So as you’re doing it, that’s part of why I say rapid development, prototyping those types of things, is because it can help get you the idea that you want, and then you can get to somebody who can actually develop the full thing, if that’s really what you want to do.

Brent Warner 27:53
Yeah, yeah. So, so it, it starts getting trickier, the the more valuable the information you’re putting into it. And so just be, be very aware, like, low level stuff, formative work, things that are going to be, you know, doesn’t really matter who’s accessing it and who’s who’s looking at it. That’s all fine. And you I think you can have a lot of fun with it, but if you’re starting to build in things that are going to be much more, you know, higher level. And, you know, hey, I’m not saying anyone at our school, or anyone around a teacher is going to be doing this, but, like, if you’re building an app that does some sort of money transfer, that’s a huge risk, right? Like, there’s all sorts of problems going on with that right when it’s pulling in from databases, right? Like, a SQL injection, all that kind of stuff, you know, like, like, there could just be lots of different problems, and so just be aware that. Be aware of what you don’t know, and be cautious around that, I guess is what we need to say. So keep it, keep it simple. Keep it to what you are know of, and that doesn’t seem to be pulling from multiple sources.

Tim Van Norman 28:56
Absolutely. And by the way, that includes grades and stuff like that. Just make sure anonymize your data, whatever it is that makes it so that your data that you’re giving to the AI isn’t something that breaks one of the many laws associated with it.

Brent Warner 29:16
Yes, indeed. Okay, so I think there’s a lot to explore there. I hope everybody can do a little bit of exploration as we’re stepping close to the summer here, try and see what maybe can work. There will be opportunities out there to learn how to do this stuff. Check out videos online, etc. But, but hopefully, if you haven’t ever thought about it, you can get a little sense of what’s going on with the whole vibe coding world here.

Tim Van Norman 29:41
Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website, at TheHigherEdTechPodcast.com

Brent Warner 29:48
As always, we want your feedback, so please go to TheHigherEdTechPodcast.com and let us know your thoughts

Tim Van Norman 29:53
for everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with your technology questions, please contact IVC technical support for. You have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me. Tim Van Norman AT T van norman@ivc.edu

Brent Warner 30:06
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman 30:11
I’m Tim Van Norman

Brent Warner 30:12
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.