Who’s behind
the mask.
Behind the mask are two of us, both Apple Distinguished Educators: a teacher who has spent eighteen years in the room and on stages, and a builder who ships software and studies how people learn. Here is the work that backs it up.
Mike Lang
Creative Direction · Curriculum Architecture · Instructional Design.
Mike is an Apple Distinguished Educator, a PBS Digital Innovator (opens in new tab), and a Heart of Education Award (opens in new tab) winner. He has taught for eighteen years across Mississippi, Taiwan, and Las Vegas, and he has taken the stage everywhere from district classrooms to SXSW EDU. Apple featured his students’ civic-action project in its newsroom (opens in new tab), and the Las Vegas Review-Journal (opens in new tab) told the story too. He has even sat down with Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. on how to teach the Civil War through a new lens (opens in new tab). He teaches that every student should understand the role they can play in changing the world, and that belief is the engine behind everything the Hoodlums build.
Known for: Apple Distinguished Educator. PBS Digital Innovator. Heart of Education Award. SXSW presenter.
Webs
Software & Product Design · Accessibility & Security · Instructional Design.
Webs lives where the classroom meets the codebase. She is an Apple Distinguished Educator with ten years in Clark County schools, she is finishing a doctorate (ABD) in the learning sciences at UNLV, and she is a software developer who ships real products. She builds the Hoodlums’ systems and tools with accessibility and security in from the start, and because she knows how software is actually made, she knows exactly what to watch out for.
Her own applications include Under Threshold (opens in new tab), VLRB (opens in new tab), and Curator (opens in new tab). She has engineered at ThoughtWorks (opens in new tab), where she authored How artificial intelligence is transforming the criminal justice system (opens in new tab), and she was on the software team behind Perception iO (opens in new tab), an Ars Electronica STARTS Prize film on bias and policing by Karen Palmer, the artist behind RIOT, for the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She teaches developers too, with Women Who Code sessions on automation (opens in new tab) and cloud security (opens in new tab).
Known for: Apple Distinguished Educator. Software developer focused on accessibility and security. ThoughtWorks alum and author. Software team on Perception iO, an Ars Electronica STARTS Prize project. Doctoral candidate (ABD) in the learning sciences, UNLV.
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