Devon Howell — All Star

We teach our students to celebrate failure, but hustle with passion towards success. For this year’s #AllStarStudded week, we’ll share a few of our students’ stories, and show how they exemplify the mission of our program.

We had an epic fail with Arduinos when I was a Teaching Fellow during the 2015 SI. We took the Arduinos (a type of hardware) out of the boxes and figured that, as hackers, we would instinctively be able to figure them out. Turns out, we couldn’t turn them on or even figure out how to plug them in.

It wasn’t just the hardware, but also the software. It was a daylong struggle learning how to upload content. Then, the transition from one language, Python, to another, C, was not as smooth as we anticipated.

The students were having a lot of trouble figuring out what code to put where. However, in the midst of all of this, the class had a lot of fun failing together. Surprisingly, our cohort ended up having an amazing Arduino project for Demo Day (Trigger Safe, made by Sam Jurcic, Francis Rivera, & Henry Cedillo). Sam, Francis, and Henry worked on most of the code by themselves and were really on point. It ended up being one of the favorite projects for Demo Day and was featured at the 2016 Summer Benefit.”

Devon is currently attending the Bronx High School of Science. Check out more stories like Devon’s, and see how All Star Code continues to foster excellence by thumbing through our 2016 Annual Report.