CS Student Profile Series: “None of our instructors know how, so I had to teach myself”

In Casey Donahue’s classes, students have a range of coding experience. For some, this is their first time coding, others are building particle physics engines within Code.org’s interface. Talking to a few of these high school students, I was struck by their enthusiasm for Computer Science and their emphasis on how important it is for the future.

These excerpts are from interviews with Casey’s Last Period students. All quotes have been reviewed by the students and permission has been given by their parents.

Kole

Kole: My piece of advice would be when you’re learning the basics, when you start the class and start learning and you don’t go into coding — stick with it.

Ryan & Emily

Ryan: I just thought coding was interesting because I thought computers were cool and I wanted to help make them work better. Every program I try to use I try to figure out the limits of it. And since I have a bad computer at my house it doesn’t take long.

Emily: I started learning a little bit my freshman year. I mostly used Robot C, which was in the Robotics Club I do. I think it’s interesting to learn the basics of how computers work and the things you can do.

In Robotics, they give a challenge and we have to build a robot that completes the challenge. This year, our challenge is ‘In the Zone’ — you have to program a robot to a remote and it has to pick up things and stack them, then pick up the stack and put it in a Zone. The best part is the Autonomous challenge — you pre-program the robot so it does 15 seconds all by itself.

This year there are 7 of us in the club. I’m the only programmer on our team and I program all the robots right now. And none of our instructors know how, so I had to teach myself.

I really enjoy the problem solving part of it.