CS Student Profile Series: “Now I hack everything. I love puzzles.”

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 Second Period students. All quotes have been reviewed by the students and permission has been given by their parents.

Mariana, Mason, Alex, & Lucas

Mariana: I first got into it with hacking my sister’s Instagram. So 4 years? Now I hack everything. I love puzzles.

Mason: I work on guitars and with the frets, you have to level them and round them. And someone just coded a machine to do that. And a machine does it in 40 minutes and a person does it in an hour. It’s cool to see how many problems you can solve and things you can speed up.

Alex: Coding expands your creativity — it’s not like traditional school where there’s one correct answer in math. I learned C programming before I learned Algebra and it was a lot easier to learn Algebra after learning C. There’s a lot of ways to solve old problems in new ways.

Lucas: I’ve been learning for 1.5 years but been learning about computers and cyber security since I was 8. I hit a wall with that not knowing how to code or how computers worked so I had to learn that. In this increasingly technological world — without a basic understanding of current technologies… it matters.

Alex: I want CS to help educate the next generation. Once you kind of know how things work and understand them better, well, ignorance can be dangerous.

Mariana: It’s like the new reading. My mom’s a computer programmer — she was one of two girls in her classes. It’s such a near future and evolving so fast. Soon if you don’t know how to program, basically you don’t know how to do things.