Hello, World

I’m Tejas Manohar, (co-)founder of Ravenwood High School’s programming club. In the 4th grade, I stumbled upon “view source.” My life was never the same. My curiosity sparked, I developed many projects alone throughout middle school and was eagerly waiting to meet other programmers my age when I entered high school.

As a freshman, I was surprised to see there were many clubs but none for programming. The rigid CS curriculum at our school actively discouraged many students from pursuing Computer Science for fun — it treated CS as an academic, theoretical subject ignoring its real power in actually getting students to apply what they learned to build things. Thus, I started a programming club at Ravenwood High School. In our first year, we only had 5 active members (and 11 total) in the club and felt there was a large close between those who got it and those who didn’t with not much in between.

This year, we joined 12 other clubs as part of the hackEDU Labs program and are working with their leaders to make our club awesome. We intend to incorporate hackEDU’s approach of getting someone started and then letting them learn through project-based exploration to try to fix that close. We’re going to achieve this through interactive workshops, CTFs, CodeDay, and show-and-tell sessions where members get to show off what they’ve been working on.

Hopefully, our efforts grow the hacker culture at RHS and show others what coding’s really about, but only time will tell. Till then, happy coding!