I started Spring of 2004 when I was a freshman at Stuyvesant High School. We could start taking electives our second semester, so I signed up for Intro to Computer Science on a whim. I was decent at math but didn't know a thing about programming or computer science and never bothered much with computers aside from playing games.
I fell in love. I remember we worked with Netlogo and Scheme. We learned about towers of hanoi, various search algorithms, dynamic programming, cellular automata, disease spreading simulations, lots of recursion, prisoner's dilemma and many other things. I remember implementing a calculator in Scheme and writing a billiards game in Netlogo as projects. People did lots of awesome projects and it was an inspiring time and place to be.
I've been programming ever since and I was very very lucky to have the option to try it out in the first place. There's a real need to bring that option to more people, and I've been thinking lately about how I can do that.
I fell in love. I remember we worked with Netlogo and Scheme. We learned about towers of hanoi, various search algorithms, dynamic programming, cellular automata, disease spreading simulations, lots of recursion, prisoner's dilemma and many other things. I remember implementing a calculator in Scheme and writing a billiards game in Netlogo as projects. People did lots of awesome projects and it was an inspiring time and place to be.
I've been programming ever since and I was very very lucky to have the option to try it out in the first place. There's a real need to bring that option to more people, and I've been thinking lately about how I can do that.