BCYF Coding Club

For my service learning, I really wanted to do something that related to Computer Science. I work for a nonprofit that encourages teens to learn how to code, but I've never really done much teaching individual people myself.

I spent all the classes teaching one kid named Bowen. He's really interested in programing and loves learning - every time he finally figures out a concept he gets extremely excited about it. I taught him some Java, starting with the basics of object-oriented programming (classes, methods, functions, objects, etc.) and moved onto mastering loops and arrays. We did a USACO problem (Cow College - December 2022, Bronze Problem 1) and sometimes I let him explore while asking me questions until he understood a concept. Some of the code he wrote is available at github.com/eeriergosling/bcyf-teaching since we were using GitHub Codespaces.

I really loved teaching him this spring, and if I'm able to, I'd love to come back again in the fall! It's really rewarding to get to see him learn and get excited about coding, and I hope having the resources to teach him at such a young age is able to help him do more and more by the time he's in high school himself. Bowen reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger. He really wants to learn how to make apps and program hardware, so I'm excited to see how far he's able to get!