Outside of programming I really love being involved in community and educational work. I enjoy working with kids, so being able to teach a subject that I'm passionate about and think is important was fantastic--especially since so many of the kids who participated came from underprivileged and underrepresented backgrounds.

I got the opportunity to teach several classes during the summer, with kids in elementary, middle, and high school. The younger kids interacted with Scratch, which is a drag and drop programming language that came out of MIT. Because Scratch provides an easy way to manipulate images and create a UI, those kids made games like Pacman. The older kids got slightly more complicated problems and higher level languages like Python and Java to eventually put intro coding skills together to make Hangman.

The kids all had different skill levels and most of them had never seen anything code related before, so it was certainly a challenge to cater lessons to everyone and really drill logic. It forced me to break computer science core concepts down to their very fundamentals and rethink how certain ideas worked--it was pretty fun.