(This is a crosspost from my weekly photo site.)
The Introduction to Computer Programming Class had a Skype Q and A with Jason from Dark Sky (Dark Sky is an iOS weather app, check it out, it’s fantastic. They also make the great weather site forecast.io.) Super nice guy, I just emailed and asked, and it was scheduled a day later. Great experience for these kids.

Here’s some student responses to the prompt: “What blew your socks off? What’d advice/stories/information was surprising?”

• When how he told that if you really want to learn something. you need to be able to do it on your own time
• I think it is motivational that someone who is successful had a hard time and still does sometimes and still does what he wants to do.
• I thought it was really interesting when he talked about “reverse engineering” video games, and that was how he learned trigonometry. But now that I think about it, it isn’t surprising that it was easier for him to learn something difficult while immersing in something he was passionate about.
• The most surprising fact was that he wrote 45,000 lines of code to make the app originally, and then he modified it to do more, but only required 8,000 lines of code. I also really liked how he encouraged people to go on their own and explore other programs by themselves.
• What I guess what surprised me the most was how he compared computer programming to dance or singing or art. Going into this class I perceived computer programming as a very technical and systematic subject…that everything is by the book. While this may be true… talking to the developer brought to my attention that computer programming can be largely reliant on self discovery and self error.
• I was shocked when Jay told us how long it took to create his app and how many lines of code it required (45,000).