Neil's News

Programming Lessons

3 September 2015

By the beginning of summer vacations, my niece Thao was pretty comfortable programming in Blockly Games. So for the next couple of months I spent one day a week teaching her more advanced programming. She rendered snowmen in POV-Ray (output), solved Sodoku in Python, created colours in JavaScript, wrote compression algorithms in Java. We covered regular expressions, finite state machines, recursion, linked lists, and networking. By the end of the summer she started solving Google interview questions for fun.

Watching Thao learn programming is humbling, she's learning an order of magnitude faster than I ever did. It is a bit like watching Neo learn new skills in the Matrix. My intention was to get her ready for her high school's grade 12 CS class, but instead she'll be taking C at a local college.

Here's a fun photo sequence of Thao losing a Jenga game at a Google picnic:

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