Bay Coding Club

From May to August 2025, I taught at Bay Coding Club roughly three times a week, working with multiple students at different levels. My main focus was Java and object-oriented programming for the USA Computing Olympiad (USACO), and I also taught Python to some students.

I wanted students to understand the language they were working in: how its ideas fit together and how to reason about a problem using those ideas. Completing an exercise was part of the lesson, but understanding why a solution worked was the more important goal.

That understanding also carries across languages. Concepts such as loops, functions, and objects appear in many languages, even when their syntax and behavior differ. Recognizing those shared ideas gives students a starting point for learning another language: they can build on what they already understand while paying attention to what works differently.

Some students preferred learning through practice problems to a lecture. I adapted the lesson format to that preference, using the problems themselves as a way to work through the material.

When a problem did not have an obvious solution, recognizing patterns became especially important. The aim was to take an idea from one problem and understand how it could apply to a different, related question. I wanted students to carry an approach forward, beyond the particular exercise we had just worked on.

Building curriculum was an important part of the role. I developed homework and practice questions for students with different starting points, connecting the material covered in lessons with opportunities to work through it themselves.

That also meant adjusting the pace during a lesson. If a student demonstrated that they already understood a topic, I could move ahead and adapt the lesson on the fly. Their understanding determined where we spent our time.

The exhibit lets you follow two worked examples: neighboring values being compared and swapped in a sort, and a binary search narrowing its candidates to find 5. Use Lesson progress to inspect the intermediate steps, or switch examples to start again.