At the beginning of the pandemic, I was fortunate to be accepted into Stanford University’s inaugural Code in Place program, a free, human-centered introduction to coding that brought together programmers from all over the world. Over Zoom, we focused on learning Python together with Stanford faculty Mehran Sahami, Tencent Chair of the Computer Science Department, and Chris Piech, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Education. The tenets of the program were the Art of Computer Science, Learn by Doing, Humane in Trying Times, Gratitude, and Being Welcoming, a comforting approach during a difficult period.
Lectures were delivered by Prof. Sahami and Prof. Piech, and volunteer section leaders led us in small groups online as we navigated the Code in Place lessons and assignments during lockdowns across the globe. My final project involved coding an image manipulation process that allowed users to enter text messages that were then formatted on travel postcards during a time we were all grounded. Feedback on the project was positive: “"Great stuff, Chris! Quite an impact when the first picture pops up after just entering some text in the terminal and the text font you've used makes the output look sophisticated." (To the left is the logo I submitted to their design competition at the end of the program.)