Because he’s a Lead Architecture Developer in Information Technology, you’d expect Daniel Bernstein to know a lot about coding. Writing computer code is what application development folks do for a living.
Dan’s taking it a step further, though, and sharing his knowledge and love of computers with students at Homewood Middle School in Birmingham, Alabama. Every Monday, after the school day ends, he meets with the Coding Club at Homewood to teach programming concepts to the students.
“I enjoy volunteering with the students,” Dan said. “They’ve got a good computer background already, but we work together to help them understand how to talk to the computer and tell it what to do.”
Dan’s volunteer work is part of the Technology Student Association (TSA), a national, non-profit organization of middle and high school student members who are engaged in science, technology, engineering and math curricula. Since TSA was chartered in 1978, almost 4,000,000 members have participated through competitions, intra-curricular activities, leadership opportunities, and community service.
As part of his volunteer work, Dan will prepare the Homewood students to enter coding contests against other schools — sort of like a sports competition. The students are using Scratch, a graphical programming language developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach students various programming concepts.
In fact, the students recently completed their first project: a short program showing a cartoon cat eating a taco. You can see it here.
