Getting With the Program: Senior Offers After-School Computer Course

Charlie Harrison ’11 always seems to have some intriguing pet project in the pipeline. As a junior he picked up a guitar and decided to learn how to play indie-rock songs. This past year, he became a teaching assistant for a ninth-grade geometry class and co-founded Rivers’ film club and milk club. (Last week’s flavor: “coffee milk.”)

Charlie Harrison ’11 always seems to have some intriguing pet project in the pipeline. As a junior he picked up a guitar and decided to learn how to play indie-rock songs. This past year, he became a teaching assistant for a ninth-grade geometry class and co-founded Rivers’ film club and milk club. (Last week’s flavor: “coffee milk.”)

He’s now engaged in his biggest challenge to date: teaching an actual class at Rivers. This winter, two years after taking a computer programming course in London, he found himself drawn back to the world of coding, creating complex mazes, video games, and even programs that dabbled in elements of artificial intelligence.

He soon talked with his faculty advisor Kristin Harder and senior project advisor Leslie Fraser about teaching a non-credit programming course after school for interested students. His teachers emphasized the seriousness of the venture, but he was more than up for the task, using most of his spring break to create a syllabus and homework assignments for the course.

Since March, Harrison has been holding classes three afternoons a week, teaching everything from generating random-number lists to creating versions of the video game “Pong.” No textbooks or hour-long lectures – Harrison simply sets up laptops in a classroom in Haynes Hall, explains a few concepts, and invites his seven students to dive in for some hands-on learning. By the end of the semester, everyone in the class will be able to code more advanced computer games, and will be asked to produce their own final projects.

“Some kids are thinking about pursuing programming in college and want to get a head start, and others are just curious,” he said.
“For most electives at Rivers, people take them because they’re legitimately interested, and this is no different.”

Fraser, who oversees the class every day, has emerged from the experience highly impressed with Harrison’s ambitions and abilities.

“From his time as a TA, he understands the role of a teacher, and is able to provide important information but also step back and let students think for themselves,” she said. “He’s extremely focused and self-directed.”

Harrison’s own fascination with computer programming revolves around the way in which it melds the creative with the functional, while also proving to be very interdisciplinary in nature.

“There’s the logic aspect, but it’s also about using creativity to solve specific problems,” he said. “It encourages a lot of exploration and experimentation.”

In the fall Harrison is headed to Brown University, where he intends to take more programming courses. He’s also working on several of his own projects, including a collaboration with his brother to code a bot that will be able to outsmart humans at online poker. It’s all in a day’s work for Harrison, who for the moment is just happy serving as a mentor for his pupils.

“The hope,” he said, “is that if I instill passion in these students, maybe it will spur them to stay involved and create even more of a culture at Rivers that is interested in computer science.”
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