By: Tianhao Chen
“Are you interested in learning Python?” my dad asked me during the summer before 6th grade.
“Python? What’s that?” I asked, curiously.
“It’s just a programming language that you can write in to tell your computer to do certain tasks. If you want, I can sign you up for a python course at your Chinese school.”
That intrigued me. Until then, I hadn’t had much exposure to programming, but what dad said made me want to try it out. Every year at Chinese School I would take a Chinese and Math class, both often very rigorous. In the past I also took Chess, but I decided not to that year, so I needed another class to take its place. After hearing about the python course, I agreed to take it.
On the first day of Chinese school, I anxiously walked into class, waiting for whatever the course was going to throw at me. The first class was very pleasant as we mostly just installed python onto our laptops and briefly went over what python was. Towards the end of class, we wrote our first line of code, which was printing the classic “Hello World!” in Python IDLE, a development environment to write python code. Upon leaving the classroom, I felt confident that I shouldn’t have any trouble learning python.
In the following weeks, that confidence went away. The teacher started talking about variables, loops, and conditional statements, and I had a hard time keeping up. At one point, he discussed whether a variable is immutable – variables that can’t be changed, and recursion – calling a function in itself, and I couldn’t understand those lectures.
What made the class worse was that for homework he would assign us to write a program to do a certain task, such as figuring out if a number is a prime number, mirroring a word, or running a game of Tower of Hanoi, where you move all the disks from the first tower to the third tower, but any larger disk must always be below a smaller disk. To me, these tasks seemed impossible because I had difficulty understanding the concepts taught in class. I would spend hours trying to complete the homework, but to no avail.
After weeks of struggling, I decided to ask my dad for help. Although he isn’t a programmer, he was willing to help me with my python homework. He would try to help explain the concepts to me and the thought process behind the homework and how to tackle it. Still, I struggled to learn and do the homework. When his explanations didn’t work, he turned to the internet to try to find resources to help me with my learning, and that’s when he found stack overflow.
Stack overflow is a website where programmers can ask and answer questions. There, we found posts that helped me better learn the material through example code. There were also posts that went more into depth about programming topics and specific ways you could use them. This really improved my ability to learn python and made the course just a little more bearable.
When the course ended, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, thankful that it was over. Although I never fully grasped the python knowledge taught, I left that class with a new skill. I learned the importance of being resourceful, being able to use tools such as the internet to help me when I didn’t know something or needed assistance. That’s what I took away from that class.