Welcome to my second 2022 In-depth blog post

My mentor:

My in-depth mentor is my mom, Anna Khmelnitsky. She has a BSC in computer sciences and mathematics and over 20 years of experience working as a software engineer. She specialized in computer networking for most of her career. When she was my age, she was quite fascinated by computers. In high school, took a computer programming course. After graduating, she went to the Israel Defense Force for five years. While in the army, she first worked on a software for aircraft maintenance, before switching to computer networking and security. After completing her service, she chose to continue her career in computer networking and network virtualization. Currently working for VMware. Over this time, she learned many languages (such as C, C++, python, Golang), and networking protocols (such as TCP and HTTPS) that serve as building blocks of communication today.

 

Computer sciences is a new field of science and is rapidly evolving. Which made it difficult for her to get bored, she always needed to keep up with the changes in computer sciences which kept it engaging. During her work, it felt very rewarding to complete a project and see people using and benefitting from it. She had a lot of learning to do throughout her job due to all the innovation in the field, which kept her brain active. But it was not a socially rewarding job because of how little you interact with people.

 

My wisdom, learning, and facilitation/teaching strategies:

Over the last few weeks, me and my mentor have been having lessons every weekend. The first weekend I just looked at some online tutorials which talked about basic python and the basics of what it has to offer. The weekend after, and the one after that, I learned more about coding specifically in the area which concerns the final project. An important concept I was exposed to was efficient code-writing. You can write ten lines of code to accomplish what you want, or if you know the language well enough, you can do it in three. The way I have learned to think about this idea is to think about it like language shortcuts. For example, you can say “I am now finished” or you can say “I’m done”. Another thing I learned, is to be organized with code, you want to keep everything regarding a certain variable or an important value in the same place. This doesn’t change the way the code works, but it helps you in the long run, mostly when you are debugging (fixing errors).

 

For the first week of our lesson, my mentor took a way different approach than I expected. Instead of teaching me about code, she talked to me about computer anatomy. But this turned out to be useful, because she was able to explain many confusing concepts later using the first lesson. For example, she could explain how data bases worked, by referring to ram storage. What I took away from this, is to make sure to start teaching in the beginning, anything that may cause confusion or lack of complete understanding later in the lesson. Perhaps the best choice my mom made while teaching me, is giving me some beginner coding logic puzzles. The reason it was such a good idea, was that it got me interested. These easy puzzles I did at the start, not only gave me an idea of what the coding process was like, but also got me excited and proud when I succeeded with them. After getting me interested, she could teach me about anything else because I would be paying attention. This to me just showed the importance of student interest and attention, and I could apply this strategy to something as simple as teaching my little sisters’ easy math. Lastly, I felt as though during the lessons, it felt less like being taught, as it felt like learning together. She seemed just as intent of finishing the project as I was through our discussion about how the finished product would look. We’ve already laid out how we are going to approach the project, and now I’m excited to learn more.