In what ways have you considered sharing your coding knowledge and enthusiasm for computer science with others?
Immediately after the scholarship was released, I studied the requirements carefully. I have learned a lot last year, therefore I want to make sure all other students I can reach out to know about this fantastic opportunity. While making a Keynote, I emailed the CS teacher at my school for a chance to present. Eventually, I got 15 minutes at the start of each class. I practiced over and over again, and it worthed it. Hands raised, asking questions and saying they want to do it. Especially when one girl who having completely no programming experiences learned about this through her friend and demonstrated a huge interest in applying for this scholarship. To me, this is like a miracle. I promptly guided her to get started, and immediately she got attracted to Swift. Even when it was time for her to leave, she still waited to finish coding the current level.
She really encouraged me to ensure other students like her to know about this. Therefore I started to write a more detailed blog post after the study session for WWDC that day. And how could I ever forget about those students back in China? I had to sneak into the robotics club and beg my teachers to join the CS study group. How could I ever forget those days when I had to look up my dictionary for technical terms used in documentations which I, a Chinese middle schooler had no clue what they mean? Everyone have the right to know about this scholarship, and that's why I entirely rewrote in Chinese to include information specific to them. Then I shared it to as many platforms as I could and requested those famous programmers to "retweet". Can't wait to see what some of those 21000 people viewed my message have made.
And as the president of the CS club at Oakton High, I tried a lot of new things to make sure students of all levels can benefit. In addition to inviting guest speakers and helping out with hour of code, we organized the first Hackathon, and I offered a workshop about Swift Playgrounds, using technics I learned from WWDC last year. I lectured the club about contributing to open source community, which I'm doing in free time. I tried to spend as much time as possible to continue translating subtitles of the Stanford CS193p open course, posting videos on bilibili, one of the China's biggest video platforms, and publish articles to share tips and technics.
Even I could not believe how I have written 1000 words and have to trim this down, but indeed, I'm eager to share more of my experiences and excitments with everyone else so they could do the same. None of my family members have STEM-related jobs, so I really could tell how programming could change one's life. Wish I could again attend WWDC and further continue my quest in empowering other people.