Joys of Teaching
2018 was the year teaching stopped being a job I did and became the thing I was good at.
I ran a wide spread of courses: visual thinking, programming, tangible computing. The moment I remember best was in the visual thinking workshop, watching students build anamorphic artworks with no plan on paper, just correcting each other as they went. ReRide continued in parallel, and I started moving its next iteration toward camera-based posture tracking.
Two ideas reshaped how I taught. Paul Graham's line that a programming language should feel like pencil and paper changed how I designed my programming courses, away from ceremony and toward something you just pick up and think with. And Dr. Naveen's insistence on prototyping kept proving itself in the room. A trip to Shimoga with foundation-year students made the same point in a different key: a lot of the real learning happens outside the classroom.
Working with Venkat on the first programming course in the series let me refine all of this, and I owe Naveen the chance to build that series at all. Set against 2016 and 2017, I could finally see myself developing as an educator: less anxious, more willing to experiment, more able to meet different students where they were.