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JOSH: Hi, I'm Josh.

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I'm 16, and I'm from the island of Guam.

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So my question is, is that
when you guys were first

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learning programming like a long
time ago, what kept you motivated?

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And when did programming
really click with you?

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SPEAKER 1: Oh, that's
a really good question.

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So I think we can probably
each answer this one.

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For me, I think it was when I finally
started finding personal projects that

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were not academic in nature.

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They weren't homework, but they were
actual problems that I wanted to solve.

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That's where I really got into
programming and the excitement

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clicked and my thirst for wanting
to learn more and figure out

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how to do things differently
and better really clicked.

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And in fact, the first
thing I can think of,

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I can paste this into the chat window.

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This is from like literally 20
years ago in Harvard's newspaper

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that I just Googled.

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I wrote this program at the time
that was called Shuttle Boy,

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and it was this command line
program that you could run in a Unix

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or in a Linux environment before
there was web mail and gmail.

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Students at Harvard used to check
their email in a terminal window,

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just like you might be compiling and
running your C code or Python code.

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And at the time, there was no GPS.

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But we did have buses and automobiles.

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And so Harvard had a
lot of shuttle buses

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that would drive around campus to take
students from one location to another.

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But the way you could figure
out when the next schedule was

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was, you picked up this old
school technology, printed paper,

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and you could look up the time that
the next shuttle could pick you up

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from location A and take you to B.

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So for me, this seemed
like an opportunity

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to use some of the knowledge that I'd
literally just picked up from CS50

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and a follow-on class called 651.

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And I wanted to implement a program that
would make this process much easier,

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so students could check the
schedule on their computer,

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then go outside when they know
there's going to be a bus there.

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And it was just so gratifying.

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I was lucky that this happened to solve
problems not just for me, but for lots

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of other people on campus.

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And I think several hundred,
maybe a couple thousand students

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at Harvard ended up using this program.

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And what was so cool about that, was
that it was never done, the program.

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I kept wanting to add more and more
features to it, fix bugs, and so forth.

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So it really became a passion project.

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And that, I think, for me is when
it really clicked that I'm not just

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studying, a topic in
a class, I'm not just

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learning something very mechanical.

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Like I'm learning
something very empowering,

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programming, that can genuinely solve
problems that excite me and genuinely

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help others.

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Brian, any thoughts come to you?

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BRIAN: Yeah I think my general
theory is fairly similar.

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That when I was first
learning, the thing

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that really inspired me was
the different types of problems

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that I was able to solve.

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And when things really
started to click, was

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when I found a way that I could apply
computer science in my life outside

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of computer science to be able to do
interesting things and solve problems.

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The one that comes to
mind is that in college I

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was a graphic designer for
my college's newspaper.

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And I would often have to
late at night be designing

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all of these charts and
various different graphics

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in a particular style to put up on
our website or to put into print.

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And very often we're designing a very
similar type of graphic again and again

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and again.

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And I remember one day just deciding
to write a Python for program that

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would just create these
graphics for me, so I could just

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type in a few lines of code and
generate the graphics automatically.

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And that alone just saved
me hours that semester.

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I spent maybe half an
hour writing a program,

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and immediately, it was
making things easier

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for me and for the people
that I was working with.

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So that, I think, really
helped it to click for me,

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being able to write a little bit of code
that helped us solve a bigger problem.

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SPEAKER 1: How about Colton?

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What inspired you?

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JOSH: So I went into it with a
goal so from the very beginning,

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which was I wanted to make games.

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And that was since I was
probably 10 or 11 years old,

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but I started around the time I
was in high school, so 14, 15.

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And the first time I actually tried
coding it was from an old book

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on the Torque game engine which was
popular in the early to mid 2000s.

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And it used a custom language
called Torque script,

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which looked kind of like Perl
or PHP, but a little bit weird.

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Had its own syntax for some stuff.

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And probably because of all
the syntax and just the fact

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that it wasn't formatted very
well and it was black and white,

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I just kind of got immediately
almost repulsed by it, to be honest.

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And didn't, I had
never seen code before,

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so I wasn't really familiar with it
or appreciate it or know how it even

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worked or knew how to, like,
what games were even made of.

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I sort of thought they were all
like Visual Editor-based projects.

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But the desire to make
games didn't go away.

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I still wanted to make games.

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So I tried again, but
this time I decided

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I was going to learn something
beyond Torque script.

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I was going to go learn
something like C or C++.

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Those are the first two
languages that I learned.

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And learning from a more structured,
beginner-focused way, you know,

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doing simple exercises, learning
the very basics, you know,

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what's an if statement, what's
a variable, what's the loop,

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all of this stuff sort of I
think lit a fire within me.

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The fact that I could actually make
a computer do things that I wanted

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to using what sort of felt
almost Englishy, but you know,

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it's like giving instructions in a way,
using C or C++, very imperative style.

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And that sort of allured
me in a way to where it

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wasn't just about making games anymore.

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It became about coding
because it was a craft

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and because I thought it was
interesting, and because the landscape

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honestly, is just infinitely vast.

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You can your whole life
and not know, you know,

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and this is the same with
most sciences, but you

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won't be able to know
everything there is to know

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about everything in computer science.

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So you'll always be
learning something new

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and it'll always be
fascinating and interesting.

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And that's what keeps me
enjoying it to this day.

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I can learn, I can
get a lot of enjoyment

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out of even small little new
things that optimize my workflow

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or let me think about
programming in a different way.

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So I don't know, it's
been a fun journey.

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