Wintriss Technical School

I met Vic Wintriss at the August 21st meeting of the San Diego Java Users' Group. He's a retired gentleman who had 3 or 4 kids in tow for the meeting. They were his students, as young as 10 years old, who were excitedly presenting their class project which turned out to be a Java-powered Sun Spot interfaced with a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot - designed to be a maze running robot.
After listening to the presentation, and seeing the excitement in the kids eyes, I was hooked.

I couldn't help but to reminisce when I was around that age, and so excited about life and also computers. I remember the Speak and Spell that we got when I was no older than 8. I took to it so much that for my ninth birthday I was able to obtain a Commodore 64 - It was $100 at that time. We hooked it up to an old TV and then I spent hours on end in the basement with the Commodore. I considered it playing, although these days it would be tough to describe it as such. Without any persistent storage, I was presented with a fresh system every time I powered it up. I had a Basic programming book and learned enough to program some simple programs. At that time there were magazines which published programs that could be manually typed into the computer. One of my favorites was a game called Marbles, which was published in hexadecimal assembly code. As I recall, it took me at least two hours to type it in, and then I could play a colorful game with nifty digitized sounds that required rapid hand eye reflexes. I wonder what language the program was written in... Assembly, or a higher level language? Either way, all I saw was meaningless rows upon rows of hex characters. If you mistyped part of the program (after typing for hours) then it wouldn't run. VERY different than the experience that today's kids have with computers.

At one point I decided that I wanted to get a program published in my favorite magazine, 321 Contact. I thought that I had a good chance, since most of the programs were fairly simple. During this pre-Challenger disaster time, the space program was a popular topic in school, so I decided to create a program which displayed a space shuttle blast off. I got the program working to my satisfaction - must have transcribed it from the computer to paper manually with a type-writer, and then mailed it in. I wish I had a copy of that code, but it couldn't have been very good. I even remember worrying that it was too long. It was an ASCII space shuttle that slowly blasted off. I'm sure the organization was terrible. The worst part was that I never got any response back and as I was disappointed each month when checking the magazine to see if it was published, as only an excited kid could be, my short term enthusiasm for programming faded. I didn't have the opportunity to get back into serious programming until 10 years in college. That's why I think what Vic is doing is so great. It's awesome to have someone focused on encouraging kids who are interested in computers. He said it, and I agree, that his program really can change kids life. I imagine that if I have that encouragement when I was ten, I would have become a strong programmer and created tons of useful code at a much earlier age.

It was only natural to volunteer to help with future Wintriss Technical School activities, including the maze contest or teaching future classes. Today I sat in on a class and it appears there are tons of things I can help with, including Object Oriented Design, source control, JUnit, Test Driven Design, UML diagrams, and other tips and tricks I've picked up over the years. I'm excited to contribute and that's a good feeling right now.