Hi! I’m Yas. I am a mom of a 5th grader (as of 2022) programming enthusiast and am very passionate about programming myself. When I was at school, the subject I loved the most was Math, and Physics came after that. I could not remember facts in subjects like Geography or History if it were to save my life however when it came to logic or formulas my mind was just made for them! I’ve always been a curious person and have had lots of hobbies because of this but when I was in high school, one of them was to solve Calculus problems on my free time. I just LOVED learning everything about math and solving problems. When it came time to pick a career, I just didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living, all I knew was that I loved math so I decided to apply for the Math department of the toughest University in the Middle East and had to score among the top 50 among 1million+ applicants to make this goal happen, then I figured that this would be like joker card career and would allow me to twist it to what I want once I figure out what I want. I got in and enjoyed it but not as much as I thought. Once I started university I don’t think I remember ever seeing a number again. It was all about theorems, proofs using variables and symbols to represent the numbers. I learned it, exceled at it but I missed my numbers. Then I found programming and realized the career with the type of mathematical mind I had, that was right for me was programming and I was in heaven again.
I’ve been working for a large agency RAB2B as the programming manager for many years now and I just love to learn, solve, improve. My older daughter started following in my footsteps, developed a love and talent for math and coding and advanced to middle school level coding activities by the time she completed second grade.
Then at 4th grade she joined the robotics club at her school. An amazing and extremely successful robotics program of the Wiles Elementary school in Gainesville, FL (Wiles Robotics) run by their amazing teacher Mr Yu. The team she joined in the club had already achieved very high results in the VEX IQ competitions in the previous year but even though they were phenomenal builders and drivers they were lacking a good programmer, Lara filled this role. But as I witnessed the things they do and learned about VEX and the competitions, I fell in love with the concept and couldn’t believe what an amazing opportunity this is for students to learn and love programming.
I researched and learned more about VEXcode IQ and programming these robots. But I found out that while kids are quite excited about building robots and driving them, programming is an area that intimidates even the brightest of them. When I researched ideas to help them set good programming practices or improve processes I found very few examples and information online. The VEX originated tutorials are helpful and cover general scenarios but there are few examples or tutorials that are being shared that apply to real world scenarios and issues they come across frequently. So I wanted to create this website to share my observations, share my programming experience as it applies to coding challenges of the type my daughter Lara deals with and make this knowledge available to all so that more kids could become excited about programming and work on it.
I didn’t want to dedicate the website to VEX only because even though it started with it I’m thinking in the upcoming years we may discover and switch to other programming technologies as well. So “love to program” should cover everything that unfolds our way. Hope you enjoy it!
Yas Programmer