In November of last year I turned into a new sort of creature: a middle school teacher. It was inevitable, with my healthy store of dad jokes and juvenile disposition, that I would find work with people of a similar maturity level to my own (teaching pre-schoolers was out of the question, apparently).

The whole thing started as a camp for kids aged seven-ten in the summer of 2015. I was sitting around, teaching the odd adult how to program in iOS, showing the kids Hour of Code-like stuff, and my wife asked why didn’t I try showing the kids how to program. The kids and a friend each, run it like a week-long summer camp, the kind that cost $700-1,000+ a week. It was May, the kids would be off in a month. Would I be able to throw together a syllabus for the week to get the kids a basic introduction to computer programming?

Like some kind of coding cook, I chucked a bunch of languages, programming concepts, and platforms I’ve used over the years as a professional software engineer into a giant digital pot, stirred them together and came out with a ratatouille of a course that used a few choice programming languages, some old hardware, chalk, Legos, peanut butter and jelly and a new thing the kids would define called monkeyJumps(int num). The first few guinea pigs exited the camp with only minor injuries, so I figured I’d pitch the curriculum as a course to my kids’ Montessori, somewhat technology-allergic, school. While they weren’t quite ready to unleash it on the elementary kids (grades one through six), they proposed I turn it into a ten week course for the middle school students.