CodeHS Intern Spotlight: Charles’ Journey from Hidden Genius Scholar to CodeHS Engineering Intern

By: CodeHS | Medium
Date: Monday, October 30, 2023

This summer, CodeHS has been lucky to have a wonderful group of interns, and many of them were able to use CodeHS in high school, including Charles McClain. Charles is a computer science major at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. He shared more about his experience as a Hidden Genius Scholar, his history and current experience with CodeHS, and his goals for his career.

Charles first started learning coding during the first two years of high school with The Hidden Genius Project , an organization based in California that trains and mentors Black male youth in technology creation, entrepreneurship, and leadership skills to transform their lives and communities. The Hidden Genius Project utilized CodeHS curriculum, including the JavaScript Karel course, which sparked Charles’ love of computer science. He became hooked after solving the problems in the course and decided he wanted to continue pursuing coding in high school and beyond.

Interning at CodeHS
When deciding where he wanted to intern during college, Charles knew he wanted to be able to actually practice his computer science skills. “I wanted my first work experience in tech to be something actually productive instead of being given inconsequential intern tasks. CodeHS let me work on real projects and I consider that to be invaluable experience,” he shared.

During his CodeHS internship at CodeHS Charles worked on the following projects:

Autograder messages for Spanish students
An autograder is a test which runs on a student program to determine whether or not it can be submitted. When a student hits the Submit Code button, the autograder will run, and if any of the autograder’s tests fail, then the student will be prompted to fix their code before submitting. Charles worked on updating the messages to be accurate and updated for Spanish speaking students utilizing our updated Spanish curriculum.

Spanish Autograders on CodeHS
Pruning pages on the site that are no longer in use
Another one of Charles’ big projects was combing through the website to determine which pages needed to be updated based on use. This practice is called “pruning” and is especially important when maintaining a website with many different sections like CodeHS has.

Internal tooling
Charles ensured many of the internal tools on the CodeHS website were working properly and up to date for the many students and teachers who visit daily.

One of Charles’ favorite parts about interning at CodeHS was being able to work with other interns and the engineering team! He learned more about what collaboration looks like in a professional software engineering environment and was able to get a series of lessons on how to contribute meaningfully and effectively.

Beyond CodeHS
Post CodeHS internship, Charles is interested in continuing his education and being a lifelong learner in software engineering. He is interested in learning more about game development and hopes to get some more opportunities to learn about this industry.

“The things you learn in class are important as you start out but a lot of what I’ve learned about software engineering has come from working on projects, so finding something you want to make no matter how small or seemingly unimportant will be a huge benefit to how much you learn.” — Charles McClain