In early December, 2020, I discovered Advent of Code, a creative and challenging story-based set of coding problems.

The main Advent of Code page

Above is the main page. You can see I’ve completed most of the problems. Some are very hard.

So far, with my private students, I’ve worked the first six days’ problems, in various languages: Python, Java, and C♯. For myself, I’ve used the Rust language for many of them. I understand that many people use Advent of Code to learn a new language, and this is what I am doing with Rust.

I’m currently working on Day 20, which essentially has us assembling a jigsaw-like puzzle containing an image, in which we must find sea monsters.

My long career of programming has given me many interesting challenges, but nothing to work my computer science chops like these!

Above I demonstrate one of my solutions. Here is the YouTube playlist containing it.

For more information on studying with me (grades 3–12), please see Programming for Kids.