Program to learn, don't learn to program | Daniel Stoiber & Sam Mendelson | TEDxDesignTechHighSchool

Sam Mendelson and Daniel Stoiber, freshmen at Design Tech High School, discuss their experiences with programming and hacking and how they got started. Daniel Stoiber learned web design skills in sixth grade and jQuery in eighth grade, and he has been using those skills to design beautiful websites ever since. He also taught himself C#, used for Arduino programming. He's made an Arduino-based web server with secure authentication, a web-controllable robot, custom alarm system, an in-progress tortoise monitor and humidity controller, a $5 Alexa-controllable smart switch and web server-based sensor monitoring. He’s also designed and built a flamethrower he describes as “scary powerful.”

Sam’s passion for computers began the summer in Paris when he was three years old, right after he taught himself to read. With unrestricted access to a PC with a fast internet connexion, he started to Google. This interest continued through grade school, where he readily assisted teachers with technology. During the same period of time, he furthered his interest by white hat hacking— for good— both at school and at home. Programming came as second nature, beginning with Scratch, followed by C# and currently JavaScript and Node.js. His latest collaboration project is a network management utility for which he created a RESTful API. He’s been providing tech support to family, friends and customers since he was an primary school student. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx