About

You're probably reading this because you've already joined the team, or somehow found out about us. Anyway, here's a little about us, Udacity, and this high school challenge.

I am Liezl Puzon, and my co-leader is Nick Lum. We both go to Freehold High School in Freehold, NJ. He goes to the Computer Science Academy and I go to the Medical Sciences Learning Center (but we both participate in our school's American Computer Science League). Last year and this year, I placed first in regular season and he placed second (just a point away). We are leading this team for a high school challenge directed by Udacity.com. I could potentially win a trip to Stanford. All we have to do is organize a team of as many people as we can, and when a team member (who can be any age) finishes a course unit, they score a point for our team.
 

You don't have to be in high school to join the team.

To sign up:
1. Create an account with your full name on Udacity.com
2. Confirm your account through your email.
3. Click this link: http://www.udacity.com/hschallenge/team/join/agpzfnVkYWNpdHl1cg0LEgRVc2VyGK3jnQUM

It really only takes a moment of your time! Then you will have an account and any class you complete before August 26th will count towards our team total. There is no pressure, and if you can't complete a course that is perfectly fine. It won't hurt our team or anything.

If you saw this please sign up and complete at least one unit of one course :)
Intro courses are pretty easy, but are good for refreshing your memory and can still teach you something new! 

Please feel free to ask any questions. I will reply! Send me questions at liezl.200@gmail.com.

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More about us and Udacity:

Udacity is not just for this one challenge.
They are part of the beginnings of free online education, along with Coursera and MIT OpenCourseWare (where I’m currently taking intro to physics). They have a lot of math, algorithms, and computer science courses that could help for IT job applications in the future. Some that may interest you are Intro to Computer Science (using python), Intro to Statistics, Algorithms, Logic and Discrete Mathematics, Web Application Engineering, and Software Testing. These are taught by university professors and people like Steve Huffman, the co-founder of reddit.com.

Why are we participating in this challenge?

1. It's great to introduce this to my classmates. And everyone out there. Especially since I am very involved with the American Computer Science League at my high school. We have participated in national and international competitions. (Nick and I were both on the intermediate All-Star team last year and this year) We want to further our own team's expertise in programming and algorithms so we can beat out our future competition. BTW: this is our senior team winning this year at the national All-Star ACSL Competition http://www.frhsd.com/district/index.php?q=node/2961
2. I actually do believe in free online education, and I think it's pretty revolutionary. Especially college-level courses that are being offered to give us an edge. I have participated in Coursera and MITOpenCourseWare before this, and I have never seen such a clean, helpful program like Udacity. I like the teaching approach with assignments and lectures, but it's never too much so that it overwhelms you. OK, enough ranting about how much I like this site...
3. Stanford. Enough said. It's an amazing university.

How can we help our team members? Well, we definitely have a lot of experience in programming, algorithms, and discrete math. I myself (Liezl) have taken AP Statistics this past year, and am starting to self study Physics. We can help you guys out, although the resources on Udacity are numerous. I will probably be active in the forums and a lot of our computer science team I hope will also be active. I am going to take a majority of the courses because they are all interesting, even the CS101 because I only know the Java programming language, and I've never learned Python at all. I will be able to help anyone out if they need.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you will join our team. Please help our team out! We, Nick and I, truly have a passion for computer science and learning.