I’ve been thinking a lot with my recent interviews. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the “Why did you want to go into the technology industry?” question.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved technology. My father, an engineer, brought home our first computer when I was really young. I don’t remember the exact year or model, but I have vivid memories of my second grade self navigating through the MS-DOS system to play games like Super Solvers: Spellbound and Outnumbered, Wolfenstein and some Flinstones game on a 5.5 inch floppy disk. When I was a little older, I had my own computer in my room. I had a program (Design Shop or Print Shop, I think) that I used to create a huge number of things. I’d make fake restaurant menus for my brothers and I to play restaurant. I’d use photos to add faces to play money. I’d create yearly calendars with photos and specially marked for the birthdays of family and friends. I loved creating these documents.

In high school, I took a computer class. It was where I first learned to really type without looking at the keys. (My teacher would cover the keyboard with shoeboxes.) In that class, we created a variety of things like business cards, resumes, letters, etc. In my English class, I had an assignment to research a career I was interested in. Because I knew (or thought I knew) I wanted to be a teacher, I was going to research teaching. Instead my teacher said to research our second choice, so I researched computer programming. Looking back, she probably assumed we had done research on careers that we were thinking about already.

In college, I’d taken a couple of computer class. In an “Intro to the Internet” class, I created a very basic web page with just HTML. In a “Computers for Educators” course, I learned how to use Access, Excell and the whole Microsoft Office suite to create a number of things from a mail merged email system, address labels and letterhead, news letters, etc. I’ve taken a couple of courses stressing the importance of technology in teaching. During these classes, I found my passion for learning through technology. One of the areas I love reading and researching addresses the question “how can technology infuence how we learn?”

When I started teaching, I found myself constantly looking for ways to involve technology into the curriculum and the tools that would help me manage my classroom and engage my students. I created a computer coding club that was based on Scratch from MIT. The students loved being able to create their own animations and games. At another school, I supervised a FIRST Lego League Robotics club, where students programmed a robot to make it’s way through an obstacle course. Both of these programs used drag and drop programming languages, but taught some of the basics of programming like procedural thinking, loops and if/else blocks.

When I came across Rockit Bootcamp, I knew I had to take a leap of faith and try it. I am so glad I did. I love that I can create anything I want. I can think through problems and find a way to solve them. I love the fact that there’s such an active technology industry in Phoenix. I know that there’s plenty of opportunities to learn more every month.