r/CSEducation

Greetings to this sub's wonderful CS educators!

I'm with a 501(c)(3) technology nonprofit focusing on CS education accessibility. We've been working with some local teachers over the past year to create a free resource, csroom.org, to remove barriers to CS education and are looking for feedback and/or additional teachers to onboard for the summer or fall semesters.

CS Room is completely free for teachers and their students, funded entirely by donations and other revenue-generating work. It provides students and teachers with a web-based Linux programming environment. Teachers can upload assignments to automatically share these with students, view their progress at a glance or drill into their code, and autograders (or manual scoring) allow for an integrated gradebook. Student code keeps running after class ends and can be viewed on a web address, allowing for large scope projects that students can own and be proud of outside of class. There is also a small library of lessons designed to address CSTA standards for grades 9-12, and the platform can be used by anyone K-12+.

If you have any feedback you'd like us to work on, please let me know in the comments! Or DM me if this works better for you. You can sign up through the website to grant your school/classroom access. We aim to approve all signup requests, capacity permitting.

Searched through the subreddit and this seems like an appropriate post for this community. If this is not the appropriate place to share this resource, please redirect me.

I spent my entire freshman year stressing over every exam, retaking quizzes, grinding problem sets to keep my GPA up.

Then got rejected over and over anyway in sophomore year.

Here is what nobody told me. The students landing Google, Apple, Meta internships? A lot of them have average GPAs. Some have really bad ones. I actually had an intern friend with a 2.2 or 2.5 GPA at Apple

I got into both Apple and Verizon. My GPA was not the reason (trust me)

Here is what recruiters actually look at in about 6 seconds:

Maybeeee school name. Relevant experience and projects for sure. Recognizable company names or keywords 100%. GPA is literally at the bottom of that list (if you put it at all).

Amazon removed their GPA filter years ago. Meta does not list one. Apple does not have one. The companies that do list a cutoff it is usually 3.0. That is it. 3.0 is not insanely difficult to get at most universities if you do the basics.

So what actually matters instead:

Projects that solve real problems - One deployed project that solves a real problem separates you from 80% of applicants. Mine were literally copied from YouTube tutorials with the colors and code changed around. That is genuinely how I started. I would rec this to you as well if you're just getting started.

Fork a project and grind it out. Once you know the basics, build something real users would use and have them use it.

Keywords on your resume. - Your resume goes through software before it reaches a human. That software scans for Python, React, SQL, whatever the job description says. I went from 1 response per 200 applications to roughly 10% response rate just by fixing this.

A recognizable name somewhere on your profile - A company, a program, a hackathon, anything that show you are clutch. My Verizon internship is literally what got me the Apple one. You can resume ad company names on platforms like Forage, Extern, etc.

If your GPA is below 3.5 just remove it from your resume, don't put it there bro

Fix the three things above this week. Your GPA is not going to change but everything else can.

I did a full break down on exactly what steps to take here if you are interested.

Good luck out there, market is rough but this stuff actually works.

This one is for all the broke college CS students out there <3

If you're like me, you don't want to pay $20 a month for claude code :(

It's an amazing tool I love, but a recurring expense is the last thing I need. That's why I find myself jumping from tool to tool, using the daily or monthly free tier limits and constantly having to find new free tools.

That's where "AI For Brokies" comes in. Just a simple github repo with a readme file of some free AI tools you can use for building :)

https://github.com/Joe-Huber/AI-For-Brokies

The actual building behind this project was mostly the automatic tool adder, following an issue format! If you want to see it in action, please drop an issue explaining a tool you use and see the bot do it's magic!

Please feel free to leave a star! ⭐️ (pretty please) You can use it to save the list of tools for whenever you run out of credits!