Jeanie P.

Learning with Jeanie

How we’ll work together

“Most students aren't bad at CS — they're guessing where they should be tracing.”

I teach you to read your own code the way a debugger does: one line at a time, asking "what did I actually tell the computer to do?" instead of what you meant. A program is just a stack of small honest decisions, and the day you can trace one by hand is the day you can write a thousand.

A little background

Jeanie’s story

At fourteen Jeanie wrote a text-adventure game in Python that crashed the instant a player typed a word she hadn't planned for; she spent a rainy Seattle winter reading her own crash logs to find out why, and learned to program from her bugs instead of a textbook. She nearly quit CMU after scoring a 41 on her first 15-122 (Principles of Imperative Computation) exam, until a TA pointed out her code wasn't broken — her mental model of the call stack was. She rebuilt it, finished the course in the top decile, then captained CMU's 48-hour game-jam team for two years and shipped a two-player climbing game that took the audience award at Carnegie Tech Game Jam. She boulders V5 on weekends and coaches CS the same way she climbs: find the one move you keep avoiding, commit to it, and try.