2018-07-22: Tic-Tac-Toe and Magic Square Made Me a Problem Solver and Programmer

" How did you learn programming? ", a student asked me in a recent summer camp. Dr. Yaohang Li organized the Machine Learning and Data Science Summer Camp for High School students of the Hampton Roads metropolitan region at the Department of Computer Science, Old Dominion University from June 25 to July 9, 2018. The camp was funded by the Virginia Space Grant Consortium . More than 30 students participated in it. They were introduced to a variety of topics such as Data Structures, Statistics, Python, R, Machine Learning, Game Programming, Public Datasets, Web Archiving, and Docker etc. in the form of discussions, hands-on labs, and lectures by professors and graduate students. I was invited to give a lecture about my research and Docker . At the end of my talk I solicited questions and distributed Docker swag. The question "How did you learn programming?" led me to draw Tic-Tac-Toe Game and a 3x3 Magic Square on the white board. Then I told them a more t