> One thing that led me to start creating Pickcode was the number of bugs I encountered in existing tools for coding education. Fifteen minutes of lost time to a minor bug or incorrect instruction step doesn’t seem like a big issue, but when those fifteen minutes represent some of the first minutes a student is programming, they have an outsized impact in changing the student’s attitude toward the subject.

As a young CS student who had self-taught before taking a formal curriculum, this was one of the things I found the most disgusting about the state of high-schools CS ed.

When the exercises and grading code have bugs, that's a major problem. When the instructor can't recognize those bugs when you point them out, that's even worse.

I moved on to tutoring and teaching CS later in life, (on the side, as a mentor with a FIRST Robotics program,) and encountering bugs in the curriculum like these were some of the things that set my students back the most.