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SmartCoderSchool

Instructor and The Teaching Philosophy

Instructor

Margaret Royzen is a professional software developer with more than 30 years of experience in the field. She holds an MS in Computer Science. She is certified as a C# Programmer and a C# Web Developer.

During her professional career she has developed numerous applications and websites. While working at Weyerhaeuser she was responsible for overseeing architecture and design decisions for the Timberlands division.

Margaret has developed software applications in the areas of problem solving, generic interfaces, device drivers, marketing, messaging, finance, automated warehouse, sales and insurance. She is an expert in all phases of the software development life cycle and has led numerous analysis/data modeling sessions with customers. As a developer she has many years of experience with C/C#, .Net, Java, VB, SQL Server, Oracle, HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Since the beginning of 2012 Margaret has been teaching the Programming Club at Seattle Country Day School. Many of her students become fluent with code and capable of writing simple video games such as Blasterball and Minesweeper almost entirely by themselves. Some students went on to winning programming competitions and even being featured by online magazines.

Margaret taught Algorithms AMP at the Bush school and coached a Bush programming team to win a global programming competition. In the fall of 2017 Margaret was selected as one of the judges for the TeenTech WA regional hackathon.


It all started when a teacher at Seattle Country Day School became very impressed with Margaret's son's programming skills. She asked him who had taught him and he responded: "My mother". Since then Margaret has been the Programming Club instructor at Seattle Country Day School. It has been both challenging and very rewarding.

Seattle Country Day School uses the inquiry approach in teaching, so Margaret builds her curricula keeping that in mind. Students learn a new technique or concept and then work on a project that elaborates on that.

All of the teaching material has been developed or customized by Margaret to achieve greater understanding. When using appropriate teaching methods, students are capable of understanding of fairly advanced concepts such as an Object-Oriented approach, event handling and complex math in Video Game graphics.

Margaret believes that it is very important at the beginning as a programmer to understand low level details. For that reason, no third party libraries are used for coding. Students develop their own reusable library of functions.

Questions and new ideas are encouraged in the class. Mistakes are understood to be part of the normal learning process.

Each class covers not only the specific language syntax but also and foremost best design and programming techniques.

Keeping the class size small at 8 students allows Margaret to spend plenty of time with each student.


Happy Programming!