Caroline Skalla

About Me

Hi! My name is Caroline Skalla and I just graduated from high school. For the last three years I have gone to Durham School of the Arts where I got to do a lot of drawing and painting. Because of how much I like art, I would consider myself a pretty creative person, which is actually very useful for problem solving. My other interests include reading good books, swimming, and now programming I wanted to be a Shodor Apprentice because when I found out about the program I had just started my first programming class in school and I really liked it. I always thought “coding” sounded cool, but I never had a good opportunity to try it until this year. I knew that if I became a Shodor Apprentice I would learn more than just how to code, but how to use coding to make useful and meaningful models, as well as gain experience completing projects using a wide range of technology. Shodor has been very beneficial to me because I am able to pick up a wider and more diverse set of skills than I am in the school-classroom setting. As well as learning, I have also been encouraged by being in an environment where I am surrounded by people who are passionate about computing. I was first interested in being an apprentice at Shodor because I was interested in computational science in fields like physics or chemistry, but since being here, my interest in programming has grown a lot, so much that I am thinking about majoring in computer science or engineering when I go to college. So far in my Shodor apprenticeship, my favorite thing that we’ve done was simulate parallel computing with a star formation model. I was really interested in how running the simulation changed when we used more than one computer. I was also really liked learning the few Linux commands we had to know to run that program. This is a website that I have built to share the projects I have completed during my time as a Shodor Apprentice. I write blogs to document my time at Shodor and remember all the cool things I am able to do here, from making forest fire models to learning about parallel computing. I have also created a portfolio where I can display the projects themselves!