Cassandra Chin

Cassandra Chin is a programming educator and the author of Raising Young Coders, an Apress guide for parents teaching children about technology. She began teaching at international conferences at 13. Her projects give learners a concrete way to see what code does: in one Raspberry Pi workshop she helped develop, wiring a button and changing a line of code gives a game character a new ability. In her work on AI-assisted programming, she gives students code they can study and instructors a way to see the decisions behind a finished assignment.

From workshop participant to author

Cassandra started as a participant at Devoxx4Kids workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area and went on to mentor and teach. She helped her father, Stephen Chin, teach Raspberry Pi workshops. While studying computer science at Colorado State University Global, she wrote a new game scenario for a CNCF Kids Day workshop. Players initially have no way to catch the creatures they’re chasing. Once they wire a button and edit the code, Phippy the giraffe can blow a whistle that calls some of the creatures over. The change gives children an immediate way to check what their circuit and code do together.

In 2024, Cassandra paired a story with a hands-on machine learning exercise in Phippy’s AI Friend: children train a small model and use it in Scratch. Her 2025 book, Raising Young Coders, gives parents projects organized by age and experience, whether or not they know how to program. The activities range from early introductions to programming a robot children build themselves using block coding. The book also includes interviews with five women in technology. Cassandra serves as content chair of CNCF Kids Day and helps organize AI Engineer Kids Day.

Teaching with generated code

Cassandra argues that students should learn to read and analyze generated code. A live model makes that hard to teach from a book: the same prompt can produce code that differs from the example a beginner is trying to follow. For the AI First Programming book series, Cassandra, Stephen Chin, and Jennifer Reif built a VS Code extension that returns a curated example when it recognizes a lesson prompt. As Cassandra explained to TFiR, students can start from the same code the lesson explains, then use a live model to extend or change it.

Her open source project Showtail addresses what happens after a student has worked with a model. The project captures prompts, decisions, and edits locally. Students can review that history privately before exporting a sanitized report. An instructor can see how the student arrived at the submitted code without receiving the full session history.

Cassandra brings a related question to pull request review in her scheduled TraceToon session: which parts of an agent’s history actually support the claims in a pull request? TraceToon uses Relate, an embedded graph database, to link agent sessions and decisions to code changes and test runs. It gathers the records connected to each change into a brief for drafting and review. A test that passed on an earlier version of the branch can explain how the work progressed; only a check tied to the submitted code can support a claim that the submitted version passed. TraceToon uses a comic to show wrong turns and corrections, alongside a technical description that explains the change and the checks behind it.