ESP Biography

Brief Biographical Sketch:

As a freshman at Stanford University, Lucas Wang is a curious learner who has always been fascinated by the intersectionalities of design, development, and teaching.

Since elementary school, Lucas has always loved designing game ideas. Having doodled over 147 pages of hand-drawn comics today, he fell in love with the concept of creating at an early age. Initially, accustomed to finishing projects in mere minutes, he viewed the lengthy nature of programming as monotonous, being skeptical about the fun of video game development. However, the block-based programming language on the Scratch website was his transition to enjoying computer science, leading him to embrace the game development process as an art.

After publishing a game on the Scratch website that accumulated over half a million views under the alias “LWCoding”, he decided to move past Scratch to take on new challenges. From a background in drag-and-drop code, he translated his skills to the licensed Unity game engine, researching the C# programming language to create marketable, copyrighted games. With this unfamiliar and relatively difficult engine, collaborating with others to develop games became a lifestyle: a way to embrace the communal aspect of game development.

Inspired by his collaboratively driven self-fulfillment, he brought his passion into his high school, proudly establishing the Video Game Design and Development Club, along with founding and leading four other clubs all aimed at teaching programming and/or game development. It was here that he developed a love for teaching, sharing his passion for design and development in a school that had few computer science opportunities. Today, he does online coaching for the Applied Computing Foundation, teaching kids from K-12 as well as college students and adults to cultivate computer science learning and a passion for design and development.

Past Classes