Activity 1: "Object from my childhood that interested and influenced me"

Early on, I was enthralled by dad and his painting studio in our basement. He was a database programmer, but we never spoke of this. What we did do together, though, was paint and draw, me watching and mimicking the tiny detail that went into creating a captivatingly life-like oil painting, his specialty, that others commissioned from him. As I got older, I became a pretty skilled charcoal sketcher, experimenting with how groups of lines, lengths, widths, and shading patterns brought a scene to life. It was this attention to detail, out of amusement and joy, that I learned to build and rebuild with a keen critical eye that serves me so well today when I debug database code or a kid's animation project.

My dad has since passed away and I know he had no idea at the time he was "teaching" me anything; he was just being himself, wrapped up in his own art passion. But that's the beauty of accidental teachers - they're contagious in all the best ways.