Undergrad wins the publishing game

Elliot Lichtman ’27

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Like a lot of things, it began with the pandemic. Elliot Lichtman ’27 was a freshman in high school, and he started tutoring younger students in computer science. “At first it was me over Zoom tutoring kids one-on-one,” he says. “Gradually I started expanding to larger and larger classes.” Lichtman discovered he had a knack for teaching concepts like algorithms through games. By his senior year in high school, he had turned his curriculum into a book, The Computer Always Wins, which was published by MIT Press in April. Lichtman hopes the book will be useful to middle- and high-school students and to their computer science teachers. “Before you take kids and drag them through the technical muck of AP computer science,” he says, “give them something to inspire them first.”