Many of us in the humanities think our colleagues across the campus in the computer-science department spend most of their time debugging software. This is no more true than the notion that English professors spend most of their time correcting people’s grammar and spelling.
Matt Kirschenbaum, Hello Worlds: Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program
I may be biased towards this as a computer science major, but I believe students should learn how to code. Even though possessing knowledge of arrays and for loops isn’t required to be successful in the majority of aspects in life, many of the skills in the field of computer science and data science are useful and practical in this era of increasing online presence, such as the ability to create a basic website (without having Wix do it for you), or the ability to recognize a potential problem with a computer.
Learning to code not only gives you the practical, hands-on experience with computers, but it also is a fantastic domain of problem solving. The ability to think like a computer and knowing how to handle data and solve diverse problems optimally can be an extremely useful skill. In my Algorithms class, there is the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm, which is used in a large map of data to find how to split the data into two sections with the least number of cuts between data. We learned in class that this algorithm was used back in the Cold War on a network of train tracks, in order to figure out the minimum number of target tracks to destroy in order to completely severe the network.
Let’s take a step back from fine-tuned algorithms to something more practical to most people: making a website for a project. If one were striving to create a humanities project digitally, having the skills to dissect the different components and bugs of website languages such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS is very helpful. Sure, since many online projects are collaborative, you could have one expert manage everything behind the scenes of the website. However, as a collaborator and potentially a team lead, knowing the basics of these languages and how they interact with one another to achieve a desired result can make one a more versatile collaborator. Knowing even just the basic structure of HTML can help to make static websites, such as calendars:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>...</head>
<body>...</body>
</html>
My programming experience began in high school, and I am currently taking my seventh computer science course here at Carleton. In my third year here at Carleton, I have now learned/interacted with 7 languages/frameworks, and all of the experience I’ve gotten with programming has helped me gain confidence in using a computer and knowing its abilities.
Computers are used by almost everyone nowadays, yet almost everyone doesn’t know how they operate and how the interior structure works. If every student were to learn at least a little bit of programming, I believe it would improve everyone’s digital versatility.
4 thoughts on “Week 3 Reflective Blog Post”
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Awesome take on the importance of computer-literacy! I wholeheartedly agree that anyone can benefit from the problem-solving methodology that coding teaches you and, furthermore, what components make up the things we take for granted in this day and age. Nice job Aaron!
Good argument for why humanities students should learn to code! Even though I don’t agree with your side of the argument, you brought up good points and I understand your side better now. I love how you also included a reference to an algorithm that had a real world application, I didn’t know about this event and want to look more into it now.
As a potential CS major student, I was also caught by this quote. It is a common bias towards programmers that can be corrected with more people learning to code. Also, I totally agree with your points on the main topic of discussion: the functional thinking mode brought by learning coding is extremely helpful to problem solving.
I like the quote you selected, and I totally agree that students can gain the ability to handle data and solve diverse problems from programming. I had similar arguments in my post. I mentioned that data analysis is essential in many humanities projects, and programming is the most efficient way to handle data. I also agree that knowing how to create a website is important since many projects are presented digitally.