First of all, I would like to start off by stating my opinion that I strongly support that humanities students should learn to code, or the basics of Computer Science. I personally think that coding language is becoming one of the most important language to communicate with the world, and We should perceive this as a language that can actually communicate rather than just a computer language.
Our students will need to become more at ease reading (and writing) back and forth across the boundaries between natural and artificial languages. Such an education is essential if we are to cultivate critically informed citizens — not just because computers offer new worlds to explore, but because they offer endless vistas in which to see our own world reflected.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Chronicle Review, May 23, 2010, “Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program)” https://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/hello-worlds/
When I was back in Korea during a gap year, I had an opportunity to work as an intern at a small startup company. My job was to work on the web pages and applications they were developing, and this process required to collaborate with not only the programmers but also the designers and the marketers. Until then, I was thinking that my job is going to be writing codes based on what’s given to me. However, that was not how it worked. People had to talk to each other to decide what is possible/impossible, what is necessary, what can be done better, and many more problems. I realized that coding is not the hardest task in this situation but the communication with the people who are from various fields of study. Then one day, one designer intern told me she is interested in learning how to code and later this made a huge difference in our development process. She started to understand our ways to approach the project by learning the basic coding terms and concepts. This reduced the time to explain our ideas and eventually improved the productivity a lot, and I believe this could happen everywhere in the world. In this world, coding is not just about 0s and 1s but an effective way to communicate our ideas and transform those ideas into more accessible software in the world.
Do you think humanities student should learn to program?
The code above is a simple html tags that will show an alert message (which is pretty biased message from me) when they are clicked. Even these simple buttons made by simple tags would help people to show what people think about. What is your idea, should we learn how to code, or not?
I strongly believe that coding is a great way to increase the efficiency of communication, especially with the rapid development of technology these days. Also, I like your code sample. It is super cool.
Hi Daniel, your experience as an intern in Korea sounds really interesting! I like how you were able to weave that experience into your post here. I can definitely see how it helped the team communicate when the design intern started learning to code. I also love your code sample, its very clever and I like the responses it prompts!