Week 2 Web Development Fundamentals: The Case for Coding as a Liberal Art

“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.”

– Matthew G. Kirschenbaum as he writes in “Hello Worlds (why humanities students should learn to program)”
https://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/hello-worlds/

I am of the belief that students of the humanities should learn to code. Allow me to be clear, however, that this statement is not meant to imply that humanities students, even digital humanities students, who have not been exposed to programming are somehow inferior, nor is it meant to place the impetus on the humanities students themselves to go out of their way to learn programming independently. Rather my intention is to emphasize that, much in the same way that I believe that engineering students benefit from taking English classes, and that there is merit to teaching lawyers advanced mathematics, it is my opinion that computer science is a similarly important topic that every student would benefit from being exposed to, specifically during their primary and secondary education.

As a computer science major who didn’t have any programming experience before coming to Carleton, working to make the field of computer science more accessible is something that I think about often. As a student that attended a predominantly low-income charter high school that focused on bridging the acheivement gap, I simply never had the exposure to structured computer science education. For this reason, when advocating for the inclusion of more topics for K-12 educators to cover, I think about the lack of resources many schools have, and the possible unfeasibility of schools providing classes dedicated solely to the study of computer science, to which I turn to classes much like this one that we’re all taking right now, that put a premium on an interdisciplinary approach to computer science, highlighting that technology can be incorporated into pre-existing math, science, and even English classes through subtle alterations to lesson plans rather than through the development of all new classes, ultimately providing students with alternative ways to approach a topic, while simultaneously exposing them to the field of computer science.

import math

"""
An implementation of the quadratic formula as a python program that could be used to expose students to computer science concepts while also teaching them algebra concepts from a different perspective.
"""
def quadratic_formula(a,b,c):
    discriminant = b**2 - 4*a*c
    if discriminant >= 0:
        x_1 = (-b + math.sqrt(discriminant)) / 2*a
        x_2 = (-b - math.sqrt(discriminant)) / 2*a
        return x_1, x_2
    return

I’m forever grateful for my high school English teachers, who taught me to be skeptical of what I read and to be clear with my argumentation, I’ll never forget my Studio Art teacher who pushed me out of my comfort zone and allowed me to express myself in ways I didn’t know possible. My French classes gave me a deeper appreciation for grammatical structure, and even while speaking English I feel as though these courses helped me learn to articulate myself better. Even though I do not plan on pursuing any of these fields vocationally, nor did I love them enough to pursue majors in them, I still feel as though I benefited greatly from exploring them, and do not disagree with Minnesota’s state high school standards requiring that I study them. To that end, I believe that allowing each student to decide for themselves whether or not the field of programming is for them while they’re still in a supportive, educational environment, is an important step towards making the field as accessible as possible.