My Background
Both my coding experience in classes and through these tutorials has been very fun and applicable to many different projects and fields. I first was exposed to coding briefly during senior year of high-school. Although a class was not offered, I conducted an independent study guided by my physics professor. Once in college, I tried Intro to CS and then eventually Data Structures. Since then, I’ve been hooked and have taken a CS class almost every term since then. Although I would not consider myself an expert by any means, I have found my skillset to be extremely useful. I would absolutely recommend that everyone, no matter their discipline, should learn to code (at least the basics). I think the appeal of coding to me is very well incapsulated in the below quote from Kirschenbaum.
“Programming is about choices and constraints, and about how you choose to model some select slice of the world around you in the formal environment of a computer.”
Kirschenbaum Paragraph 5
Coding allows us to look more deeply at our world in an attempt to model it. For example, in an attempt to create a character, I might create a character class which contains instance variables that distinguish characters and make someone unique. In the code below, this unique characteristics describe me as a virtual character.
class Person:
def __init__(self, name, age, hair_color, eye_color):
self.name = name
self.age = age
self.hair_color = hair_color
self.eye_color = eye_color
me = Person("Ben", 21, "red", "blue")In the Computer Graphics class I am in right now, there is actually a large portion of art that is required to create the graphics we are displaying. To accurately display their art, creators must very closely work with a programmer, or understand coding and their program on a basic level. Programs such as HTML Dog provide really good tips for all experience levels. I feel that I have a much better grasp of the structure of CSS and the basic knowledge need for JavaScript. I would recommend everyone look at the free tutorials such as these.
