One question that comes ups often with math majors in the program is “Why do I have to take a computer science class?”
I am not sure where the official requirement comes from, but I can say that I am extremely thankful I had a computer programming class in college. It was over 20 years ago, and it was Pascal programming, but I am very happy that I still remember the skills I learned. I don’t remember anything about Pascal, but over the last 20 years, and especially the last three weeks, I have used the heck out of those skills.
When I was in business, the programming skills allowed me do some serious Excel sheets and data crunching that got me noticed and promoted.
As a teacher, those Excel skills allowed me to strip data from the PDF reports and turn those into useful files that we could actually mine for relevant data on our learners and their learning. Those skills also allowed me to learn basic HTML and CSS coding to build websites over a Christmas break and create multiple websites.
Now, as a master teacher I have spent several weeks building a very complex database in Access to manage our check in and check out process with the hundreds (soon to be thousands) of items in our teaching supply store room. To do this, I have had to teach myself Visual Basic, Access structure, as well as some basic SQL database language.
Now don’t get me wrong.I do not have anywhere near the skills to be paid to program in any of these languages, and it is taking me 5 times longer than a real programmer would take. But, because of that Pascal programming class 26 years ago I have the ability to learn the new skills, new languages, and troubleshoot the really bad code I am writing and make it better.
Why should today’s learners learn coding? Because if this dinosaur can reap these benefits out of the class over my career, then imagine what benefits our learners today will reap over the next 25 years! It only gets more important and more essential from here.