College Graduates in every major should understand software fundamentals

Mark LeBlanc teaches  “Computing
for Poets” in conjunction with
 English courses at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass

The New York Times

By RANDALL STROSS

Published: March 31, 2012

Many professors of computer science say college graduates in every major should understand software fundamentals. They don’t argue that everyone needs to be a skilled programmer. Rather, they seek to teach “computational thinking” — the general concepts programming languages employ.

At the college level, computer science courses intended for non-majors run a gamut. In some classes, students start coding right away with a mainstream language. Others exclude programming and examine social and ethical issues related to computer use.

At Carnegie Mellon, students who are not computer science majors are invited to try “Principles of Computation.” It starts with a history of computation, but in Week 2, students start learning the programming language Ruby. Then the course covers iteration, recursion, random number generators and other topics.

Tom Cortina, who teaches the course, says that some students perceive the programming as challenging, especially those who aren’t majoring in a field of science, technology, engineering or mathematics and are not accustomed to “the preciseness required.”

At Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., Mark D. LeBlanc, a professor of computer science, teaches “Computing for Poets.” The only prerequisite, according to the course syllabus, is “a love of the written (and digital) word.”

Professor LeBlanc has his students learn the basics of Python, another modern language used in the software industry. But this course is tied to two courses offered by the English department on J.R.R. Tolkien and Anglo-Saxon literature. Students in the computing course put concepts to immediate use by analyzing large bodies of text. The syllabus is more like what one would find for a humanities course.

“In the class, we take on big problems,” Professor LeBlanc says. “The majority of the students are overwhelmed — ‘Where do we start?’ ” This provides opportunities to illustrate the concept of decomposition, which he describes as “breaking a large problem into small manageable problems.”

Professor LeBlanc estimates that just 5 percent of students who enroll each semester find it “worse than a foreign language” and drop the course. He believes that most graduates of Wheaton, a liberal arts college, will work in fields where they must learn how to program. The liberal arts college offers “a safe place to be a novice,” he says.

At many other campuses, computer science departments introduce computational thinking by sparing students from learning an industrial-strength programming language in order to try applying the general concepts. Instead, students learn visual scripting languages that produce interactive animation. Scratch, which was developed for elementary and middle-school students, is one such language.  Read More

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