Code Teaching

Just fourteen lines

"Project Sonnet" was my name for the idea that, just as high school students are asked to write fourteen lines of English to produce a sonnet (even though they would likely not become poets), college students should be asked to write fourteen lines of Python (or whatever) (even though they would likely not become software developers).

There is an idea in circulation, in the mid 2020s, that generative AI's ability to write code makes this unimportant. That is misguided.

In 1998 I started my second intro to programming text. (The first was an intro to C for Business Majors (!) at Wright State University, in 1993.) It was to be a much-extended version of my Lisp/Scheme/Racket notes for Honors / humanities students. Here's the intro:

• A Certain Precise Tilt of the Will: Programming for Beginners
  

But I had to be more practical. Instead, I wrote a "textbooklet" for NKU's INF 120 Elementary Programming, which was used for all sections of that class from roughly 2010 to 2018.

• An Invitation to Programming
  

While not as unorthodox, it was fun to use Mark Guzdial's Jython Environment for Students for some visual projects. This course had originally been built to morph into something like "programming for the liberal arts", as opposed to a prereq for CS and IT majors.

Photo (K. Kirby): A CUDA-화투 Thanksgiving, 2016.