New Year’s resolution - learn how to code!

Picked this up from a Tweet from a fellow Scitable Blogger Khalil A. Cassimally aka @notscientific

"My New Year's resolution is to learn to code with Codecademy in 2012! Join me. http://codeyear.com/ #codeyear"

All I can say is - Go for it Khalil!

The above is something that is all very close to my heart.

Way back last century (or if you wan to be really cruel - last millennium) when I was at school we were taught how to program (admittedly it was in Basic, and it was only a small group of the school that took the class), and when I was at university studying for my first degree in Biochemistry we had a programming course (again in Basic). What this taught me was problem solving (that is all programming really is) and not to be afraid of computers. Once you know how something works you are no longer afraid of it.

I believe that everyone should be able to program, or at least have a rudimentary idea of how to program because unless you understand how a computer works then you can't get the best out of it - plus, learning how to program also 'demystifies' the machine. I have touched on a lot of this in my earlier blog post - Slaves to the machine…* The fault of ICT? - which you may want to have a look at.

Anyway, if you think you would like to (or you feel you should) learn how to program then you might want to check out the code year project that is being run by codecademy, which Khalil is going to do (and I hope blog about). So far (as of Friday January 6, 2012 at 9:25:11 am GMT) they have had 187,909 people signed up for the challenge, and that can't be a bad thing.

And if you really want to get in to programming then you might want to check out the Raspberry Pi project which is producing a $25 computer (currently in beta) that is aimed at people who want to learn how to program. In fact, Raspberry Pi and code year could make a great combination and help kick start a whole new round of people learning how to code.

Happy coding!

4 Comments

January 11, 2012 | 08:46 AM

Posted By: Nick Morris

Thanks Khalil - there is also a good follow-up piece at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16493929

January 11, 2012 | 08:09 AM

Posted By: Khalil A. Cassimally

A very nice article in The Guardian about the pluses of studying programming at a tender age.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/11/teach-children-computer-programmes

January 06, 2012 | 04:10 PM

Posted By: Nick Morris

Having coded for a number of years (I wrote my fisrt program on punch cards (yes, I really am that old)) I would say that coding breaks down in to two tasks: 1. Understanding and breaking down the problem you are trying to solve; and 2. writing the code. Of the two tasks 1 is by far the hardest, and 2 is just a matter of learning the syntax of the language.

January 06, 2012 | 02:41 PM

Posted By: Khalil A. Cassimally

Thanks! I'm quite looking forward to it. Though, to point out, I do know HTML. So not a total n00b!