Data Conscience

CHAPTER 4Computational Thinking in Practice

Source: Twitter, Inc.

Coding has gotten a reputation for being tedious, hard, and a highly specialized skill. This narrative hurts the inclusive tech cause. People believe that they won't be able to learn to code, that it'll take a long time to learn the skill well, or they have to be a math prodigy to understand and apply coding concepts. In reality, you don't have to be “super smart,” but you must be persistent. This chapter stretches the accepted realities and standard discussion points of computational thinking to broaden our socio-ethical tech consciousness. The chapter begins by describing computational thinking and then moves on to a brief comparison of coding environments. We'll run through a common practice we do as software developers—borrow someone else's code either in part or whole. Vetting code for cloning and repurposing is a quandary we explain by pulling social, technical, and ethical levers. And recognizing when we need to step away from automated methods to re-engage real people in real time is the real “computational thinking in practice” skill set we need to develop.

Ready to Code

Well, not quite ready. I first have to address the four-letter trendy buzzword: code. Computer programming, aka coding, is the planning, designing, implementing, executing, testing, and maintaining of algorithms in a specific computer ...