When you hear about coding or programming, you might picture brain-twisting lines of nonsense on a computer, and understandably so. Although you might not find computer programming to be particularly useful or enjoyable, I’m here to convince you to give it a try, because it’ll teach you unexpectedly useful things you can apply in college or life in general. Not only can it teach you how to take full advantage of your phone and computer, it’ll also teach you how to better solve problems and face failure.
Programming can teach you how to take full advantage of your computer’s capabilities.
Computers help us be more efficient in our day to day lives. If you have a class that’s graded in a strange way, and you can’t find an online grade calculator to fit it exactly, save yourself the trouble of typing in your calculator over and over again, and make the tool yourself! If you need to manage a community without it taking up all your free time, program a Discord bot to do it for you! With programming, you can instruct your computer to follow exactly what you told it to do, and you can make any tool to fit your needs. It’ll allow you to rely less on the existence of a tool that just happens to do what you need it to, when you can just make it yourself instead.
Programming can teach you how to solve problems.
Once you’ve decided on what tool you make and open an online tutorial, you’re now faced with a problem to solve. By “how to think”, Degus means computational thinking, which is a way of thinking about problems systematically and logically. Now, picture this: you want your program to reverse the number 12345. This is very intuitive for you: just write down 54321.
How would you explain this to a computer more precisely? According to computational thinking, you will need to break down the problem into simpler steps. This is where you start thinking about the steps you actually take to write down 54321: looking at each digit from the back and writing it down in the front. This is where you begin to form an algorithm with computational thinking.
Once you come up with a precise solution, you can now translate it into code. Learning computational thinking can help you in areas outside of programming as well. If you’re solving a complicated math problem, breaking down the process into familiar steps can help you better understand the solution. If you need to plan a big event or outing, make sure you’re specific about what is happening at any given time, like who needs to buy which items, or how you’re going to get from one place to another.
Programming can teach you how to fail.
You’ve tried running your code, but it doesn’t work. Disappointingly, your computer gave you a number like 15 instead of 54321. Here’s the thing, though: programs almost never work on the first try. In order to get it to work, you’ll have to fix it over and over again. The debugging (code fixing) process is inevitably tough and gruelling. Instead of giving up immediately, you’ll need to examine each error to figure out what went wrong, until your code finally works.
This will train you to view each failure as an opportunity to learn and fix the problem, instead of a negative reflection on yourself. Building mental resilience and adjusting your mindset is difficult, but you’ll come out a stronger person. If you’re threading a needle or even applying for jobs, which you might need to try over and over again, you might find that each failure affects you less, because you’ve learned from your mistakes.
Where to Start
If I successfully convinced you to pick up programming, here are a few places to start. You may have heard that programming can be done in different languages, with C++, Python and JavaScript being particularly popular. These languages are all great places to start with programming. While the basic concepts are essentially the same in most languages, they begin to diverge in more advanced projects where each language shines in different areas.
There are lots of great resources available on campus online. If you can make space in your schedule for a Computer Science course on campus, go for it! The CS009 series covers Python, while the CS010 series teaches C++. Otherwise, online learning sites such as CodeCademy, DataCamp and GeeksforGeeks offer free courses for you to try your hand at programming. Happy coding!
