Coding should be part of the curriculum – HTML Lab Week 2

Increasingly, though, texts take the form of worlds as much as words

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum https://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/hello-worlds/

I really liked this sentence by Kirschebaum, particularly because it reflects incredibly my feelings towards coding. Coding is like creating a world of wonder, you have your main characters (variables) that go on adventures (being passed onto functions), encounter villains (errors) and then have a happy ending (a full execution of the program). In my opinion all humanties students should learn how to code because nowadays everything is turning digital and being able to understand how this digitalisation works is key to be able to keep up with the times.

I started “coding” when I was 9, my parents got me a Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 kit for my birthday and it had a program in which you could create programs through the use of logical blocks. I spent many hours using that program, I did everything from a game that used only the screen (akin to tic-tac-toe) to a sort of car that would follow people around while shooting little plastic balls.

That experience was a sort of catalyst for me, it led me to do a specialization in IT in highschool, where I learnt the basics of coding in Java and C# as well as the handling of relational databases and project management. Even if my highschool education was perhaps lacking in terms of humanistic exploration, in college I have gained an affinity for the humanities, realising that I enjoy the study of history, particularly south american history and of mythology (particularly Greek and Roman) and I think of all the ways that coding and history could intersect, how we could use tools like Unity to create experiences that replicate those that someone could read from Homer’s Odyssey.

To sum up, coding should be a requirement of the curriculum from the humanities, if not to replicate worlds, at the very least to help us understand the one we live in, by using those intersections that generate themselves between the Humanities and CS.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<!-- Website created over the course of an afternoon to aid my experiment on extinguishing my use of swear words, this website is meant to work as a research tool and can be accessed at ruk1p.github.io-->
<html>

<head>
    <title>CPL Swear Counter!</title>
    <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet">
</head>

<body class="center">
    <h1 >
        Swear Word Counter
    </h1>
    <p>
        Times sworn so far: <span id="display">0</span> 
    </p>
    
    <button id="btn">
        <img id="image" src="ButtonNotClicked.jpg">
    </button>

    <p class="center">
        This website was developed as a way to count the amount of swear words the creator (Conrado Peña Lemes) uses in a 
        normal sentence, this was done with the goal to get data into this in order to make an experiment for the class Psych
        210 - Learning and Memory, Winter 2025 in which part of the class goals is to change a behaviour through the use of 
        classical conditioning, habituation or other methods that we are to learn through the course of the term
    </p>
    <script src="main.js"></script>
</body>
</html>