This probably would have best been posted a few days ago, but this week is
computer science education week, or "code week" (
coding just means writing computer programs). From December 9th to the 15th, over a million people all over the US are promoting computer science for students ranging from elementary school to college, as well as those of us finished with school. This is not only really cool because it is generating enthusiasm for computer science education, but it is also providing a lot of real educational resources (like online tutorials) for people of all ages to learn how to code (how cool is that?!).
In this post I want to go over some of the cool things about the code week initiative, talk about why it's important, and offer some of my experiences as a biomedical scientist who started computer science work in his graduate thesis lab with little previous computational knowledge.
Many people are intimidated by the prospect of working with computers (programming). In my experience, one of the biggest things that really turns people off to programming is that they think it is super difficult to learn a computer language and that they can't do it. I have experienced this multiple times when talking to fellow biomedical researchers who want to start integrating computational biology into their own work. People are often concerned that they will be unable to learn because they don't have a computational background, and/or they are worried because they don't know where to start or what the learning process will entail. To this I always respond by telling them that they certainly
do not need a computer background to learn programming, and that the basics are surprisingly easier to learn than they think.