Switching from MySpace to Facebook at 16 was a traumatic event for me. Gone were the days when I could change my background from pictures of Carrot Top to a montage of Brandon Boyd at whim. All of a sudden my font styles and worse yet, font colors, were doomed to a conventional, monochrome Tahoma. Of course Facebook turned out to be 100 percent more awesome and 100 percent less trashy, but it also lifted our need to understand elementary coding. After all, that was how I embedded the “Dramatic Chipmunk” video on my friends’ profiles and created a flashing “about me.” In a society where computer education in K-12 schools usually doesn’t move far beyond typing, this simple MySpace code this was probably one of the most pervasive and voluntary adoptions of coding for people our age.
But it seems like coding is having a renaissance, at least for kids at Northwestern. Last Wednesday, the Medill/McCormick Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism announced the launch of the Knight News Innovation Laboratory, an initiative that will bring journalists and computer scientists together to innovate digital media, build partnerships with local media organizations and put Chicago on the technology map, first by linking software already created by the Knight News Challenge with media outlets. For example, the Challenge created a program called Tell Me More that scans stories you’re reading and finds related articles that don’t just regurgitate the same story, as Google News does, but rather fill in the gaps by tracking smaller names and statistics that support the story you’re reading.
Almost more exciting than the lab, is the Medill/McCormick Center that has made it possible. Aside from the tangible products that will be created at the Knight Lab, this collaboration is bound to increase computer science literacy on campus through its recent offering of interdisciplinary classes. The Lab is generating just the right amount of sizzle Northwestern computer science needs to get people interested. If people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in these skills learn how to talk about them and benefit from them, there’s no telling how far it will spread.
Jeannette Wing, a professor visiting from Carnegie Mellon, is giving a seminar called “Computational Thinking” this Wednesday at 4 p.m. at the Ford Center that dovetails with the integrative focus behind the Medill/McCormick Center.
She believes that computational thinking, something she calls “a range of mental tools that reflect the breadth of the field of computer science,” should be taught to everyone. Like the Knight Lab, there is nothing stuffy about Wing’s ideas. She celebrates the harnessing of creative humanity and its application to different fields, saying, “Computers are dull and boring; humans are clever and imaginative. We use our cleverness to tackle problems we would not dare take on before the age of computing and build systems with functionality limited only by our imaginations.”
If linked with people’s existing love of social networking and technology, this language and thinking Wing believes in has the potential to lower people’s resistance to computer science. And imagine if this began in high school.
This school year, Medill began Media Teens Chicago, a program lead by Sarahmaria Gomez (Medill ’05) that works with Gary Comer Youth Center to bring high schoolers to Medill’s downtown newsroom and teach them how to shoot and produce video stories with the help of current undergraduate mentors. Maybe the Medill/McCormick Center could start a similar program involving coding. That way, kids in high school will have a leg up going into college and the workforce, and the mentors can learn a little something, too.
This journalism and engineering collaboration is a lot to take on, but all eyes are on Northwestern now. Let’s see how they bring it.
Alex Hollander is a Medill senior. She can be reached at [email protected].
