Coding as a life skill

Information Systems Department Chair Raghu Santanam, provides his readers with his opinion on the importance and applicability of teaching students how to code.

By Raghu T. Santanam Chair of Information Systems  

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, has said “learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better — creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.” As with any issue of significance, there is an opposing camp which includes some top-notch IT professionals that do not think programming is for everyone. Their counter-argument is that you don’t need to know how engines work to drive a car.

However, in our modern cars it looks like we do need some technology skills — if you want to operate your garage door, connect your phone to the Bluetooth receiver in your car or set up the audio to play your favorite music from your music library on Spotify, Amazon or iTunes. So, yes, I do believe that coding is increasingly becoming an essential life skill. More importantly, it is becoming an essential business skill. Not everyone is expected to be a proficient programmer but every professional should know what it takes to create macros and scripts in spreadsheets, build simple models to test out business assumptions and set up various cloud services so that they have all the information they need anytime, anyplace. In our school, we are teaching all of our students the fundamentals of building smartphone apps.

A week-long Microsoft App Development Symposium in our introductory first-year students Computer Applications course features professionals from Microsoft as guest lecturers. As part of the week-long set of activities, students will develop HTML5/CSS games and publish them to a website. Students will use Microsoft’s “TouchDevelop” browser-based game development environment, and using fully-automated self-guided tutorials, will program one or more games using customizable templates that mimic many popular games such as "Flappy Bird."

The course instructors — Matt McCarthy and Robert Wood — are asking students to publish their games to Microsoft Azure’s cloud web apps. The objective is to give students a gentle introduction to programming, game development and website hosting. Students also will be introduced to the fundamentals of online/app marketing and strategy. We are proud that our business school curriculum introduces our students to the unlimited possibilities of technology from the time they first step into the university. We continue and build on the good work in this introductory course and encourage students to continue to maintain curiosity about contemporary and emerging technologies.