Lessons Learned Teaching Coding to Journalism Students

Lessons Learned Teaching Coding to Journalism Students

Cindy RoyalAEJMC 2015Associate ProfessorTexas State Universitycindyroyal.comslideshare.net/cindyroyal

• Programming basics/JavaScript• Data

– Excel– Scraping with Python

• Charting tools• Web Frameworks• Comprehensive final project

coding.cindyroyal.net

A good interactive can tell a story in different ways than text, photos or video

Teaching coding is different than teaching Web Design

Students still need a solid understanding of HTML/CSS

<p id=“name”>Your Name Here</p>

document.getElementById(“name”).innerHTML = “Cindy”;

It’s tough to get students from zero to professional, interactive project in one semester

Coding isn’t one thing, it’s a lot of different concepts.

JavaScript Python

PHP

MySQL

JQueryRuby

RailsWeb Scraping

Bootstrap

Wordpress

Logic

Interactivity

Design

Visualization

GitHub

Computer science programs do not teach Web Development

Computer Science

Web Development

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Teaching coding requires constant course updates and modification of teaching approaches.

Finding good, applicable datasets is difficult

Focus on exposure, perspective first. Skills second. But the goal is to make things.