On teaching coding to English studies students

Because this is a practical, hands-on, interdisciplinary class, the students all need to be on roughly the same page early on. And that is how I end up back with teaching English studies students how to code – we are starting with really basic Unix commands to understand how computers work, and build on these principles of commands to programs to understanding how computers can supplement human inquiry. Predictably, the CS students fly through the early Unix stuff and can really struggle with the reading, whereas the English studies students succeed wildly with the reading stuff and can really struggle with the computational stuff. —heather froehlich.