Teaching Programming to Liberal Arts Students ― A Narrative Media Approach

摘要

In this paper we present a new learning environment to be used in an introductory programming course for students that are non-majors in computer science, more precisely for multimedia students with a liberal arts background. Media-oriented programming adds new requirements to the craft of programming (e.g. aesthetic and communicative). We argue that multimedia students with a liberal arts background need programming competences because programmability is the defining characteristic of the computer medium. We compare programming with the creation of traditional media products and identify two important differences which give rise to extra competences needed by multimedia designers as opposed to traditional media product designers. We analyze the development process of multimedia products in order to incorporate this in the learning process, and based on this we present our vision for a new learning environment for an introductory programming course for multimedia students. We have designed a learning environment called Lingoland with the new skills of media programming in mind that hopefully can help alleviate the problems we have experienced in teaching programming to liberal arts students.