Project-Based Coding Courses for non-STEM Students

Co-taught by Alexa Alice Joubin (English) and Ryan Watkins (Education Leadership)

Tentatively scheduled for Fall 2022, this course teaches coding skills to non-STEM majors. Students within the social sciences and humanities routinely struggle to see value in developing their technological and computational skills when courses teaching these topics focus almost exclusively on statistical applications rather than pragmatic projects centered on the student’s discipline. 

     This course addresses this challenge by offering open access tutorials and other instructional resources for non-STEM undergraduate and graduate students. Students will learn coding skills to solve public problems (e.g., social inequality) and advance Public Interest Technology with human-centered design. The inclusive and interactive course will target topics of interest to non-STEM majors.  

     Students will engage in projects such as web scraping for political science students, geographic information system (GIS) mapping for sustainability studies, and semantic search for the humanities students. By focusing on pragmatic coding projects that students can apply in their discipline, the course and instructional resources will motivate students to develop their computational skills and prepare them for public service careers.