Coding It Yourself Can Be Fun

Every couple of weeks I bake a couple of loaves of bread. The bread mostly gets used for breakfast sandwiches. Now my bread does not look as perfect as what I could get in a bakery. And the bagels? Once in a while I try my hand at bagels, don’t look anything close to what I get at my favorite bagel place. But they all taste good and I find it very satisfying to make it myself.

Coding can be a bit the same. Not everyone writes professional looking (or performing) code but sometimes there is some satisfaction in having a program that works just they way you want it to and does just what you need. Maybe it is not “release to the public” neat and tidy. It may be what we used to call a “programmers program.” In other words, a program that only the programmer who write it could (or would) use. My Wordle solver helper program is one such. It works great – for me. It doesn’t have the error checking a released program should have. And maybe it should start at one and not zero. But it works great for me.

Programming is basically stating a process or method using computer code. My Wordle solver represents my thinking of how I think Wordle could be solved. It was fun to write and is fun to use. It’s not ready for prime time though. Does that make it a bad program? No more than my imperfect bread or bagels are bad. They both meet my needs and that, for me, for these, is all that matters.

In some ways, that is the message we may want to pass on to students. Many, perhaps most, of our students will not become professional software developers. They may still write code for their own tasks or interests though. We need to help them enjoy that experience. One way to do this is to assign projects that are interesting to the student. Open ended projects are good for this but even better is letting students select their own projects.

For semester ending projects, I used to allow students to select from a list of suggested projects and also to have the option to design their own projects (after discussion with the teacher) that solved a problem that they were interested in solving.  Helping students find the fun and satisfaction in solving an assignment promotes their learning. And, I hope, helps them think of computer science as worth doing for themselves.