Book review: ‘Code for What?’ by Clifford Lee and Elisabeth Soep

facial recognition software, music classification algorithms for streaming services, gender- and racialized high school dress codes, LBGTQ+ Discrimination is part of the social problem that YR Media’s teen team has attempted to address using digital technology.

of “Code for What?: Computer Science for Storytelling and Social Justice” (The MIT Press, $29.95, ISBN 9780262047456) Dr. Elisabeth Soep and Dr. Cliff Lee challenge the current practice of computer science courses. Instead of teaching computing in a technical and decontextualized way, we encourage educators to push the boundaries of traditional education and lean toward interactive and impactful ways that can approach content from a more human perspective. Encourage.

Could coding become a justice-driven medium for storytelling? Empowering young people to create digital products with social impact? What would that look like? These are some of the questions the author attempted to answer with her group of young interns working at YR Media.

The program enabled students from underserved communities to develop digital media skills. Over the course of a decade, teens learned how to design projects that benefit their communities, code them, and bring them to life. This book is a rethinking of these initiatives, their successes, failures, and learnings that may be applied by educators seeking to modernize their teaching methods.

west side stories was a project that allowed students to highlight in an interactive way the rich history of communities facing gentrification. Can AI be taught to dance?, A teenage programmer turned to artificial intelligence tools used to quantify creative works of art.of turn off face, They challenged the limits of facial recognition algorithms and the social implications of the technology’s growing popularity.

Some of these products have made a visible impact on the student community. Double Charge: Behind the Numbers It highlights how the allotted court costs have pushed young people into a vicious cycle of poverty and debt, and even sent them back to prison on new charges.. To raise awareness of this perceived injustice, the YR Media team created an interactive digital experience where users follow the stories of young people’s beliefs. At each step, the calculator summed up all the charges incurred based on the experience of real people.

The news stories sparked by this investigation led to Alameda County’s decision to eliminate the juvenile delinquency administrative fee. California followed suit in 2018.

Written from a mentor’s perspective, this book reflects what it means to teach computing to a highly digital generation. Described as a “fundamental rethink of STEAM,” the author makes a compelling and engaging argument for his human-centered approach to computer science. There, students can ask themselves what coding can do for them and for the benefit of their community.

While this book is very centered on the specific experiences of YR Media’s youth programs (which are not always easy to replicate under the current constraints of most educational systems), it is a rethinking of current teaching methods. In this aspect, the last section, “Tension and Expansion,” explores real-world educators and innovations who have been able to establish a “justice-driven” educational approach that can be placed at the intersection of computing and art. shining a light on the person

Using accessible language, Soep and Leep delve deeper into what computer science education means and make a compelling argument for the importance of incorporating ethics into coding courses. After all, it’s humans who code. Human error is also often responsible for technology’s propensity to reproduce algorithmic bias and inequality.

Instead of thinking of coding as a skill that is only useful in the technical field, code for what? provided a real-world example of how coding can benefit media, journalism, and education in general, and I wish I had attended an influential coding lesson in middle school.

What do we code for? The authors of this book explore how computer programming can provide insight, connection, community, accountability, creative expression, joy, and ultimately hope for the next generation. Ultimately, however, the question in the title of this book can be boiled down to just one concept. It’s about writing code for change.