My Reflection
Personally, to learn some coding and to combine it with journalism are the reasons I chose to have postgraduate program at Cardiff University. I had a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and though it would be nice to combine some coding skills into furfure career. But this module gave me more than that. Apart from the very practice coding skills, I think it’s highly possible that computational thinking can and will have a long-lasted influence on me, not just in learning or working aspect, but more on daily lives
Thanks to the great work done by two professors, this module not just gives me the knowledge of HTML and CSS, which is vital of course, but more surprisingly, I’m starting to know Computational Thinking as problem-solving method. Now, I’m going to talk about my gains in this module and how those gain will assist me in future learning, in those two phases.
What have I learnt?
After two weeks’ learning in this module, surely, I started to get in touch with systematic computer science learning. Although I can only put some basic coding strategies into real use, I am making progress. A few weeks ago, I had zero knowledge about programming, but now, I can use three different programming languages to tackle some mathematic problems, using Python to clean up dataset, and to build website with HTML and CSS of course.
Except from the practical skills, I learned the concept of Computational Thinking, which can be interpreted as ‘to think like a computer scientist’. What is Computational Thinking? It is a set of method to tackle problems, in ways similar to how computer process information. Mostly it is formed by four contents: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction and algorithms. In this module, I got to know this and put it into practice by programming, but this can help far more than programming.
How will those help?
This module is not an independent learning process, it has tight connection to other modules in this course. And moreover, the knowledge l earned in this module can be absolutely useful outside COMSC buildings, in my Data Journalism course, for example.
Technical speaking, the things I learned about HTML and CSS are the paving stone of later modules. As I’m learning JavaScript now, which is also designed for website building, it is almost impossible to learn any JavaScript without HTML and CSS knowledge ahead. Similarly, I can’t complete the workshop on Wednesday about Data Journalism without HTML and CSS (more HTML). I can image that HTML and CSS will play a role in my future study and working.
At the Computational Thinking level, for me it’s more like the status education has to a country—the benefit may not show in a blink of eye, it will only have effects and change the thought slowly but deeply. As for the rest of my course, I think I will ‘deconstruction’ this concept into decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction and algorithms; so I can put it into better use.