Procedural literacy:...educating art and design students with code

Abstract

It was found that there were a wide variety of programming languages and tools being used with the single most important motivator in offering such programs to students being the need to ready them for the multi-skills digital media workplace. It was concluded that some level of programming literacy in art and design students is essential in preparing them to work in cross-disciplinary industries such as games development and interactive media. For arts and design students, computer programming can seem an irrelevant, technically complex and narrow skill having no bearing on their chosen discipline. However, in today’s fast-paced Internet society with real-time, high quality interactive media experiences, students now, more than ever benefit when they are well versed with procedural literacy. While there are a plethora of research papers written about individual teacher attempts at teaching coding to artists, there is no collective, comparative examination of how these attempts are being carried out. This paper addresses the gap by collating and analysing these experiences along with in-depth surveys from educators teaching coding to art and design students at higher education institutions worldwide. In this study we examined how and why educators were teaching programming to art and design students in tertiary institutions. The results indicate art and design students have a great initial fear of computer programming that can be overcome with the correct pedagogical approach. The 12 in-depth interviews administered in this study revealed a range of teaching approaches with a high emphasis on visualization techniques, on-demand lectures and eliciting buy‐in from students