Scaffolding to Support Humanities Students Programming in a Human Language Context

Abstract

Language is a key topic of interest for students in the humanities -- language is the way in which humans express themselves, communicate, and make art. Computing on language (e.g., recognizing language, generating language, building bots) can be a pathway into using computing for humanities contexts. At the University of Michigan, we are developing a new program to support students in liberal arts and sciences to learn about computing, explicitly including programming. We have designed two courses for introducing computing (1) in terms of creative expression and (2) around the implications of computing on justice. In both classes, we use a scaffolded sequence of programming languages and activities to explore computing on language: (a) a teaspoon language for sentence generation and recognition, (b) a set of custom Snap blocks for sentence generation and recognition, (c) a set of custom Snap blocks for building Chatbots, and (d) an ebook activity for mapping from Snap to Python. Each language takes less than 10 minutes to introduce, with a wide variety of possible student activities (for in-class active learning or for later homework). While the tools build on each other, the earliest stage (the teaspoon language) could be used within a single class session in linguistics, communications, or other liberal arts courses.