Scaffolding to Support Liberal Arts Students Learning to Program on Photographs

Abstract

Digital photographs are part of liberal arts students' classes (e.g., art, history, and production classes in film and television) and their daily smartphone-based life, in apps like Instagram and Snapchat. Building image filters can be a relevant and engaging context into using computing for humanities students. We have designed a new course for introducing computing in terms of creative expression. We use a scaffolded sequence of programming languages and activities to explore computing on photographs: (a) a teaspoon language for generating image filters, (b) a set of custom Snap blocks for even more sophisticated image filters, and (c) an ebook activity for mapping from Snap to Python. Each stage 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 other liberal arts courses.