Teach Yourself to Program

While there are definitely computer science and engineering students in CU-WISE, not all of us know how to program super well (or at all). I ran into a nice little article from Life Hacker called Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code, which gives a few tips on how you can get started.

Why learn programming if you don't need to? I can think of a few reasons:

• It's a fun challenge.
• It helps exercise the logic part of your brain.
• You can work on your problem-solving abilities.
• You can use your new skills to make a game, website, or other fun project.
• When you create a program that does something cool, you can show your family!
• You might need to know some basics in a future job. For example, scientists and mathematicians sometimes need to use programs like Matlab, and knowing how to write code can make your Matlab lives so much easier!

If the suggestions of learning a real programming language is daunting at first, try Scratch and then move on to something like Python. You might be surprised at what you can do.