Considering the non-programming geographer's perspective when designing extracurricular introductory computer programming workshops

Abstract

Computer programming is becoming an increasingly important scientific skill, but geographers are not necessarily receiving this training as part of their formal education. While there are efforts to promote and support extracurricular introductory computer programming workshops, there remain questions about how best to deliver these workshops. Therefore, as part of a recent introductory programming extracurricular workshop I organized for non-programing geographers, I tried to understand more about their perceptions of computer programming. I identify that one of the most important aspects for geographers to learn to computer program is to have training that is domain specific to ensure that the training is relevant and achieves a deeper learning outcome.

Keywords

• geography
• GIS
• learning
• pedagogy
• Python
• R
• relevance
• teaching