I really love that Twitter allows bots, for this reason. Students - and, let’s face it, me too - get really excited when they see that something they created in a programming environment shows up in a part of the online world that they’re actually familiar with. First and foremost, they’re awesome because they’re on Twitter - someplace “real,” not just stuck in the hermetic confines of the iPython Notebook or a Terminal window. In our most recent break, we made Twitter bots. In our second break, we made rudimentary text adventure/Interactive Fiction games.
In our first such break, we made madlibs. While it’s mostly been a good guide, there have been a few times where I could feel my students itching for examples and projects that are more specifically literary - not just things to please students from all the many branches of “the arts and humanities.” When that happens, we take a break, read some DH-heavy literary theory, read some computational literary texts (thank you Emily Short!) - and focus on some more obviously English-y task. We’ve been using Nick Montfort’s textbook, Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press, 2016). My students make me proud every class, not only figuring out stuff they thought they had no business figuring out, but doing incredible, weird, amazing, totally unexpected things with their newfound programming skills. There have been a few bumps in the road, but all in all, it’s been pretty awesome. For the first time in my life, I’m teaching a programming class for English students.
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