What Creative Coding can teach you beyond crafting visuals

Published by Tim on Friday November 17, 2023

Last modified on February 5th, 2025 at 10:13

Learning to code has had a bad reputation for ages. Many people have the impression that it’s all about acquiring purely technical skills. I experience this very often with my graphic design students: many of them see creative coding as a skill that primarily serves to create particularly interesting visual worlds. They look at Creative Coding as a style, a specific aesthetic. And this is absolutely fine, it can be a huge motivation in the beginning of the learning proecess. But on the other hand it completely underestimates the real value of learning to program.

It is often mentioned that Creative Coding is very suitable for learning Computational Thinking, a bundle of skills that is very valuable and helpful for work far beyond programming. I fully agree with that. However, I find the term Computational Thinking problematic, because it makes it sound as if we humans are learning to think like computers. But it’s the other way around: the way computers work has been designed by humans and from many perspectives the computer works just like the human thinking. So in a sense, we learn to recognize patterns in our own thinking rather than learning new ways of thinking.

Some time ago, I found a great book by Marina Umashi-Bers, a professor at Boston College, and it’s called “Beyond Coding – How children learn human values through programming”. For me it was an eye opener: Instead of focusing on the fact that children learn important ways of thinking while programming, she goes one step further and writes about how they even learn human values and virtues through coding. This is by no means far-fetched. MIT Press is one of the most renowned scientific publishers in the world.

Marina Umashi Bers lists 10 virtues that children learn through coding: curiosity, perseverance, patience, open-mindedness, optimism, honesty, fairness, generosity, gratitude, forgiveness. In the book, she discusses each of the virtues and backs them up with her experience and research findings. In her opinion, learning to code can teach children important soft skills they need to become reflected future citizens. In the book, the author explains in detail how this works for each of the virtues listed.

The point I want to make here is this: I find it amazing how much value we can get out of learning to code. Creative coding is perceived by many creatives as a certain aesthetic or style. But it is much more than that. Programming offers us a huge spectrum of valuable things that go far beyond beautiful graphics and visuals.

Resources

Enjoying the content?

Since 2018, I have published 239 interviews, case studies, and tutorials, along with over 345 lessons in 22 online courses – and there's more to come! If you want to get full access or simply support my work and help keep this platform thriving, please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thank you very much!

Speaking Image

Monthly Newsletter

Fresh perspectives circling around Creative Coding, Design and Technology, every first Friday of the month, directly to your inbox.

Related

Diogenes meets Demo Festival

Below is the written version of my talk at DEMO Festival in Amsterdam, January 2025. I’ve also recorded an audio […]

Design is dead – long live Design!

I have been observing developments in design for 40 years. That may sound strange, as I’m only forty myself, but […]

I am writing a Book

Hey you! I hope you are doing good. It’s crazy what times we live in, isn’t it? It feels it […]

Creative Coders against AI Colonialism

It is 2025, almost three years after the “AI shock”, when ChatGPT and Dalle2 suddenly captured humankind’s attention. From then […]

Demystify Technology

The guiding principle in my teaching and in the development of this platform is “Demystify Technology”. The Problem When people […]

Thinking Different – Using Linux in Design

“Think Different” If you are as old as me, you probably remember the iconic advertisement of Apple with the bold […]

A Call for Coding Designers

This is a call for coding designers. It aims to serve as a proposal and a provocation for creative work […]

Meandering Thoughts on “Low Technology”

Intro A few years ago, I received an old Macbook Air from 2011 as a gift from my mother. It […]