The following is the English original of an article that has been published in Czech in the magazine of Psychology students at the Charles University in Prague (see the Czech version at the end of this post).
Photo by Vít Krištof
In September of 2009, I started my Computer Science studies at Cambridge in the UK. During one of our first courses I was astonished to learn that a majority of these smart, experienced, and well-selected students struggled grasping certain programming concepts. Recursion (some program code executing itself) stood out in particular as something that was crippling to others but felt natural to me. How could this be? I concluded that either I was an alien with a special brain (unlikely), or I had some prior experience that caused this difference (more likely). But what could it have been?
As I thought back to my high school years, I recalled that at the age of 12 my great teacher Gabriella Blénessy had asked me and my classmates to draw beautiful self-repeating pictures such as this triangle in an educational programming language called Logo. That was when it hit me: our teacher had managed to trick us into learning recursion at a young age without us even noticing, simply by making it an enticing (and attainable!) challenge for us. This was the beginning of my understanding that basically anyone can learn algorithmic thinking given the right learning environment (experience shows that random 10-year-olds certainly can!).
Source: wikimedia.org
Fast-forward to ten years later. I learnt through my partner’s endless supply of fascinating research reviews and stories that Psychology was becoming more of a science, with more emphasis on data and statistics, yielding unprecedented progress in the understanding of human behaviour and mental health. Knowing this, it really ruffled my feathers each time I heard someone (especially from the scientific community) dismissing Psychology as “art and philosophy”. Furthermore, I noticed that few researchers’ knowledge of statistics (and the necessary programming) were up to par.
A permanent question on my mind is how can I as a technologist and teacher contribute to something more than yet another photo-sharing, gif-sending chat app? What if I could indirectly contribute to improved mental health and wellbeing by supporting would-be Psychology researchers to have confidence in statistical programming? This is what led to the inception of the Preparation for Statistical Programming for Psychologists (PSPP) course.
The course is now over. It was fascinating and highly rewarding to see some truly scared people with no maths or programming background start out from scratch and get to a level where they can independently import, transform, plot, and analyse data. If this isn’t a heroic achievement in its own right, they even managed to have fun (or pretend to do so) throughout. The course has a way to improve, but if all is well, next year’s students should have the chance to become confident statistical programmers as well. You just have to be adventurous and sign up - I’ll help you through the rest!
The Czech Article