Procedural literacy: educating the new media practitioner

Abstract

PurposeSeeks to argue that procedural literacy, of which programming is a part, is critically important for new media scholars and practitioners and that its opposite, procedural illiteracy, leaves one fundamentally unable to grapple with the essence of computational media.Design/methodology/approachThis paper looks at one of the earliest historical calls for universal procedural literacy, explores how games can serve as an ideal object around which to organize a procedural literacy curriculum, and describes a graduate course developed at Georgia Tech, Computation as an Expressive Medium, designed to be a first course in procedural literacy for new media practitioners.FindingsTo achieve a broader and more profound procedural literacy will require developing an extended curriculum that starts in elementary school and continues through college. Encountering procedurality for the first time in a graduate level course is like a first language course in which students are asked to learn the grammar and vocabulary, read and comment on literature, and write short stories, all in one semester; one's own students would certainly agree that this is a challenging proposition.Originality/valueNew media scholars and practitioners, including game designers and game studies scholars, may assume that the “mere” technical details of code can be safely bracketed out of the consideration of the artifact. Contrary to this view, it is argued that procedural literacy, of which programming is a part, is critically important for new media scholars and practitioners and that its opposite, procedural illiteracy, leaves one fundamentally unable to grapple with the essence of computational media.