J233 Advanced Coding Interactives

This course is an introduction to programming concepts as they relate to the journalism industry. The goal of this course is to equip students with a foundational computational literacy to construct interactive online stories such as data visualizations, infographics, maps, multimedia packages, games or other types of projects students may conceive.

This course teaches students how to be literate in code. Beyond the specific skills they learn, students will have a more well rounded understanding of crucial technologies that influence the news industry in innumerable ways. They become better decision makers when working with technologists, and will help to forge the future of the journalism industry.

Specifically, this class covers prototypical object oriented programming, an important component in many web coding languages. Topics covered include variables, typecasting, arrays, for-loops, conditional statements, comparison operators, functions, enclosures and cross-domain data requesting. This course will also cover JavaScript and Python, along with popular data libraries like D3 and Pandas.

Students who have successfully completed this course in the past, along with the data journalism courses, have gone on to become web/graphic developers at national news organizations. These journalists tell visual and interactive stories.