• Question: Did you take computer science at school? Do you find it helpful?

    Asked by imogen98 to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 13 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Martin Archer

      Martin Archer answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      My school didn’t do a proper computer science course, just information technology. I took it for AS Level and in my projects I went a bit above and beyond to include some proper coding (I’d learnt a bit at home). Computer programming is an important part of my everyday life doing science and I know some people who only first encountered it at university struggled with it to start with.

    • Photo: Grant Kennedy

      Grant Kennedy answered on 16 Mar 2013:

      I’ve never learned computing in a proper way, except for some really basic stuff. I’ve figured almost everything out by myself, which means that I google things a lot!

      It would have been helpful to have some more proper lessons. The code that I (and most astronomers) write is very ugly. Mostly the bugs aren’t bad enough that the answers are wrong, but there would be a lot less of them, and maybe the code would run faster too, if I’d done some computer science.
      g

    • Photo: Amy Tyndall

      Amy Tyndall answered on 21 Mar 2013:

      I think for astronomy it is a very useful course to take, yes – I was totally clueless when I started University (and still am about some things, hehe!). Programming is something I find quite difficult, and so some proper lessons would have been great for me… In most jobs apart from astronomy, it is necessary to use a computer in some way, so it will never NOT be a useful class to take 🙂

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