Chapter 4 is about teaching computing to non-CS majors at the undergraduate level. I focus on liberal arts, architecture, and business students in the example of Media Computation. I describe how it was designed and the results over the last decade [121, 126]. e general teaching method being used is contextualization which is teaching computing in an application context that makes it authentic to the learners.

Some people learn computing for reasons other than the leverage it will provide to learn something else. Sometimes, people learn computing because they want to learn computing - and not because it will get them a great programming job. The faculty at Georgia Tech decided in the late 1990’s that their students should know computing. They bought into the argument that it’s an important skill in a technological society. they believed that it gave their students an advantage over students at schools who didn’t make that commitment.
As of Fall 1999, every undergraduate student at Georgia Tech had to take a course in computer science that included programming [123]. The story of how we made that work provides insights into how to provide computing education at the undergraduate level that meet learners’ needs and goals, even when those goals are not professional software development. Increasingly, non-computing undergraduate students need to learn about computing, but that requires a different approach from what we offer our computing undergraduate students.