 petition to Congress urging them to make computer science classes available in every school has gained hundreds of thousands of signatures and Code.org itself has raised ten million dollars. This is happening at the exact same time that about 80% of schools have experienced budget cuts often affecting arts programs for the most underprivileged communities especially communities of color. For example the percentage of black and Latinx students who have access to art classes in school has dropped from 50% in 1992 to about 26% now. I do personally care about giving all students the chance to learn about computers after all my full-time job is trying to improve CS education but I definitely don't think that it should be happening at the expense of art in humanities. So this talk is about why the humanities and arts are an important part of any education but even specifically a CS education that if we want students to become good technologists we should not sacrifice the humanities and should even go out of our way to specifically include them in a computer science curriculum. So firstly using art and visual aids is a great way to both set the tone for learning to set the tone for learning and intimidating subject. Linda Lucas's children's book about programming called Hello Ruby is a great example of using art to set the tone for learning. Her illustration style is colorful and whimsical and sets a foundation for setting for thinking about computers with creativity and curiosity. And besides setting the tone for a subject art and illustrations can help explain a concept for visual learners. Even if a student isn't a visual learner research shows that reinforcing a concept in a variety of ways can help the concept sink in. So as an example the first bubble sort zine is about calculators and using electricity to make computations. Inside the chapter about circuits the zine explains batteries as cataries. It shows a diagram of a category split up inside with one half full of catnip and the other half full of tiny pent up cats. And as soon as you put a wire between the two sides the cats rush through the wire to the other side. The category analogy even holds up for explaining resistance and parallel circuits. Resistance is anything that might get in a cat's way like yarn or puddle of water and more cats will choose the path of least resistance because they're lazy. Another useful way to incorporate the humanities in CS education is using history to set the context for a concept or a technology. Before talking about binary numbers we can cover a bunch of historical number systems used throughout history. So most historical counting systems are based on 10 because we have 10 fingers and not because there's anything inherently special about the number 10. There are even some cultures that counted in hex because they counted the spaces between fingers and toes which is 16. Egyptian numbers of symbols are cute and fun. For example the 100,000 symbol is a tadpole because in frog breeding season there were so many tadpoles in the Nile that that was the Egyptians idea of a ridiculously large number. Historical arithmetic systems around the world are super interesting too. This is Ethiopian multiplication and it's fascinating to cover because you represent one of the numbers as pebbles and the other as houses. You put them both in columns and you double the pebbles and you have and floor the houses until you reach one house and you cross out even numbers because they're considered unlucky. And the answer is the number of pebbles at the end of this and I love this calculation because it involves superstition and you end up with the right number at the end. And I remember reading about this as a kid and being so fascinated by it that when I started writing a zine about computation I knew it was the first thing I wanted to include. If we're going to be talking about how the internet works we can also talk about historical long distance communication methods. For example drums in the African Congo that could carry complex messages as far as six or seven miles at the speed of sound hundreds of years before Morse code telegraphs. Uncommunicating by drums shared many properties with the internet including protocols, error correction and redundancy and encoding. While talking about encryption we can talk about how a Hindu guy to behavior for young women in the 800s suggested that every accomplished young woman be skilled in cooking, perfume making, chess and ciphers along with 20 other skills. When talking about encryption we can talk about how Arab linguists studying the Quran discovered the frequency analysis method for cracking the random substitution cipher a good thousand years before Europe would discover this method. And speaking of the history of encryption it's rife with personal drama. There were several cases in history where a cryptanalysis breakthrough was motivated by revenge or spite. A cipher called the visionary cipher was considered the strongest cipher in the 1700s and 1800s in Europe and remained unbroken there for 100 years. And Charles Babbage who also invented the difference engine dabbled in trying to crack it but didn't succeed until he was motivated by spite. The story is that a London dentist claimed to have invented a special unbreakable cipher which when Charles Babbage read about it was just the visionary cipher. And he was so annoyed by this dentist that he resolved to break the visionary cipher to piss him off and did so within a single year. Another spite driven cryptanalysis story the enigma machine was used by Germany and World War II to encrypt messages and the successful cracking of the enigma cipher shortened to the war by two to three years saving about 21 million lives. The inventor of the enigma machine's brother was so jealous of his brother's accomplishments that he sold the secrets of the enigma to the allied forces and this ended up being used by the allies to construct replica enigma machines that were instrumental in cracking the cipher. I don't know about you but I love reading about how technological breakthroughs are influenced by feelings. Speaking of science influenced by feelings, another important reason for including history in computer classes is that it's a good reminder that math and science and computer science aren't objective. They're inherently political. In the U.S. schools and textbooks cover mostly the scientific discoveries and accomplishments of North America and Europe leading to the impression that the West has contributed more to technology. Scientific discoveries are often funded using government money. Huge computing advancements came out of war intelligence efforts. In the 1800s and 1900s even many monarchs and governments funded both cryptography and cryptanalyst teams to keep national secrets safe and to try to intercept and decode any anti-government messages. Marie Antoinette for example being royalty was well versed in ciphers and used them while sending messages. Because so many of the scientific discoveries that we learned in school are western centric this is why I make a specific effort in bubble sort zines to include mathematical and computation discoveries and inventions from East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. Arabic cryptanalysis discoveries, Ethiopian multiplication, mind counting systems because it takes an active effort to decolonize science education. Including art in computer science classes also frames computers as a tool for creativity. I remember when I was learning programming what got me most excited was while I was making websites and being able to personalize them and customize them and use them to share my writing and fan art. Imagine a computer science curriculum that included exercises in making generative art, hacking, knitting, and embroidery machines, programming music visualizations, creating photo filters, or generating sonnets. Lastly the most important quality in any technologist is empathy. Art whether it's literature or painting or music can help you build empathy for people with very different life experiences than yours by putting you in their experience in their story. Empathy helps technologists communicate and collaborate well. And empathetic technologists will build technologies with people as their number one priority. I'd love to talk to you afterwards if you're interested in computer science education or the intersection of the humanities and technology. And thank you so much for having me here.