university

Now that you feel good about your form, consider the two vignettes below:

Vignette 1:

Chun Ying Tsang (20) is an exchange student from Birmingham, West Midlands, England. He is here as an exchange student and only just moved into his dorm yesterday. Although Chun Ying has an email address (Terrif.Ying@yahoo.com), he only has his UK cell phone +44 075 9921 9264.

Vignette 2:

Ash O’Connell-Chapman Jr. (33) has been invited to speak at an event co-hosted by CODE and Project SAFE. Drawing on personal experience growing up in Portage, MI, Ash will be talking about the discrimination faced by the transgender community, and how allies can support those who are transitioning. Due to previous harassment, Ash refused to give out a phone number or an email, instead directing you to the National Center for Transgender Equality website.

Before continuing, try to encode the information from these visitors with your program. What happens? Does your program work? Where does it fail?

The Beliefs We Hold

Read through the following webpages:

Reflection Questions

  • Would your program work for the visitors at the beginning of Part 2? If not, why not? What assumptions did you make about the personal information of the visitors? What assumptions did you make about how this information would be entered?

  • How would you change your program so that it wouldn’t fail? What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing this? You do not have to actually make the changes, only describe what you would do.

  • Look through the links above. Why might programmers care about these things? How might you approach these problems differently in the future?