It all comes down to this. The answer to my main inquiry question, “What is the impact of coding on the world?” Before I get into everything, here is some background information on coding. “What is coding,” is a very bold question, but I will answer it. Coding is a sort of language that people can read and understand. Code makes a computer work and do things you want it to do. If coding was not used for computers, your computer would just show a white screen. When you code the computer “understands” what you write and does something in return. Coding is inputs and outputs. You input a command, and the computer gives you an output. As Douglas Vermes, a computer scientist at the Scarsdale High School puts it, “In my mind, coding is making some sort of program or application that can run on your computer.” Coding can make websites and lots of things we use today. Let’s get a little deeper into how coding works. Coding works with on and off signals or 1s and 0s. Since modern day coding languages are very complex and do very intricate things, and the processor cannot understand such complex things, the computer is forced to convert the code into something called computer language or binary which is those 1s and 0s. Say I am coding in python and I press compile. Since python was built on C++, I thought that it converted the python into C++ then into whatever that was created in until it got to computer language. But what really happen is in python’s code, there is a command that instantly converts your coding into binary, which makes the whole process faster. To understand what impact coding has on the world, a reader needs to know how coding has transformed our everyday lives, how we have used coding has already solved big problems in the world, and how coding can be used in the future to solve some of the world’s big problems.
Have you ever called your friends on an iPhone? Coding has allowed you to do that. The way we can make phones work is by coding on the computer and then running the code on the phone. Phones can multitask too. You can shop for groceries while phoning a friend. Send an email while watching a movie. We can also track where people are on our phone. If you are a parent and your child goes out on his own or with friends. You can see where they are. In fact, coding has transferred our everyday lives in many other ways than that. Do you have a computer? If so, coding has helped create that too. The first very useful application was called spreadsheet. It did your calculations, documented data, and much more. That revolutionized computers. Guess what, it was made with code.
Another thing coding has done for us is solving a lot of big problems in the world. Here are some of them. There are some people that do very bad things online like create child pornography. Some people also traffick children. This is a huge problem for reasons you probably already know. But an organization called thorn can help. They put their code into participating sites, if the people who own the site find a bad image, they send it to the police. Then, they send it to the cloud. After that other participating companies take that image and use the thorn code to automatically detect the image and send it to the police. This results in faster catching of suspects and faster rescuing of victims. When someone has a bionic limb or a prosthetic, the prosthetic limb is connected to the nerves. When the nerve sends a command to the limb, the code in the prosthetic decodes the command and turns it into an action. We have also used coding to cure diseases. If we can decode the human genome using code, we may find some cures to big diseases in the world.
Using coding we will be able to solve huge problems in the future. We can use coding to monitor the temperature in the air and keep it consistent to prevent global warming. Current coding students can position themselves to help solve these problems by thinking logically and practicing coding. There are also big problems like the food crisis. Using coding we could just take all of the water in tons, and use coding to calculate how much water each 195 countries should get. Although, that could cause more water problems so I will have to change that plan. Coding could also help us with the overpopulation of our planet. All rocket ships run off of code, and when our planet gets overpopulated, we can send people to other planets using none other than, rockets.
In the end I learned that coding is a very powerful language that powers our life. Our Phones and computers are powered by code. Code has solved some very very big problems in the world and is yet to solve some big problems in the future. You can help with this too. I encourage everybody to start coding. That will make our task force bigger so we can solve more problems quicker. So, what will you do?
