7 Coding as Aesthetic Experience

In this chapter, we reimagine coding as aesthetic experience,1 a fundamental form of human experience that undergirds all other forms of experience and provides an essential continuity across heterogeneous forms of experience. Dewey argued that “the measure of the value of an experience lies in the perception of relationships or continuities to which it leads up.”2 He observed that the richness of an experience is marked by a variety of interests and an “intimate association” between various forms of knowledge, which are “torn asunder” and ruptured in schools due to the disconnected experiences of curricular domains. Positioning the problems of democracy as problems of education, Dewey located the discontinuity inherent in formal education at the heart of these problems. The possibilities and challenges of computing in K-12 education, we believe, to a large extent, are also rooted in a similar paradigm.3