Workshop: Data visualisation as a gateway to programming

I was invited to run a workshop at THATCamp Feminisms West at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and thought 'Data visualisations as gateway to programming' would be a good way to provide a gentle introduction to 'computational thinking' by working through the effects different data structures have on potential visualisations in ManyEyes, the online visualisation tool. I also prepared some material on basic concepts in programming and put together a page of 'Inspiring women through history' mapped across time and space that contained heavily commented code that suggested various things to try to get a sense of how code (in this case, JavaScript, HTML, CSS) works. My slides are below, you can play with content prepared for ManyEyes, or 'view source' at the 'inspiring women' link above, save the file to your hard drive and have a play.