Can Learning to Knit Help Learning to Code?

There's a really fascinating article up on Mind Shift that compares the instructions that knitters follow with computer programming. You can find it here. 

From the article:

When electrical engineering professor Dr. Karen Shoop of Queen Mary University in London took her first knitting workshop, she noticed immediately that knitting is very similar to writing computer code. “I noticed that knitting instructions are largely binary (like computers) – in other words, knit or purl,” she said. “More interesting were the knitting instructions, which read just likeregular expressions [of code], used for string matching and manipulation when coding.” Shoop also recognizes that the earliest stages of computing were inspired by handwork: “Of course, computers ultimately started off partially inspired by weaving and the Jacquard loom, or earlier Bouchon’s loom. Arguably some of the earliest programmers were the people making the card/paper punch hole patterns for weaving patterns.”...

“Students often feel anything to do with computing (especially coding) is in a separate bubble,” she said. “And I wanted to show that we ‘code’ in our outside world.” Shoop even had a student — an enthusiastic knitter — who, as a senior class project, developed a digital tool that could recognize and generate new knitting patterns.  “We’re interested in how creativity can inform technology and help create and inform new tools and technologies to support the creative process,” she said.

One of the conversations I've been having a lot lately is about incorporating more coding into math class. I'd hate for coding to become just another skill to add to the list of things kids ought to be able to do... this article seems to me to suggest a way to show kids that coding is a way of thinking about problems in a different light. And as a math teacher, I am all about seeing problems in a different light...