Coding at Home: April 30th

Today we’ll be streaming live from 1pm, Irish time!

Today’s Session

We got off to a roaring start with our very own camera app and image view yesterday with the Lights, Camera, Code playground.

We learned about a few new components that have been written especially for this playground: the Space, SwiftyCamera, and ImageView type. Just like our previous work in Everyone Can Code Puzzles, these types have properties and methods we can use to configure them how we like and perform certain functions.

We worked with the grid of the space for laying out our camera and image view components and sizing them, which is a whole new thing for us.

It brings us closer to app development, because laying out the interface people interact with is a large part of our work, and it is often composed of multiple components.

Today we’ll continue that work and add our pictures to a photo album in the Photos the iPad.

We’ll see you at 1pm today!

Coding at Home: A New Frontier! (April 29th)

Well, it’s still the same frontier, mostly. We’ll still be streaming live each weekday at 1pm, including TODAY.

We’ll still have the recordings up after each session on the kids.code() playlist.

Today’s Session

Today we’ll briefly go over the homework assignment from yesterday: design a staircase for the Appending Removed Values page from the Learn to Code 2 playground that fills the entire row and place characters on each step.

These arrays playground pages are a great way to exercise really important skills and give you great practice for working with arrays in Swift.

Photos!

You have spoken (sort of)!

According to our Twitter poll, people most wanted to learn either app development, taking pictures with code, or augmented reality.

So we picked something that combines a bit of app development and taking pictures with code (we’ll do augmented reality next).

The Lights, Camera, Code playground (from Apple) is a great playground to take your coding to the next level. Plus, you’ll get to take advantage of the camera on your iPad!

We’re going to get introduced to some brand new types and get some experience using the camera of our iPads… from code.

A Big Step

This is a big step from our trip through the fundamentals of coding, but you’re more than ready. We’ll just take our time, go slow, and figure it out.

See you at 1pm and make sure you’ve done your makeup for your photo shoot!

Coding at Home: April 28th, You’re Finished!

You’re now a 100% trained-up coder and I can teach you no more!

(Psst, we’re still live today at 1pm, Irish time!)

Oh, wait. There’s loads more to learn about programming, even Swift! You’ve done an amazing job getting this far with us in the Everyone Can Code Puzzles curriculum — this is no amount of coding to sneeze at! But this is only the beginning of a very long Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style journey.

Today’s Session

Today we’re going to have a look at those playground pages I asked you to look through yesterday: appending items to an array, removing them from one array and adding them to another.

Sometimes it will feel like we have two buckets: one full of items, the other empty. When we iterate through the full bucket, we’ll remove the items we used and append them to the other bucket. Like a To Do pile and a Done pile, in a way.

This will come in handy when your code grows into larger apps with a lot more complexity and you need the app’s code to remember and act on more things for you.

We’re also going to have a guest student on today to talk about the Algorithms chapter in Learn to Code 1 and some strategies they used to solve those puzzles.

What’s Next

We’d love it if you filled out our survey, to help gauge the type of experience people have who are watching the videos. You also have the chance to say what you’d like to study next.

Our Twitter poll finished (nearly) dead even with AR, App Development, and Taking Pictures with Code each receiving two votes (so far), so get in your votes, quick!

See you at 1pm!

Coding at Home: April 27th, Arrays Again

Catch us today at 1pm, Irish time!

Today’s Session

We’re back with arrays today. We’ll be working on rearranging items in our arrays, inserting item, removing them. Arrays are such a useful tool for you to use and they have so many handy features, we’ll make sure you see as many ways to use them as possible.

We’ll also explore how to debug issues with getting items out of our arrays and what types of errors we might see.

from Everyone Can Code Puzzles

This is such an important topic and you’ll use them so much, we’ll make sure we spend plenty of time on them!

See you today at 1!

Coding at Home: April 24th, Arrays

Got time for more arrays today at 1pm, Irish time on our live stream? Join us!

Today’s Session

We’re going to practice using arrays. One of the first things we’ll do is iterate over items in an array; just like you would with items on a to do list, or a shopping list.

For this we’ll be using our for loops quite a bit and working within our repeating block.

We’ll also keep other things in our arrays, like characters, gems, and portals.

Arrays are yet another super useful tool in our coding toolbox. They have a ton of interesting functionality and features, and we’ll get to explore some of that today.

So we’ll catch you at 1pm on Twitch or later on the recording!

Coding at Home: April 23rd, Arrays

We’ll be live today at 1pm, Irish time.

while !understandsWhileLoops

We’ve covered while loops the last few days, which are ways to repeat a certain block of code while a condition is true. We learned why this tool is handy, and when you might use it instead of a for loop.

understandsWhileLoops = true

Now we’re ready for the next tool.

Today: Arrays!

In Chapter 10, we talk about arrays.

From Learn to Code 2: Arrays

An array is a list of items. In Swift, the items in the list will all have the same type. In our playgrounds, we might have an array of Characters or Ints (remember, these are whole numbers).

This is a heavily used tool in programming.

If you skipped ahead a little bit in the Rock, Paper, Scissors playground, you may have seen arrays in use and wondered what the square brackets (‘[‘ and ‘]’) were for, or some of the ways loops were used looked a little different than our for i in 1...n or while condition syntax.

We’ll learn all about the syntax of arrays; how to create them, change them, and use them.

See you at 1pm, Irish time!

Coding at Home: April 22nd, while loops

Catch us today at 1pm, Irish time, for some more live coding!

Recap

We finished up logical operators yesterday with a little BuzzFeed-style quiz. Our code looked a little something like this:

show("What is your name?")
let name = ask("Name")
show("Hi " + name)
show("Answer some questions and I'll tell you what type of animal you are.") 

show("Are you house-trained?")
var isHouseTrained = askForBool()

show("If I threw a ball would you chase it?")
var wouldChaseBall = askForBool()

//🦁🐱🐶🐺
if isHouseTrained && wouldChaseBall {
    print("You're a 🐶!")
} else if !isHouseTrained && wouldChaseBall {
    print("You're a 🐺!")
} else if isHouseTrained && !wouldChaseBall {
    print("You're a 🐱!")
} else if !isHouseTrained && !wouldChaseBall {
    print("You're a 🦁!")
}

Paste that into a Swift Playground on your iPad and try it out!

Today’s Session

Today we’re back with while loops.

They require a little more design thinking, and especially today’s playground, where we nest loops! This just means we’ll be running a loop inside of a loop.

Because this is a little bit of a leap, conceptually, we’re going to take our time and come up with some strategies for reading code that might help you. Not only will they make reading code someone else has written easier, they’ll make reading and explaining your own code later easier. And the tips will help you design your code better, before you even start writing a single line.

If you need to catch up on while loops, feel free to watch (or re-watch) yesterday’s session.

We’ll see you at 1pm!

Coding at Home: April 21st – While Loops

We stream today at 1pm, Irish time, who’s with us!

Feedback can be sent to [email protected], dropped to our anonymous survey, or posted on our discussion board.

The End of Logical Operators

We’ll show you the true value of logical operators today — a BuzzFeed-style quiz!

If that doesn’t bring home the usefulness of logical operators; our &&’s, ||’s, and !’s, I don’t know what will.

On to While Loops

Now, we’ve covered loops before, you might remember the for .. in ... syntax.

That has worked really well for us throughout this course, but today we’re going to learn another way to repeat our code: while loops.

With while loops we’ll keep performing the code in our block until a certain condition is false.

Our new while loop syntax

It’s a great bridge connecting two of the different coding tools we’ve learned: loops and conditions.

Now that we’ve had a bit of practice with both, we’ll see ways in which we might want to use this new tool.

See you at 1pm, Irish time!

Cicero

Coding at Home: April 20th – Week Five

We’re back again for week five of coding at home!

We’ll be live today at 1pm Irish time, finishing up with logical operators and doing a little debugging session.

Recap

You have covered an absolutely massive amount of coding concepts if you’ve stuck with us thus far.

In week one we covered commands and functions

The second week we introduced loops and variables. We even started on conditional coding!

For the third week we continued with conditions, introduced types and initialization, and started functions with parameters.

Last week we dove deeper into functions with parameters and logical operators (which brought us back to conditional coding again). We dropped an extra video last week to try and help illustrate the usage of some of these concepts.

What’s up this week

This week I hope to start us off with a live debugging session. This is useful because it’s a scenario you’ll often find yourself in. You’ll have a chunk of code you need to walk through in order to hunt down a tricky bug or bad behavior.

After the debugging session we’re going to explore a great way to exercise our newfound skills with conditionals and logical operators. We’ll use The Code Hub’s version of the Answers playground, from our playgrounds feed.

We’ll quiz our friends and collect their answers in variables and then use conditional coding and logical operators to change what our answer to them is.

Later… more loops!

Later in the week we’ll continue with more ways to loop and then maybe squeak in the start of arrays: a handy way to store lists of things.

See you at 1pm!