Category: Events

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.

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

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!

All the stuff we said yesterday? We’ll be doing that today! https://twitch.tv/thecodehub, be there or be square!

If you dialed in yesterday at 1pm, Irish time, and didn’t see us, we’re so, so sorry. But we’ll catch you today!

UPDATE!!

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we weren’t able to live stream the coding session today.

We will be live tomorrow (Friday, April 17th) with bells on*.

*Warning, no actual bells will be worn.

We’re live at 1pm today, catch us on Twitch!

Logical Operators Return!

As with many of our sessions lately, yesterday’s was meaty. Logical operators are a whole new level in our programming toolbox.

We have the NOT operator, which is an exclamation mark (!) in front of a boolean variable, like !isOnGem. So if we are on a gem, that whole statement, the exclamation mark and all, will return false. Confusing? Sure, maybe a little. But we’ll get it with practice.

Then there’s the AND operator, which is two ampersands together (&&). This tests to see if both values are true. If one of them is false, the test will fail and return false. In code, it would look something like this: isOnGem && isBlocked. The only way this returns true is if we are on a gem and we’re also unable to move forward (that’s what the isBlocked tests).

Lastly, there’s the OR operator, which is two pipes next to each other (||). In this case, if one of the values is true, we’ll return true. The code looks like this: isOnGem || isBlocked. In this case, if either case is true… if we’re on a gem or we’re unable to move forward… or even both are true, we’ll return true.

Deep Breaths

The puzzles will require a bit of patience and sometimes a bit of trial and error to get a feel for combining conditions. But that’s what we’ll be practicing today.

Hopefully a few of the tricks we use to visualize the concept of logical operators will help you in today’s session!

See you at 1pm!

Our saga continues today at 1pm, Irish time!

Recap

We have covered a ton already this week, with our functions with added flair. You’ve been writing (and using) code that is super powerful because we can pass in parameters that change what the function actually does.

Hopefully you were able to build your own amazing game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. In our own version above we might have cheated a little by making an unbeatable unicorn. What did you do? Feel free to email us your creations at [email protected].

Logical Operators

Today we start on Chapter 8 of Everyone Can Code Puzzles, Logical Operators!

We’ll be talking about booleans again: values that are either true or false.

We’ll be introduced to the NOT (!) operator, which turns a boolean value into its opposite value. The AND (&&) operator, where two boolean values must be true for the condition to be true. And the OR (||) operator, which tests two booleans and if one of the booleans is true then the condition will consider itself true and execute that branch of the condition.

What this all means is that our conditions get can more sophisticated. With logical operators it allows us, especially with the && and || operators, to test multiple conditions at once.

We mentioned in the conditional coding session the example of deciding whether you need an umbrella or not.

Here in Ireland, you might check to see if it’s raining AND if it’s not too windy then you would bring an umbrella, otherwise, you would leave the umbrella at home.

We’d write that condition a little like this, if it were code:

But that’s all ahead of us today! See you at 1pm!

Can you believe you’ve made it to week four? This is a gigantic effort! While it’s true that #EveryoneCanCode, it’s not easy. It requires practice and a lot of patience.

We’re back today for the live coding session on Twitch at 1pm Irish time.

And if you feel like you’re a little behind, need to catch up, or just want to re-watch a session, you can always use the kids.code() playlist.

Recap

Last week we discussed two heavy topics: Types (and Initialization) and Functions with Parameters.

The syntax that we’ve learned so far gets a little funkier when we add these things into the mix.

Our homework over the weekend was to figure out a better way… or maybe just a different way, to write the function in the screenshot above.

Did you manage to come up with something better?

What’s Up This Week

We’re going to keep going with Functions with Parameters this week. Over the Easter weekend (which is still on here in Ireland with Easter Monday) we threw together a little addition to our Holiday Turtle Graphics playground.

In the new chapter, following our usual Christmas one, we’ve added two new egg-decorating pages. This chapter uses the more involved Turtle Graphics functions, so it shows off both instances of a type and a function with a parameter.

It’s available from The Code Hub’s playground feed, and will show up automatically in Playgrounds if you’ve already subscribed to the feed.

Later…

Later in the week we’ll move on to Logical Operators, which sounds like a particularly geeky band. They’ll really make our earlier lessons with conditional coding start to sing.

We hope to see you with us today at 1pm!

We’re back for day fourteen of coding at home, live today at 1pm, Irish time!

Recap: Types, Types, and More Types!

We’ve spent the last three days going over types in Swift. We could spend another couple dozen, easily, going over types, because they’re such a big part of Swift with a lot of fun aspects to explore.

If you feel like you need more practice we gave you some good pointers yesterday, in the Learn to Code 2 playground, and our work in the Shapes playground should provide you a lot of opportunity to work on initializing instances from types.

Functions with Parameters

As bad as “Initializers” sounded in the previous chapter, “Functions with Parameters” sounds like something Doctor Who might be attacked by.

But we’ve seen (and used) functions with parameters before! In the Turtle Graphics playground, we called the function forward() with a number in between the parentheses to specify how far we wanted the turtle to move forward. Or we used the right() or left() functions with a number to specify the number of degrees we wanted the turtle to turn.

We created functions in previous work because we found ourselves repeating a certain set of tasks. And it made sense to group the code together so we could call it by using just one function call.

By creating (or using) functions with parameters we’re just making our code even more useful.

We’ll spend our time today in a Turtle Graphics playground and the Learn to Code 2 playground.

Feedback

If you can, please fill out our six question, very informal, very anonymous survey so we can get a bit of feedback on the sessions so far.

And if you have any work you’re particularly proud of, feel free to email it to [email protected], we’d love to see your stuff!

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Remember to wear your Easter best, bring your iPad and Learn to Code 2, we’ll see you at 1pm!

Live stream, today at 1pm Irish time: https://twitch.tv/thecodehub or catch up on the kids.code() playlist on YouTube.

More Types

We’re going to go over types and initializers (chapter 6 of Everyone Can Code Puzzles) one last time today. It’s a deep subject, and a bit of a shift from our previous lessons, which is why we’re spending a few days on it.

We saw one student use two turtles to draw the picture above, each instance of a turtle taking responsibility for drawing a different part of the picture. This is a nice use of instances to divide up tasks. A lot of what we’re covering these days is about organizing our code.

If you practice your Types and Initialization playgrounds you’ll get a ton of work on organizing your code. I would recommend “Setting the Right Portal” for practice with setting properties on instances. For organizing your code, the “Train Your Expert” page is excellent.

The Anatomy of a Type

Lastly, we looked at how a type is constructed, just to have a look at the guts of what we were doing.

For kicks, we designed a Dog type. This is something you might do if your code was part of an application that cataloged dogs… or trained them. We defined a property, called name, and a method, called chaseStick().

The point of this exercise wasn’t for us to go off creating our own types now. It was just to give you an idea of how types are constructed to demystify the code you’ve been using so far.

Today’s Session

For today’s session we’re going to dive into another new playground, called Shapes.

This will be our last stop in Chapter 6 of Everyone Can Code Puzzles. We’ll get to see a few new types, create some instances, and interact with those instances.

See you at 1pm!

We’re live again today at 1pm, still talking about types!

Recap: Types Everywhere!

We went through a LOT of stuff yesterday. A whole new concept with some fancy new language and new ways of writing code.

If we think about our playgrounds so far, we’ve been dealing with lots of different types:

• Our character, who navigates around the puzzle, is a type
• Portals are a type
• Tiles are a type that have an isOnGem and isOnClosedSwitch property

Many of these things, so far, have been hidden to us, to ease us into coding. But as we go on, we’ll see types, and especially instances, in use everywhere in the code we’re writing and reading.

In other playgrounds we’ve used, like the Turtle Graphics playground, the turtle itself (which is a monkey, in our case) is an instance of a Turtle type.

Our Turtle type has certain properties, but what we’ve been using it most for is to perform certain actions, by calling methods on the instance. forward(), left() and setColor() are all functions on our type.

We’re going to explore turtles a little more in today’s lesson and we’re also going to open up a type and show you what the guts look like.

We’ll see how useful types are and use them as another way to organize our code.

So join us at 1pm today!