Hour of Code 2016 (with UDev)

A great day with our friends from UDev, where we broke the ice with programming and computer science, we used a Code.org block-based programming tutorial to explain basic programming concepts and CS basics.

We aimed to motivate, inspire and teach non-cs students and let them discover why we love this amazing field.

And that's what we got, most of the challenges were solved and explained by the participants. Some of them were motivated to learn programming after discovering that they have problem solving skills, and how easy it was to read codes though it was their first time.Then they saw the execution of some applications of programming on a robot , a flappy bird game, and a webpage.

Going beyond hour of code

Learn more from

• Udacity, Udemy, Coursera, Edx

• CodeCademy , Codeschool

• French: Openclassrooms, Grafikart, Les Teachers du net

• Arabic: Muhammed Essa, Abdullah Eid, EgyCoder, ElZero Web School , NewBaghdad

• And Ilyes's python tutorial (Algerian dialect)

And for more useful resources and tutorials checkout our awesome list

Q&A

Why you programmers love dark editors ?

We feel that it eases the stress on our eyes, and it looks beautiful 😁.

Can you use wordpad instead of this, and why you use Atom ?

Of course you can, I just love Atom it makes life easier.

What does the var count = 0 do there ?

It's a counter, the loop increases it until it riches a value where it stops.

We have count<5 in our loop, why it reaches the 5 ?

We started counting from 0, count from 0 to 4 :simple_smile: . That's why we tell people Programmers count from zero .

How does it know that notFinished() in the game returns true or false ?

That's a function detailed in another part of our code, where it tests if the bird reached the point or not and it replies by true or false.

How's the real implementation of notFinished() function

The bird is on a (x,y) point and the pig is on (x',y') the finished means that x matches x' and so on, and then Ilyes showed us an example with the ultrasonic sensor in the robot, and that notFinished means that it's far from the obstacle.

What does the parentheses do in functions like moveForward(); ?

Sometimes in programming, we write some reusable parts of code called functions, you saw them in maths like log(x) you can't see what's behind logarithm function you just give it a value, that's what we are doing here, sometimes functions take parameters and sometimes no.

What language we are using here ?

Javascript but the syntax doesn't matter for the moment, that's why block-based programming is cool.

What is the name of this application we are using here ?

Scratch by MIT, and Code.org made their web version of it.

How does this robot understand codes ?

The Arduino board on it has a CPU that executes codes.

What OS you are using ?

Linux Ubuntu, with gnome-shell3 as a DE (Desktop Environment).

Links

• #HourOfCode
• Udev
  • Facebook
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  • Github
• Open Minds Team
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  • Github