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My nephew asked me why his game needed a 'for loop' and it took me back
He was trying to make a simple space shooter in Scratch and got stuck on making the aliens move. I told him about loops and his eyes lit up, saying 'So it's like telling the computer to do the boring part over and over?' That was exactly how I felt when I first learned about them from a library book in 2005. It's funny how the basic ideas that click for a beginner are still the same, even if the tools look totally different now. What was the first coding idea that really made sense to you when you started out?
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brookewood1mo ago
My first real click was variables in a QBasic class, 1998. It just seemed like magic boxes for numbers.
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sandraf841mo ago
Remember when the biggest problem in your life was getting a syntax error on line 20? Those magic boxes were a gateway drug to spending three hours debugging a typo.
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loganprice1mo ago
That "magic boxes" feeling is what got me too, but with functions. It was like teaching the computer a new word once so I could just say it later instead of writing the same steps every time. What was the first thing you taught yours to do?
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