University of Michigan - Programming for Everybody

I enrolled myself in a basic MOOC (massively open online course) covering the fundamentals of programming in the Python language. I choose University of Michigan's "Programming for Everybody" 

"Programming for Everybody" is a 10 week course with a 2-4 hour per week course load. Each week introduces a new concept which you learn about through video lectures and writing small programs to manipulate data. The video lectures are very engaging and the tutor Charles Severance combines his vast knowledge with small doses of humour meaning you are never once bored whilst studying!

Whilst the course might be massive, open and online the tutor pays careful attention to his students, responding personally where possible to queries in the course forums and running office hours sessions all over the world when he is travelling; meaning if he is coming to your part of the world you can meet up with him and other students for a chat and a coffee. With the many thousands of people participating in MOOCs this bonus feature sets this course a cut above the rest.

I thoroughly enjoyed this course and would recommend it highly to anyone who is interested in learning the basic building blocks of how to write computer applications.

I am very pleased to report that I passed the course with Distinction! (100%)

Khan Academy - Simple Animation

Pig - Animated

Made using: Khan Academy Computer Science.

My pig drawing is now animated, the pig grows in size til it fills the screen. This was achieved by using the draw function and an if statement, so whilst the face size is less than 300 pixel the pig will grow on the screen once it reaches 300 pixels it stops.

Khan Academy - Variable Expressions

resizable pig

Made using: Khan Academy Computer Science.

My pig drawing is now resizable! Tweaking the faceSize variable value resizes the drawing keeping everything in proportion so it scales rather than distorts. This was achieved by using variable expressions and fractions. Each variable is related to faceSize and parsed into each function call to allow this to happen.

Khan Academy - Javascript

Pig

Made using: Khan Academy Computer Science.

I'm finding that transferring skills between languages is so far quite simple, this evening I have spent a few hours reading up on and watching videos about Javascript on Khan Academy. This task was a lot of fun, it only involved very basic shape placement and a tiny amount of variables but I have learnt quite a bit.

Khan Academy - Hour of Code

Spin-off of "Project: Greeting Card"

Made using: Khan Academy Computer Science.

This was really fun! Simple yet effective.

Grok Learning - Hour of Code - The Dark Tunnel

Grok Learning's third and final contribution to the hour of code project involved making a small text based game using user input, variables, if statements and loops. The biggest lesson I have learnt from this is to always test as you go along, I first wrote out a lot of code, it did not work quite right and I could not find my error so had to start afresh, this time I made a point of checking each command to make sure it did what I wanted it too then fleshed it out further to incorporate the next task. This seemed to work well and my code passed testing, however I am not 100% sure my code is as concise and clean as it could be so am setting myself the extra task of refining the code til I am certain it is the best it can be.

Grok Learning - Hour of Code - Disease Epidemic!

Just completed Grok Learning's second contribution to the Hour of Code project, it was very similar to the first; revisiting if statements and loops etc but this time using integers and comparison calculations instead of working with strings. Now feel more confident working with if statements and user input in Python, was able to write the code needed naturally rather than keep re-reading the study text to find the answers. On to the third and final version.