4:00 – Wallow in Self-Pity

So If you haven’t realized from my title I did an Hour of Coding with the Grinch. I love Christmas and I absolutely love the Grinch (and the Grinch scene I referenced in my title), so I was pretty excited to find this.

I still have very little clue about what coding actually is. However, after completing my hour of code, I feel like coding does not feel to be as much as an unimaginable skill as I felt it was before. My current understanding of coding is basically telling something what to do (kinda). It is a way to program something like a machine, game, or whatever (please let me know if my simple definition and understanding is way off base).  

Below is a video I made (using ClipChamp – my new favourite video editor) showcasing how my hour of coding with The Grinch went. I screen recorded a couple of the different lessons/levels and how I did with them, especially the lessons I struggled with. I also did a voice over to explain what I was doing and how my coding was going. 

I actually really enjoyed doing the hour of code. I think it was lesson 8 of the one I did that I struggled with because I was trying to run what I had coded and I couldn’t get the timing of how to jump over the obstacles properly – that was more of my inability to pass a level in a game than troubles with the coding aspect. 

I also got confused on later on in lesson 18 when I had to code how to get the Grinch to move from lane to lane on his own. It took me a hot minute to figure out how to get the conditional coding to attach to what I wanted it to because a big box had to fit into a little box and my brain did not put that together.

And finally I struggled with lesson 20, where you code a level of the game (similar to a Subway Surfers type game). If you watched the video I showed where I struggled around 5 minutes into the video. Basically I had to code which obstacles would show up in which lanes while playing and I did not realize that the code block that spawns objects had to be connected to each other so when I first tried I had one row of obstacles and that was it. I found out after a while of playing around that I had to connect them together – it was another issue of the size of the box did not look like it fit into where itt was supposed to go.  

Obviously my understanding is very basic and I know coding can get way more complicated that the hour of Grinch coding I did where I connected blocks to eachother to get the Grinch, Max, and the sleigh to do what I want them to. But coding atleast makes a little more sense now!