The Computer Can’t Read Your Mind

Coding is something I am familiar with but do not have a lot of experience with. My fiancé has a degree in computer science so I know what coding is and sometimes I like to see what he is doing for work. I sometimes watch him work and have never been so confused watching it, it looks so complicated and I have no clue what he is doing. He is good about it and tried to explain to me what he is doing but I have no idea how it all makes sense. I can understand basic coding like it is pretty much just giving the computer instructions, but by doing this activity I was learning how specific your instructions needed to be.

I decided to check out Hour of Code which gives you step by step instructions on how to do a coding project, starting out with the basics and then getting more complicated. The project I choose to check out was one where you animated the Google logo on scratch. 

When I went into scratch it had every letter of the logo set up as a separate squig and you had to animate each letter individually. First when I started I changed the squiggs I turned some of the letters into food and then changed the colours of the letters I decided to keep to go nicely with the food characters. I chose to keep some of the letters in their classic font and only change 3 of the letters to food as someone was able to know that this was still the Google logo. 

When starting to animate my first letter it was abit of a learning curve. I didn’t realize how fast it would move when you gave it an instruction to the point I wouldn’t even see it move. I tried to have it rotate 5 times but it rotated so fast that it looked like it hadn’t even moved. So when then I had to add 1-3 seconds in between each rotation so that I was able to see that it was rotating. Then i learned that I need to put only the instructions I wanted to be repeated with a repeat side bar. At first when I put the repeat in I had it repeating the instruction of “when I touch the green flag” which did not do what I was wanting. 

I learned that while coding you need to give the computer very specific instructions and it will do exactly what you tell it to do and will not read in between the lines of what you are expecting it to do. I had a few moments of “Why is it doing that?” then realizing it is doing exactly what I told it to do in the code.