Programming: Python
For our programming unit, we learned the basics of coding in a programming language called Python. We chose to learn Python because the robots that we were to program contained credit card-sized single board computers known as Raspberry Pi, which were to be programmed in Python.
To initially learn this language, we turned to a website known as codecademy, which is rather popular in terms of teaching newcomers the basics of almost any coding language you could possibly want to learn. Our course for Python was advertised to have a total time span of thirteen hours give or take, while I am sure it took much longer for many students, including me, in the class due to goofing off or zoning out or juggling a handful of other projects throughout the weeks we were coding.
I learned a lot about coding in the first place, for now I can code basic programs, applications, etc. including a pig latin translator and a virtual game of battleship, as well as calculate my own tips... but in code! It is a rather novel skill to have at the moment, but I suppose that if I ever go into computer science in the future it could prove to be extremely valuable, so long as I keep up with it.
This project taught me a lot about patience. It took a very, very long time to complete. And other than that, it definitely taught me the importance of paying attention to detail. You could look at a piece of faulty code for hours and not understand what you have done wrong so long as you are looking at the code as a greater whole. Too many times did I find myself ignoring minute details and painstakingly writing and rewriting lines of my code repeatedly, only to have my initial failure be attributed to my negligence to capitalize a single letter or forget to add a single space. Minute details like that which may seem unimportant can fail whole sets of code in a finicky language like that. Programming was a really interesting experience and it opened my eyes to a whole other branch of science that I had barely explored then.
To initially learn this language, we turned to a website known as codecademy, which is rather popular in terms of teaching newcomers the basics of almost any coding language you could possibly want to learn. Our course for Python was advertised to have a total time span of thirteen hours give or take, while I am sure it took much longer for many students, including me, in the class due to goofing off or zoning out or juggling a handful of other projects throughout the weeks we were coding.
I learned a lot about coding in the first place, for now I can code basic programs, applications, etc. including a pig latin translator and a virtual game of battleship, as well as calculate my own tips... but in code! It is a rather novel skill to have at the moment, but I suppose that if I ever go into computer science in the future it could prove to be extremely valuable, so long as I keep up with it.
This project taught me a lot about patience. It took a very, very long time to complete. And other than that, it definitely taught me the importance of paying attention to detail. You could look at a piece of faulty code for hours and not understand what you have done wrong so long as you are looking at the code as a greater whole. Too many times did I find myself ignoring minute details and painstakingly writing and rewriting lines of my code repeatedly, only to have my initial failure be attributed to my negligence to capitalize a single letter or forget to add a single space. Minute details like that which may seem unimportant can fail whole sets of code in a finicky language like that. Programming was a really interesting experience and it opened my eyes to a whole other branch of science that I had barely explored then.