Coding, a way to communicate to computers, there are many languages of coding – just like there are many human languages. One of all the many different and complicated languages of computer communication is called Python and that’s what we learned about in round 3 of Technology and Multimedia.
A lesson always has some sort of introduction. First thing was the rules. I’ve learnt coding in another a language before – JavaScript, so some of the basic rules of coding in Python were similar and it was easier for me to understand some of the things our facilitator explained. We started learning coding in Python with the basics which included variables and the “print” function. Variables are basically blocks that have value or text. And the print function does what the name says, it tells the computer to print things. We spent most of our first week on Codeacademy, a great website to learn coding in a lot of different languages. Every class would start with a lesson or discussion and we would be off to do practices or exercises.
As most lessons go, they get more advanced or rather ‘head-hurting’. Whenever a new concept is introduced to me in coding, it’s whether or not I understand it even the slightest bit the first time that will determine the level of confusion I would face. I don’t know why or how it works, but it does and that’s one of the things that’s hard about coding. If I don’t understand something the first time, it becomes even more confusing when I try to understand it. For the rest of the round, we kept on learning new and more complicated concepts which included loops, if statements, boolean, comparison, the break function, and the continue function. With more concepts and knowledge of Python coding came more exercises and activities.
Learning about the concepts isn’t as hard as putting them to use when you need to or fixing your code when you get an error you didn’t expect. Sometimes, you might’ve broken a simple syntax rule and sometimes, you might’ve used a function wrong, but hey we learn. One of the things we had to do was write a program that checks whether or not a number is prime and man did that activity take me a lot of brain power. The thing about coding is that there are a lot of ways to make a program work or write a program and when you find a way, you need to make sure that there are absolutely no errors. One error in a program’s code can affect the whole program. Sometimes when you think your program works, you’re really proud of yourself, but then you do another test and find out that it actually doesn’t. But one of the best things about coding is when you try really hard to fix a program with errors and you take a deep breath and run a test to find out that it really works – in the way that it’s supposed to and without any errors. That is what I love about coding. It makes you somewhat happy.
That was coding in Python. All I have to say is that I loved learning about it, doing exercises related to it, becoming frustrated when my code doesn’t work, and becoming really happy when I fix it. This round of technology and multimedia was yet again, another great round. Lastly, I thank you for reading this!