Code Club: One Month In

Beginner Club

Here’s a look into what we’ve been up to in the beginner club. We’ve learned about the Scratch interface, where each of the tools live and how to use a few of them. We’ve created scripts that will go on forever. Our first project was to make Scratchy move across the screen and draw some simple shapes. While drawing the pen color would also change.

Most of the kids have finished that project and have moved onto making their first game. The first game has Scratchy in outer space, he flies around trying to collect objects, while avoiding lightning. It’s a race to see if he can collect all the objects without being hit by lightning too many times.

Be sure to ask your child to see their projects! They will love sharing what they have created with you!

Intermediate Club

Here’s what we’ve been up to in the intermediate club, we’ve learned about the following types:

• Strings
• Numbers
• Booleans
• Arrays

We also talked about what a variable is. A variable is a keyword that allows you to give it a value. The value can be (but is not limited to) any of the types that we discussed. Variables can also be given another variable as a value.

We talked about how when JavaScript reads your code it reads it twice, it first says: “Hey! Give me all of the variable names!” Then after it gets all of those variables it runs through the your code and says “Hey! Give me all of the values for those variables!”

Then we practiced setting variables to different types. We ran examples like the following:

var codeclubber = "awesome";
var age = 9;
var coding = codeclubber;
var dinosaurs = ["T-Rex", "Megladon", "Pterodactyl", "Stegosaurus"];

We have also talked about working with Array data, and we’ve practiced that by doing some of the following:

var dinosaurs = ["T-Rex", "Megladon", "Pterodactyl", "Stegosaurus"];
dinosaurs.push("Raptor");
dinosaurs[2]; // "Pterodactyl"