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programmingMS 2013
Shodor > SUCCEED > Workshops > Archive > programmingMS 2013

Today was the first day of the Programming Concepts workshop. Joel, one of the instructors for the day, first introduced to the students the idea of communicating with a computer. Computers need a lot of very specific instructions and the instructor demonstrated this by having one person acting as the "computer". The idea was simple, have the programmer, Joel, instruct the computer to draw a house. The execution was a different story - the computer needed instructions on what the angles in the shapes were, the size, and their orientation - in other words, the computer was quite "dumb" since it could only do exactly as what the programmer asked it to do.

The students were then exposed to their first code - they were instructed to run a simple piece of code and then to open it up in a text editor to see how it worked. Rahul, another one of the instructors for the day, then lectured the students in the different types of variables in the programming language Javascript. After the lecture, the students then got to play around with another different piece code- this one had a box with bouncing balls inside of it. The students were encouraged to explore by passing into the code different variable names and giving them different values.