The students in the workshop seemed very intrigued by the presentation. Aaron taught them the basics of programming using JavaScript in the error console. They started out by doing simple problems just to see how it worked. This included simple things such as setting a variable to 10 and then calling the variable, which would return 10. He then proceeded to teach them about if/then/else statements. To help with the understanding of these concepts, he showed them a JavaScript model that showed the spread of a disease among a defined population. They also went through processes of commenting parts of the code out so that they could further understand what those specific parts do. They continued to learn by changing variables such as the number of people in the model, and other such variables. Without really going in to it, he briefly explained arrays.
After the 15 minute break, Rachel started to teach the students editing using html. This is very important to JavaScript, because the HTML file links to the JavaScript. She briefly talked about the Turing Test, which is used to determine whether or not a computer is recognizable as a computer, or a real person. The test is a program that simulates a conversation. For example, it would ask questions such as âWhat is your name?â and when the user responds, it would continue the conversation as if it was a real person responding. They dealt with prompts, alerts, and confirm. All of the students were able to compete the assignment and were able to have a HTML and JavaScript file which would simulate a conversation.