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programmingMS 2015
Shodor > SUCCEED > Workshops > Archive > programmingMS 2015

For today’s Programming Concepts Workshop, students first explored concepts such as loops and functions in JavaScript. They were given a sample problem in which they were instructed to loop through a series of numbers and find factors of either 3, 5, or both 3 and 5. When a factor was found, they were told to output the words “fizz,” “buzz,” and “fizzbuzz” respectively. As part of the planning process, students first wrote their programs on the whiteboard and looked at them conceptually, then rewrote them in a text editor like TextWrangler to test if their programs actually worked. When properly completed, their applications would output a series of numbers starting with 1 and ending with a user-defined value, with factors of 3, 5, and 15 outputting the words “fizz,” “buzz,” and “fizzbuzz.” Next students were allowed a considerable amount of time to work on individual projects. They were given default HTML and JavaScript templates from which they were to create simple games which involved the movement of objects on an HTML canvas. Most chose to move objects using an input from the keyboard, with a user or sometimes multiple users controlling the characters within their games. As it was the last class of the week, the students finished the workshop by learning to compress and email their projects from the week to themselves, so that they could work on them in the future. With their new knowledge of loops and functions, many voiced their excitement for working on JavaScript projects in the future.