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Nexgen Codecamp
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Teaching Code is Easy - #6
UX comes with experience. The more software you build, test and use - the more empathic you become with respect to your users. Just in case you didn't know, UX is not just about the user interface & the design. The word 'experience' is the giveaway here - it is all to do with your users' satisfaction as they navigate the different touch-points with your product from initial conversations/emails to use of your product to feedback/support/responsiveness of your team. All disciplines should be involved in UX - Product, Engineering, Marketing & Support.
What has that got to do with teaching code? Well - it has more to do with thinking & creating solutions. We teach young people to code 2D games from scratch which puts us in a great position to think about introducing UX to them as well. One of the highlights of our courses is customisation of each game. Each student has to 'imagine' what their game is going to look like and how it is going to operate. This is a fascinating stage of the course as we never know just what is going to come out at the other end of the coding machine. Two students come to mind which illustrate one of the most common differences that we see. Students either tend to be inclined to design or inclined to code.
The first student created a character that 'breathed' ie. a standing animation. This added wonders to the whole experience of playing his game. Check out the video ux-1 below.
The second student wanted to add artificial intelligence to the enemies in his game. This entailed a 30 minute sit down with one of the instructors in the room (We generally have 3 instructors so we can afford to do this!), some hard thinking and interesting logic! After 30 minutes he had basic AI - more importantly the UX was excellent. The enemies actually looked like they were thinking before chasing down the player. This was helped by some subtle sprite design.
Checkout ux-2 below.
youtube
youtube
These are the elements of UX. Next time I'll talk about recent experiences in the real world with UX from a user's (ie. my) perspective.
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Teaching Code is Easy - #5
We are very excited to announce that our Student Gallery is live. This features all of the games that our students have created. At the moment we have put up many of the games, however there are still are number to put up. If you want to take a look - go to the student gallery page.
It looks like this:
One of our main reasons for being is to stimulate and encourage creativity. Our students start developing their game from a blank canvas and use 'real' code in the creation process. We are toying with drag and drop coding environments such as Stencyl but only as a bridging exercise to onboard students into the real world of coding. To say that you have 'taught people to code' using only drag and drop environments is to us anathema! We have said it before and we'll say it again: Coding or better still software development is about teamwork, creativity, learning, problem finding, discovery and fixing and building better solutions. It crosses over into design and business analysis and requires some degree of project management skill. It necessitates the proficient use of several tools to be successful. Take all this and add a few hundred lines of code!
When we state it like this it doesn't seem that easy, however we have found it is possible to create a microcosm of this world when you have the right teachers with the right experience. It is one thing to have someone who has had a 'course in coding' as your teacher but quite another to have an experienced professional of some 5-10 years who is eager and proficient at passing on their craft.
This was meant to be a short post so I'll leave it there. Keep coding and be creative!
We are a Sydney based company that teaches coding, robotics and web design/development through our holiday codecamps and other programmes. Please reach out to us if you want any help with or simply want to chat!
The Nexgen Codecamp Team
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Great mini-site example for kids who love numbers! Give it a try! This whole site comes down to a single line of code!
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Teaching Code is Easy #4
Mundane Tasks
If I was to ask you to find all of the contact email addresses for every private school in Sydney, how would you do it and how long do you think the task would take? Before you answer the question, I should tell you that the list doesn’t really exist ie. you can’t just find it. You can find various websites with search interfaces to all private schools in Sydney and one by one by clicking on each link you can navigate to each website and then go about finding a contact email for that single school. Now how long do you think it would take? A week perhaps? Well I did it in 2 hours. This is more down to the flexibility & power of Javascript and Bash rather than my skill. In fact I learnt most of the Bash commands that I used along the way.
Coders will be the wizards of Tomorrow
It’s true! Coders will be able to perform tasks that others can only imagine. Want to build a simple robot? Learn some code and a bit of electronics. Want to hook up your Christmas lights to the internet? Learn to code and a bit of Arduino. Want to build a schmick data visualisation? Yes you guessed it - learn to code. Want to search for random data across many websites? You got it! To many who do not see the value of coding - coders will be a bit like Merlin the Magician in King Arthur’s Court - ‘How did he do that?’ This kind of world is right now! In 10 years time it will be more so. The aim isn’t to scare anyone here but to encourage you to at least take a look at what code is and what you can do with it.
Where to start?
Well - good question! In my view, I would start with perhaps the simplest language to learn and get started with - Javascript. You could pick a Codecademy course or find something on Youtube to get you started. Once you have completed a beginner course online - which will take you a few hours (no significant investment of time necessary just yet) - and you have enjoyed it and want to take it further, you should invest in a face to face course, learning from a 'live’ instructor with real world industry experience. Working with an experienced instructor will speed your learning no end. If you are in Sydney look us up (nexgencodecamp) - but really there are many companies out there providing first class training in computer programming.
Back to the Problem
So, to solve the problem of the email list I first found a webpage that listed all of the schools in a table. Then I used this Javascript/JQuery code to create me a list of the website urls:
var schoolList = []; var bashStr; function getWebsites(){ let rows = $('.wikitable tr'); for(var i=0; i < rows.length; i++){ var row = $(rows[i]); var a = row.find('td:nth-child(7) a'); var href = a.attr('href'); if( href ){ schoolList.push( '"'+href+'"' ); } } bashStr = "(" + schoolList.join(" ") + ")"; }
I then saved all of the websites into a text file. Finally I used this bash script to 'visit’ all of the websites in the list, trawl the homepage and then find any emails on the page which were then appended to another file. Here is the program:
while IFS='' read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do curl $line | grep -E -o "\b[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-Za-z]{2,6}\b" >> schools.txt done < "$1"
Yes - a grand total of 3 lines. I must admit here as well - I don’t really know bash and can count the programs/scripts I have written with it on 1 hand (in my entire career). Thus Google came in handy!
And there you have it - a week’s worth of work done in 2 hours utilising 2 tiny programs.
We are a Sydney based company that teaches coding, robotics and web design/development through our holiday codecamps and other programmes. Please reach out to us if you want any help with coding/robotics or simply want to chat!
The Nexgen Codecamp Team
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Teaching Code is Easy - #3
I’m sure that most would agree that teaching is related to learning. When you are in IT, many of us spend our whole career learning new stuff. It is possible to get stuck doing one thing forever but that is risky not to mention boring and unadventurous. No - IT is all about change and change we must to be relevant. I’d rather do this than wake up one day and discover that my kids are talking a different language to me. My point - a life of learning predisposes you to teach or at least presents the opportunity.
Our title for this series ‘Teaching Code is Easy’ is somewhat flippant. Teaching is certainly not easy and it is our belief that professional school teachers are not rewarded sufficiently for the job that they do. For those of us outside of 'the system’, teaching takes on a slightly different 'shape’. At Nexgen Codecamp it is our passion and mission to communicate our experience and love of tech to the next generation. This is what makes teaching an easy proposition to us. The experience of our instructors is what facilitates and guides the learning process. Their knowledge - gained over years in the industry coupled with their passion to see young people thrive is what makes us stand out in our chosen market. We see our students as individuals - and not just part of a bigger sales target. It is when you see individuals that you begin to realise how to teach and that a blanket approach does not always work… and this is where the experience comes in!
We are a Sydney based company that teaches coding, robotics and web design/development through our holiday codecamps and other programmes. Please reach out to us if you want any help with or simply want to chat!
The Nexgen Codecamp Team
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Teaching Code is Easy - #2
This is the second part of an extremely long series called ‘Teaching Code is Easy’. It kind of like ‘The Truth is out there’ from the X-Files which always churned out the same title for virtually every episode over about 10 seasons. I probably won’t be that prolific but at least now you get where I’m coming from.
This is my slightly restyled Google home page. Nice eh? My daughter asked me if she could change the Google page on her Windows PC. This was a great opportunity to teach her about HTML elements and attributes - focusing in on the <img> tag and its “src” attribute.
I don’t think I went into the CSS at the time but there is no reason why you shouldn’t. To change the page, we first looked for a purple Google image on images.google.com and then copied the link to it. Secondly we ‘deleted’ the original Google image. You can do this by changing the “src” attribute to “” in the Elements window above (the stuff highlighted in blue). We then put the link to the purple Google image in the “src” attribute instead.
To change the text box colours - I played around with the CSS later. This was harder than at first you might think as the text box is made up of many nested <div> elements. Nasty!
And there you have it. Your own Google home page.
We are a Sydney based company that teaches coding, robotics and web design/development through our holiday codecamps and other programmes. Please reach out to us if you want any help with or simply want to chat!
The Nexgen Codecamp Team
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Teaching Code is Easy - #1
Yesterday evening, my daughter - who is currently in Grade 5 - wanted to know about ‘brackets’. Strange you might think, however I find that I have to explain parentheses, braces and square brackets to most high school students that I teach.
After a quick explanation of the various names and uses I took the opportunity to introduce strings, numbers and arrays into the conversation. Using the Chrome developer tools, I quickly knocked up an array containing 4 strings - the names of my 4 children and explained that an array was a simple list - kind of like a shopping list. I then told her (my daughter) that any one of the items in the list could be fetched from the array using the square brackets we had just talked about:
She then decided that she would create an array herself from a list of some of our pets. By this time I had already explained that any array list starts at 0 and NOT at 1 - again a bit strange but not difficult. Take a look at the image above which illustrates the concept. “Josh” is 4th in the list and yet to ‘find’ him in the array we must look at the 3rd element ie. kids[3]. I also took the opportunity to explain that an array in Javascript can be populated with numbers as well as strings - Oh and I explained what strings were as well:
This then led nicely onto a discussion about ‘null’ or empty values, variables and camel-case. In fact, I managed to explain a significant chunk of what we teach in the first morning of our basic coding course in a few minutes - or what felt like a few minutes anyway. Why was this? I would suggest context, a hunger to learn and a passion to teach. Generally I wouldn’t teach coding to a 10 year old - I believe there are more important skills to learn at that age. However, if someone shows an interest in learning - that interest should be met with encouragement.
We are a Sydney based company that teaches coding, robotics and web design/development through our holiday codecamps and other programmes. Please reach out to us if you want any help with or simply want to chat!
The Nexgen Codecamp Team
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