My first experience with coding was from the show Code Monkeys that played on G4 when I was in the 10th grade. It revolved around two game programmers, Dave (the slacker) and Jerry (the do good) for GameaVision (a satire on Activision and Intellivision). It was all in the format of an 8 bit game from the 1980’s. Other than that, all I thought about coding was that it was a bunch of 1’s and 0’s. But that was yesterday.
Today I embarked on a two hour journey into the world of coding on Codecademy. When I first arrived at the site I was asked which language I would like to learn. Not being sure, I decided to go with JavaScript because it said I would learn how to make a game, and who doesn’t like games? About a 45 minutes into my lessons I began to formulate a game in which Batman is fighting of all people, the player. All and all coding JavaScript was a lot of fun and I definitely learned how important it is for interacting with customers.
I began to get lost in time and I could feel my body crave soda pop and snacks. With a bag of jalapeno chips at the ready I began to switch gears all together and embark on HTML. This was a lot more straightforward, and I felt although I had a lot more control over how easy it was to access the code later on. I realized that the amount of lines did not matter and I could have it nicely formatted for revisions if need be. Codecademy is a great tool someone that has never even touched coding before, it will teach you both how to code (in the language you want) and how it works. There are helpful hints in case you happen to get stuck and are unable to figure out why it is wrong. Trust me, from someone who has never even looked into coding before, it’s fun, very interactive, and most importantly educational.
Take a look at the screenshot of how far I got in two hours, think you can beat me? Try it here and tell me how it goes: www.codecademy.com/
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