Weeks ago I registered for a class thinking it would be about the psychology of technology, but I quickly realized that this was a class meant for introducing you to the basics of coding and data analysis. This was absolutely terrifying for me because I had tried to learn coding on many different occasions and it always turned into me being extremely discouraged and angry. However this was a much better experience for me, as I explained in my last blog post, and while there were definitely days where I felt angry and discouraged (today being one of those) this was such a better experience. I was actually able to learn, share and connect with people and am so proud of myself with what I have learned. It is so interesting the things you can learn and to do and find with this new skill. 50 days of code was a helpful exercise for keeping me involved in learning.
There were many things that I really enjoyed and I found that, especially with coding, I learned the process better when there was an activity to do with a goal and actions to achieve this goal. I had a really hard time learning the basics because I would overthink and not understand how the simple code builds into more, and how when you first learn you learn the building blocks that make code into something more. For example when I was learning about boolean expressions I found it much easier to understand and funner to work on if I made it into a truth or dare game instead. Another problem that I really enjoyed working on was turning my words then sentences into pig latin using if then statements and functions. When I was learning both of these I had a lot of trouble understanding the purpose of little bits of code and when I gave them a goal to achieve their functions and purpose became clearer.
Another #50daysofcode that I was really proud of making and taught me more about the process of coding was my madlibs code, my hugs and kisses counter and finding out which Hogwarts house you are in based on three characteristics (even though J.K Rowling is a real big Dursley right now). The madlib problem was extremely fun to work on and it taught me about inputs and string methods, this really showed me how strings can be put together and the usefulness of inputs. It was so cool when I did this for the first time I got so excited that I created something and thought it was super cute and fun to work on, interact with and see the result. The hugs and kisses counter is a simple little block of code that helped me understand for loops and the usefulness of the computer being able to count and work faster than a person at figuring out how many x and o were just randomly jammed in. The Hogwarts house finder was one of my favorites to work on, I was really able to learn what if, elif, and else statements could be used for and how this code processes the information given. This was also really fun to work on because it felt big and a little more complicated than previous code I worked on.
This way of practicing code has really benefited me and my slow start to coding. When we learned enough code to look into data sets I was so intrigued with all the different things you could find and learn. Making the graphs was extremely informative and I had no idea how much you could play around with and learn from all the different types of data sets out there. This has been a challenging but rewarding start to my coding journey, with still more to learn.
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