CHAPTER 1 YOUR FIRST CODE The bell rings and you rush to coding club You’re excited to continue working on your video game In the game a queen has to find her way through a maze On one side of your screen you see the maze and the character you made On the other side is a white space All video games have code that makes them work 5
In the middle are colored blocks with commands on them These blocks will make the queen move You drag a block to the white space The command on the block says WHEN RUN You drop more blocks underneath it They say MOVE FORWARD TURN RIGHT and MOVE FORWARD When you click the run button your hero moves forward turns right and moves forward again Your code is working Visual coding languages are easy and fun ways to learn coding A code or program is simply a set of instructions telling the computer what to do Coding is the act of writing those instructions 6
Early computers were so big that they took up entire rooms Coding has been around longer than computers themselves Ada Lovelace wrote the first code in 1843 for a computer that existed only on paper She showed how the computer could be programmed to do complex calculations 7
