21st Century Skills InnovatIon LIbrary Blockly M a k e rS as Innovators Cherry Lake PubLishing ann arbor MiChigan by Ben rearick
MakerS as innovaTors Chapter 1 Welcome to Blockly y ou might think your computer is pretty smart After all it can do all kinds of incredible things However a computer does only what a person tells it to do It can only do such amazing things thanks to the work of smart creative computer programmers In the past programmers had to learn their jobs the hard way They wrote line after line of code and told What’s going on here These words aren’t nonsense They’re computer code 44
Getting Specific When you tell a computer what to do you have to be very specific If you want a computer to draw a circle you have to tell it how big to make the circle and what color it should be You might also need to tell the computer how quickly to draw the circle and how many circles to draw before stopping If you’re not careful a computer could go on doing something forever in a never-ending loop computers how to do things like solve math problems Today there’s a more fun way to learn about com puter programming Using Blockly even beginners can create their own computer games and other cool programs Blockly is a language you can use to communi cate with a computer and tell it what to do Different languages are used to communicate with different people and things Languages can be written down or spoken aloud They can even use hand move ments or be drawn with pictures Languages used to communicate with computers are called program ming languages Most programming languages use a combination of words numbers and symbols They can be very complex and tough for beginners to learn Blockly uses blocks shaped like puzzle pieces 5 Blockly
