I was in 8th grade when I learned to program.
I first learned how to make a
green circle and a red square appear on the screen.
You just learn these lessons, and there aren't that many of them,
and you just eventually can get to the point where you can do almost anything that you want.
Computer science is just learning how a computer works and how it thinks,
so that you can teach it to do new things.
These days what you can do in computer science is pretty much amazing.
I think it's the closest thing we have to a super power.
(Tanya: Computer Science student) In the next hour we're going to play a game
that will teach you the basic concepts of programming.
Usually programming is all in text but we'll use Blockly,
which uses visual blocks that you drag and drop to write programs.
Under the hood you're still creating code.
To start off we're going to build code for a program that will help
this angry bird move through a maze to get to the evil pig that stole its eggs.
Blockly is split into three main parts.
On the left is the bird's maze where your program will run.
The instructions for each level are written below the maze.
This middle area is the tool box,
and each of these blocks is a command that the bird can understand.
The white space on the right is called the workspace
and this is where we'll build our program.
If I drag the "move" block to our workspace and press "run", what happens?
The bird moves forward one box on the grid.
And what if I want the bird to do something after the move forward on one box?
I can add another block to our program.
I'm going to choose the "turn right" block and I'll drag it underneath
my "move" block until the yellow arrow appears
and then I'll drop it and the two blocks will snap together.
When I press "run" again, the bird will perform the commands that are stacked,
from top to bottom, on our workspace.
If you ever want to delete a block,
just remove it from the stack and drag it to the trash can.
After you've hit "run", you can always hit the "reset" button to get the bird back to the start.
Now, let's get those pigs!