Unplugged Activity | The Big Event
This lesson is called "The Big Event" It's all about how
we can control our programs and actually change the way a program runs on the fly, using events.
Like the push of a button or like the click of a mouse. For this lesson, you'll be controlled
with a paper remote control. It's just like a real live video game. An event is an action
that causes something to happen. It's like when you click the button on a mouse, and
the web page loads. That's an event. When you touch your screen on a tablet to scroll,
that's an event also. Events are a great way of letting the user direct your program, whenever
they need or want to. There are things that happen that we all respond to.
We feel hungry so we go to the fridge.
We hear the mailman come, he puts our mail in the mailbox, and
then we go get our mail. Those are just like the events of pushing a button or moving the
joystick. They are something that happens that triggers us to do something. Most people
who program video games, there's this one event that everyone calls "update" and it
happens 30 or 60 times a second. For video game programmers, that's more important as
an event than the buttons or the joystick. Because what we tend to do is, the main event
we're watching for is that tick happening. And then we check the joystick in the tick.
So we say.. oh? Has somebody pushed the button in this frame? Yes or no? Without events,
the player couldn't move. The player couldn't jump. You wouldn't be able to control what's
going on. The video game wouldn't be able to animate anything. It's only because of
the events of time passing that we're able to make animations and things move.