One thing that computers are really good
at is repeating commands.
As a person, you'd get really bored if you
had to do the same thing lots of times in a row.
But a computer can do the same thing
millions or even billions of times,
and not get bored and be able to carry
that out really well.
So for example if I wanted to wish
everyone on Facebook a happy birthday by
sending them an email,
it might take me more than a century to
actually write out all of those emails to everyone.
But with just a few lines of code, I can have
a system
send an email to everyone on Facebook
wishing them a happy birthday.
So that's what loops are, and why they're
valuable,
and something that computers can do very well.
In this example your goal is going to be
to move the bird
to get the pig. Now we're gonna be able to use the "repeat" block
in order to be able to do this very
easily. You can either do this by
giving the computer a "move forward"
command
five times in order to advance the bird
one step each time to the pig.
Or you can just tell the computer to
"move forward" once,
and then tell it to "repeat" that 5
times, and it will do the same thing.
So in order to do this you drag your
"move forward" command,
and then you put it inside the
"repeat" block.
And you can click on it and tell it how
many times you want to repeat the block
to tell it how many steps you want it to
take forward. Now one more thing is
you can put as many commands as you
want inside the "repeat" block.
So in this example you're telling it to
move forward and turn left,
which it will do five times. Alright good
job and have fun :-)