Star Wars with Blockly - Hour of Code: Introduction

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Welcome to the Hour of Code...

Hi I'm Kathleen Kennedy and I'm the producer
of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Today you'll

be working with one of our stars, BB-8. BB-8
is a spherical droid. Everything he does and

every movement that he makes is controlled
by computer software. Computer science impacts

every industry, from marketing to health care
to film. In fact, hundreds of computer engineers

worked together to make a film like The Force
Awakens.

Hi, I'm Rachel Rose. I'm a senior R&D engineer
at ILM and I lead the animation and creature

development team. In The Force Awakens, I'm
responsible for helping the artist develop

rigs, which are the parts of the character
that move that allow the character to look

very believable in a galaxy far, far away.
In the next hour, we're going to build our

own Star Wars game that will teach you the
basic concepts of programming. Usually programming

is all text but we're going to use blocks
here so we can drag and drop to write the

programs. To start off, we're going to work
with Rey to program BB-8 to walk to collect

all of the scrap parts.
Your screen is split into three parts. On

the left is the Star Wars game space where
code will run. The instructions for each level

are written below the game space. This middle
area is the toolbox and each of these blocks

is a command that BB-8 can understand. The
white space on the right is called the work

space and this is where we're going to build
our program.

If I drag the moveLeft block to our workspace,
what happens? BB-8 moves left one block on

the grid. And what if I want BB-8 to do something
after the move left block? I can add another

block to our program. I'm going to choose
the moveUp block and I'll drag it under my

moveLeft block until the highlight appears.
Then I'll drop it and the two blocks will

snap together.
When I press run again, BB-8 will perform

the commands that are stacked top to bottom
on our workspace. If you ever want to delete

a block, just remove it from the stack and
drag it back into the toolbox. After you hit

run, you can always hit the reset button to
get BB-8 back to the start. Now let's get rolling!