CS Fundamentals Unplugged: Songwriting

the songwriting lesson and the

songwriting with parameters lesson are

very closely tied together if you're

teaching songwriting with parameters you

can teach songwriting first to refresh

everybody's memory and then it should

all flow the way you're about to see in

the video if you're only teaching

songwriting go ahead and skip the second

part but it's very possible that someone

will ask about differences and choruses

and then you can go ahead and teach them

the parameters part as well okay so how

many of you have ever looked up lyrics

to any song alright so you're probably

used to having them written down

something like this so has anybody ever

heard this song before ideally this

would be a song that you guys kind of

know but it sounds like the majority of

you guys don't know this song so I'm

gonna teach you the chorus okay so the

chorus have have any of you heard of the

chorus of a song when you're looking up

lyrics you have the chorus of a song

right so the chorus goes I'm Annette I'm

Anna I'm Anna I'm Anna I'm a nut can you

guys do that with me okay that was very

good so now we're gonna take it from

here here we go

okay very good all right

so we went through the lyrics why when

it said chorus here why didn't you sing

that is why I'm cracked you see chorus

okay so what you're saying is that we

are singing all this because it's

written down but when we say chorus

we're really referring back to the thing

we already defined earlier right we gave

this thing a name and that name was and

so now anytime we wanted to use this

chunk instead of writing it all over and

over and over again

all we had to do is put the word very

good so you could take verse one and

define it over here take verse two and

define it over here and verse three over

here and then you'd write your program

by saying verse one chorus verse two

chorus verse three chorus very good

alright does everybody get how you

define a course and use it later

okay so now you guys are saying well

what if something's kind of different

right what if something a little

different in the chorus and we want to

call with one thing and then with

another thing we could just make two

different courses all there really is in

Old MacDonald is choruses you just sing

the same course over and over but you

have to change the words so if you were

gonna sing all MacDonald's with all your

favorite animals you'd have to have 12

different courses right that wouldn't

save you any writing in fact it might be

more writing than you need so what we're

doing is we're we're introducing

something called a parameter can us a

parameter parameter so you probably have

noticed the word parameter on our word

wall but this is what it actually means

it's an extra little bit of information

that you want to pass through so that

you know what to sing in the chorus

because it can change in the chorus so

here we're gonna have animal so on his

farm he had an animal but are we

actually gonna sing animal we need to

know which animal we're gonna substitute

for the word animal and then whatever's

first because animal is first whatever's

first is going to become animal and

whatever second is gonna become sound

very good so let's try this let's try

singing the song exactly the way it's

written chorus pig oink chorus cow mooo

chorus chicken Bock is that is that

really what they meant for me to say no

so what I want you to do now that you

understand the definition when it's

called

with its parameters I want you to see if

your brain automatically knows what

you're actually supposed to sing okay

here's your test are you ready

Old MacDonald job guys

so what were some things you notice

after you were done going all the way

through it called chorus so you went all

the way through chorus and then what did

you do you went to the next line down in

the program right and then you did it

again and then you went to the next line

down in the program and you did it again

and then you got back and there was

nothing left in the program so you

stopped so that's exactly what a

computer does when you have a function

and there's a function that you've

defined somewhere else and you said hey

whenever I say this word I really want

you to go do all this stuff so I'm only

going to type this cuz I got better

things to do but you are gonna run all

of this oh and because it changes a lot

I'm just gonna let you know what I want

these special words to become so all I

have to do is this and you're gonna do

all the work for me

that's functions with parameters okay

but we don't have to because a computer

inside just a computer's programming it

understands it's already been told that

these are the way we tell you things

later so we don't have to do that as

part of this one program because the

master program that makes the computer

run at all has already told it that's a

really good question