It’s the penultimate week of the Student Blogging Challenge! Penultimate’s such a great word, it means second to last. That means that next week is the last week of the Blogging Challenge! I’m going to miss creating a new blog post every week. 

Well, this week is all about coding. ‘But what is coding?’ you may ask. Well, coding is what computers are based off of. Every screen you can think of is controlled by little lines of code. These lines of code form the basis of websites, apps, and lots of other things. They’re made of programming languages, which are like real languages— they have a lot of rules, and if you don’t use them right, the computer won’t understand. What you write determines what the output is.

I love coding, and I’ve been doing it since I was little. I used to use a simple programming language called Scratch, which was basically just moving blocks around until something happened. Some of the things I made on Scratch were games where you moved characters around, games where you pressed different keys on the keyboard that would play different music tracks, and sometimes straight up TV shows. Most notably of these, I would say, is a look-and-find game I programmed where players looked for different fruits in different fantasy settings (e.g., a mushroom that a fairy lived in). 

When I was in elementary school, we were involved in Hour of Code, which inspired kids to get into coding. And I’m not bragging or anything (I definitely am, please don’t judge me), but I was so far ahead that I got interviewed for a French-language news special about coding that I cannot, for the life of me, find. I also did a summer camp about coding where my overarching project was creating a glow-in-the-dark headband. I loved headbands at the time. Sometimes I would forget that I was wearing my project. 

And now, I was super excited to hear that this week’s Blogging challenge was about coding. The first task (of three) is to leave a comment on Alex’s blog, who inspired the coding challenges. I left this comment for him:

The second task is to complete an Hour of Code tutorial. I chose to do a tutorial with Python, which is a programming language that I’ve used before. Unlike Scratch, Python is entirely text-based, and when I was younger I didn’t really understand it. Now, however, I find it really interesting. The task of this hour of code was to battle a disease epidemic in cats by creating formulas to calculate how many cats were infected, what was causing the infections, and how many cats would be infected in the next hour. It took me a while, because I wasn’t noticing that there was a missing parentheses, so the iPad couldn’t understand it. Overall, I really enjoyed this task and it inspired me to get back into Python coding.

The third task was to use HTML coding to program your blog. HTML is the programming language most commonly used for websites. I chose to use the HTML feature for the blog post writing. I used HTML coding for this portion of my blog post:

HTML coding is so cool. You can put things in italics, or make them bold. You can even have links,

• bullet points,
• and other cool stuff.

Now, that text looked pretty simple, but the HTML code looked like this. To change the style of the text (italics, boldface), you use a series of brackets and slashes around the words you want to change. For links, however, you need to specify a couple things— the URL, or where you want the link to go, and the words that will form the link. HTML coding is super useful, especially for building a website.

I really enjoyed revisiting coding, and I hope you learned something by reading my blog post!