Coding
Monday-Friday
9 AM - 12 PM
Fee: $300
This module is offered in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). This module walks students to three programming languages with great examples and fun coding exercises. In general, two days will be devoted to doing block-based coding with MIT’s Scratch, three days of typing and coding with JavaScript, and eventually five days of Python to solve simple computational problems.
MIT Scratch is a graphical user interface (GUI) based programming environment. While it has a friendly interface that appeals to young children, it has tons of functionality! You can do 2D animations of objects, create cool drawings, make a character sing a tune, develop an interactive game, and even narrate a story with images!
This camp uses the Khan Academy JavaScript environment, which features a web-page with a coding area and virtual canvas area for output. As you type the code, the output appears/changes. This friendly environment comes with a powerful graphics library that minimizes the coding effort. utdallas.edu/~jeyv/kajs has a few examples if you would like to review.
Python is a friendly & powerful language to develop software applications quickly! While there are several integrated development environments (IDE) available to develop Python code, we will use the web-based IDE to get going quickly. Students can go to repl.it and create a free account. Then, they can start at repl.it/new/python3 and create programs and store on the web as well.