Beep

So the Intro to Programming classes have been working on FOR loops this week.

We've counted up, down, by two. The only problem is at this stage they don't have much in their bag of tricks, so it is a lot of practice problems like "Print the numbers 18, 15, 12, ...3".

Today we were needed a bit more practice, but they are understandably underwhelmed by printing numbers. We use VB 6 for this class - so I took advantage of some of the sound options to help with the counting. We used the system beep to create sounds at different pitches. It means a whole day of laser zaps and bings. You can instantly hear the difference between counting by 5 or 500, and counting up and down get totally different effects.

Everyone was engaged and on task. Hard to sneak a nap with all the noise.

There is always one kid that decides to see how high it can go, which eventually gets painful. The best part of the day was when the fire alarm went off at the end of the day and it took us a second to figure out it was the alarm, not the kid with the extra fancy beeps.

Next week we'll start using the loops to process colors in pictures. We start with a self portrait project and end with a mini movie they develop and animate using VB. Lots of fun, and a lot less noisy.