experiments

“Rails for Zombies” for Halloween?

Teacher Learns to Code background, experiments, programming, ruby, ruby on rails , , , , , , , , ,

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I love Halloween!  The whole spirit of the day is so refreshing and whimsical.  Everyone has fun, and there are few family or religious obligations attached. (…obligations that can make other holidays more stressful!)  Plus, if you happen to be a Halloween grinch, all you have to do is make sure your porch light is off, and Viola!  You have the perfect excuse to curl up in your basement with a good book or a movie and ignore the world for a night. Halloween is a win-win.

One of my favorite parts about the holiday is that it gives all of us over-worked, over-tired, over-stressed, and entirely-too-serious adults an excuse to just take a breath and to think like children for a day. We can delight in the excitement of the little ghosts and goblins (and Elsa’s and Spidermen) that haunt our streets for just one night every year  We all get to have fun, forget our troubles, and pretend we are someone else. We can adopt a sense of wonder and just PLAY!  Continue reading →

“Hello World”, and What the Heck is a Text Editor?

Teacher Learns to Code experiments, programming, ruby, ways to learn , , , , , , , , ,

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Codecademy environment, Ruby Tutorial…Left is instructions, center is where you type the code, and right is where you see the program run.

As I’ve been making my way through tutorials, something was starting to bother me. Tutorials let you practice in nice little environments that provide three fields: One for the tutorial’s instructions, a second for you to write code, and a third to show the results of your programs.

The problem is…This all happens on a webpage, and I couldn’t figure out how that translates to writing actual code and having it do something on my real computer.  If I don’t know this, I would bet that others as green as me don’t really know either.  Thus, I decided to figure it out (with help of course), and spell it out in this post.  Maybe this will be helpful to other novices out there, and I know it will be helpful to me in the future if I need a reminder.

I asked my most trusted advisor, the husband, how to program something for real, and he explained the steps you need to go through. The “Hello, world!” program seems to be an initiation ritual of sorts, so I decided to use my little “programming for real” lesson to make my computer say “Hello, world!”

Here’s what I learned: Continue reading →