The hour of code- Drawing with code

Last week we have been working with Khan Academy. What is that? It is a non-profit educational organization, created by Salman Khan, his goal was to make education available for everyone. It has videos that explain certain topics in different subjects like math and computing, and exercises to practice. My classmates and I are working with the computing section. 

We started with the topic "Hour of Code", which teaches you how to make drawings by using codes, it is the first step to start "programming computers" with codes. How does it work? Every task starts with a video in which a teacher from the Academy explains you what you will be doing, you also have challenges and projects.  

In this post I am going to explain some concepts and show how I worked with this website. 

Challenges:

The challenges are exercises that give you points once you completed them. They start very easy, but they get more difficult, as you continue working. 

Our first challenge was to create a "simple snowman" with codes. We had to draw a snowman by using the "ellipse" command. This snowman consists of 3 circles, that means 3 commands, but they have different sizes, so what you have to do is change the numbers that appear inside the parenthesis. In this case the first number is called "x". It moves the position of the circle from left to right and viceversa. The second one is called "y", this one tells you where the circle is positioned in an axis that goes from the top to the bottom. And the last ones are called "w" and "h" the w is for width and the h for height, this means the with and height from the circle. 

This is the end result: 

   

   

Projects:

The projects are the final challenges. They also give you points, but they are more complex, this means they have more commands.

We had to decide which project we wanted to do, between 3 options: "Super Snowman", "Wild Animal" or "Self Portrait". 

With a friend we created an wild animal. We decided to do a panda.

The commands we used are the followings:

"background" for the color of the background.

"rect" for the floor.

"fill" for the color of the floor, of the panda, the bamboos, etc.

"ellipse" for the belly, head, eyes, arms, etc.

"arc" for the ears and mouth. 

"stroke" for the color of the outline in the leaves, bamboo, etc.

"strokeWeight" for the thickness of the bamboo and leaves. 

"line" for the lines in the bamboos and the bamboos. 

"bezier" to create the leaves.

Which looks like this:

Badges and Energy Points:

Badges are prizes you get. 

There are different types. The "Challenge Patches" which are awards for completing topic challenges. The  "Meteorite Badges" which are common and easy to earn when just getting started. The "Black Hole badges" are the rarest Khan Academy awards. The "Sun badges" are difficult to earn and they require impressive dedication. The "Earth badges" require a significant amount of learning. The "Moon badges" represent an investment in learning.
In the picture below the badges are showed in red. 

Energy points are the points you earn by watching videos and completing challenges and projects. 

In the picture showed below, the energy points are showed in blue.

This is the first introduction video in the "Hour of Code", it explains you everything you can do with codes, like games or websites for example. 

I hope you liked the topic of this post, stay tuned for more!