About You

ABOUT YOU

Everyone has to start somewhere, right? I had to start writing this book by assuming that you can do this stuff:

• Type on a computer and use a mouse (if you’re working on a computer) or use a touch screen tablet (if you’re working on a tablet). Your experience can be on Windows or Mac — or Android or iOS. Because Scratch and MakeCode run in a web browser, the instructions in this book are platform-independent. Figures show the programs as they would appear in Chrome on a Mac.
• Read or read with the help of someone who reads, as well as follow directions with help from the text and the figures.
• Do some basic math operations such as adding or comparing numbers. I introduce algebraic variables in this book, but you don’t need to have any prior knowledge of variables.

Lastly, if you struggle with spelling and punctuation, you may need to spend extra time troubleshooting your code for misspellings. Block-based programming greatly reduces these types of errors, or bugs, and programming languages can give you clues about which commands they don’t understand. But you will need to pay extra attention to the details, making certain that commands are written exactly as you intend.