On September 28th, I attended the Learn to Code workshop in Sitterson Hall. The event was sponsored by UNC's Women in Computer Science. Around 50 women from all sorts of departments assembled for the workshop. It was led by a number of female Computer Science majors, who were distributed throughout the room to help us with any problems.
Our first activity was to make a pong game at Scratch Though the website looks like it is designed for children, it was actually difficult to think logically to make the objects move. In the end, I made a pong game using an orange on the moon.
Afterwards, we learned how to solve a mathematical question found at Project Euler
We used Java Compiler to solve the problem. Unfortunately, my code may have had an extra parentheses so it did not work. I tried to follow the speaker's exact code, but it was difficult because she moved so quickly. I also could not follow the java code in general, it is a different language after all. Next time, I hope that they will explain why they are using the commands that they have chosen.
I now have a better understanding of how code works and the process of learning it at UNC. All in all, it was a very enlightening evening.