A Tour of Programming on Khan Academy

Voiceover: Ok so now you see how cool a short program can be so hopefully you're really excited to keep going with programming and Khan Academy and we want to give you a little tour of what you can expect. When we want to teach new concepts we use coding talk throughs where we'll write code on the left side over here and we'll see the result on the right side constantly updating as we change the code. We'll also be talking about what we're writing so make sure you have your headphones or speakers on. To get started with a talkthrough, just click play. And pause if you want to study something that we've done. You can even change the code yourself then and see the result update. Like maybe, I think that Winston is actually an alien from this crazy planet with purple faces and I just think that he should have really, really big eyes. Whoah! bug eyes! Programming isn't just about going through the tutorials that we've given you. Our favorite part about programming is the exploration and the creativity of it. That means that when you wake up in the middle of the night with an idea for a completely new program, just log on and click new program. Once you've done that, you'll get a blank editor and a blank canvas and the world will be your programmatic playground. So you might not remember how to do things, you can look down at the documentation and remember oh yeah, i want the ellipse function and then I'm going to use the draw function, OK, alright so we go up here and we use some variables there. And then we hope it runs. Oh! But we got a problem, uh-oh. mouseZ is not defined. OK, that's fine. It's actually supposed to be mouseY. And now it works. So here's the point It's totally OK to make mistakes. You should make mistakes. That's what we programmers do, all the time. We just break things and make mistakes, and then we learn from them. Now once I've made my amazing new program and I'm really satisfied with it, I can save it, give it a really nice descriptive name like "Circle Drawy ThingyBobby". Maybe, "Mr Circle Drawy Thingerbobby", I can save that and then other people can actually find it. But creativity isn't just about creating completely new things, it's just as much about building on top of existing things and taking them in new directions. That's the power of the spin off. So now that I've saved this program, I can actually go and modify it. And if I consider my new program to be different, I can just go "save as spin-off" Alright so this one's like "Mr Big Circle Drawer ThingyBobby" But you don't just have to spin off your own programs you can spin off anyone's programs. We've made it really easy for you to find other people's programs. You can browse the hot, the spotlight, the top, the recent. I mean, I spend my Friday nights just browsing programs on Khan Academy because I find so many cool things that I would have never thought of. So some people make games, right. Like Doodle-Jump. If you've ever played that on the mobile phone. It's a really fun game. And somebody made this version on here and oh-man, almost got it, ahh! Alright, I'll play that again later. People make simulations, so if you want to understand how a pendulum works, like if you're in physics class, you can do it in a much more fun way by using this simulation here. And then you can go and modify things on the side to see how different variables affect the pendulum. People make drawings, like of their favorite cartoon characters. This is my favorite, the TARDIS from Dr. Who. And if you're not watching Dr. Who yet, you really should. Because as you can see from all the programs and spin-offs on Khan Acadamy it's a really cool show. People make charts or even animated charts. Some people make really trippy animations like this one. I could just watch this for hours and get hypnotized by it. You can see that lots of other people liked it too because they made all these spin-offs of it, right. Because that's the thing, if you find a program that you like, you can just start tinkering with it and seeing "oh well what if I change this, and this? "and maybe I change this here, how's it change it?" And you may not even understand it entirely first, but the more you tinker with it, the more you play with the code, you get a better feel for it and maybe you come up with this variation that you think is really cool, and then you'll save it as a spin-off and say like "Alright this is my really cool version of the Hypnozaic" And then you can save it and other people can find it. But maybe you want to ask a question about it. Right. Maybe you don't understand how something works. We'll just go to the questions panel and say like "why did you start your variables with i?" "Do you work for Apple?" And you can ask your question and hopefully the person who created it will answer it. If you find a question that you know the answer to, then answer them, and say like "hey, yeah you can, "here's where I did it" And a lot of times you can answer with actually a link to another scratchpad where you actually answered their questions. Now if you just want to say how awesome it is or give a tip, you can goto the tips and feedback panel. And say like "Wow, this is the coolest thing I've seen today" And then the creator will feel really good because they got this compliment from you. And that's one of the awesome things about programming is that you can put out these things in the world and you never know who's going to find them and who's day you're going to make better because they found this really cool, creative thing that you came up with. So we want this to be a community of people learning from each other, and sharing their creations with each other. Because that's a big part of what we love about programming. It will definitely be hard at first. And you're first programs will start out small. But as you keep going, you'll be able to do more and more until one day you realize that, wow, you can do almost anything in programming.