Begin Programming

Week 1: Week 2: Week 3: Week 4: Week 5: Most FutureLearn courses run multiple times. Every run of a course has a set start date but you can join it and work through it after it starts. Find out more This beginners’ course teaches the basics of programming and you don’t need any knowledge of coding to take part. You may find it challenging at times, but we hope it’ll be fun too. However, the course does require you to be comfortable downloading, unzipping and installing software to your computer. If you think that you may find this difficult, you may like to have someone with a good knowledge of IT on hand to help you – particularly in Week 1. The 4 hours per week is an estimate based on past participants’ experiences, however some previous participants have reported taking much less time, while others take considerable longer to complete some weeks. This will depend on your experience and to some extent how powerful your computer is. This course includes video content and other visual teaching methods. As such, blind and visually impaired students may need a helper. You can use the hashtag #FLmobigame to talk about this course on social media.

• An introduction to the course, programming and the development environment for building the mobile game.
• Setting up the software
• Setting up the testing environment for your game
• Debugging and operators.
• Different data types and variables
• Introduction to operators
• Applying variables and operators to the game
• Modifying the game to change the speed of the ball and moving the ball to a position specified by user.
• Conditional statements and comments.
• Array variables and looping constructs.
• Modifying the program to make the ball stay on the screen and adding a control paddle for the user.
• Modifying the game to include multiple target objects for the ball to bounce from. The target objects are implemented using arrays and accessed using ‘for’ loops.
• How to decide which algorithm is required to solve more complex tasks.
• Considering which algorithm to implement, to modify the game.
• Functions or methods – separate parts of a program.
• Modifying the program using functions to replace any repeated code.
• Consolidation of the course – analysing the game.
• Considering the process behind implementing another game.