I want to get into edtech. When I taught, I enjoyed creating my own games, songs, etc. to help the kids learn and enjoy learning. A typical exercise is unscrambling a word, so I wanted to try to make my own.
This turned out to be quite the endeavour. I had to play around with the scope and reset. I could bore you with the long tale of it all, but I rather not. I asked for help from my cohort and former instructor. Was tempted to get needy (was probably very needy); however, I did not once say “Just tell me!”. That never is helpful. This is not an assignment. This is me playing around. Coming to a working exercise the hard way ends up teaching me more. Giving me the answers doesn’t make me feel good in the end. (Much happy happies to those who helped.)
Yesterday I could not finish my memory game. I will. I need help. Or a rest. I’ll get both. Maybe even some ice cream.
Instead of donning my cranky pants, I opted to do an -ish. This is day 10ish. Day 10 is still a memory game, and don’t you forget it. Although I could not get the code right (yet), I learned the Fisher-Yates Shuffle algorithm and revisited prototypes. Today I decided to play with both.
I brought the Array.prototype.shuffle from yesterday’s code into today’s, and then wrote three more functions that used my very fancy and kind of sexy prototype. I scrambled eggs, which also was an exercise in CSS shapes and dynamically inserting elements into a hardcoded element. I shuffled my name, which was not at all challenging. I shuffled your name, which entailed my capturing the name from an input field, doing some .string() magic, and then shuffling.
I kind of like making prototypes. Unfortunately, it sounds all robot like, and whenever I think of prototypes, I get that dumb Styxx song stuck in my head. If I should suffer, you should, too:
I didn’t finish my code last night and did not care. I still coded. Have gone only one day without coding since code school finished. I have not always completed a mini project, but I coded. Same goes for last night:
I swerz flipCard is defined. SWERZ! My abdominal muscles aren’t, but … c’mon. I know it is.
I wanted to build a matching game that I could alter. After watching Adam Khoury’s video tutorials on building a matching game and creating an Array.prototype for shuffling, I got started building a matching game. Probably started too late, looking back with my hindsight shades. Maybe another few hours, and I’d have found my error(s?), but here’s the deal: yes, I love coding, but there are more important things in my life. I foster greyhounds. I got Gregory yesterday, one of the Pensacola Six to come in yesterday. Zero home experience. Obsessed by the mirror (such a teen). Clueless about sliding glass doors. Major velcro tendencies. Yesterday I could have started coding earlier, or I could have hung out with this fella:
Admitting that I love something more than coding is not to say that I don’t still love it. I would hope that we all love something involving sentient beings more than coding. Getting back to my match game, to learn it, I’m starting with a simple (read: boring) matching of pairs of letters. I hope to change the “deck” once it works to something involving greyhound rescue or even my other love: foreign languages.
I plan on finishing the memory game today, but let’s not end this defeated: I did have some wins. I can explain the Fisher-Yates shuffle in layman’s terms and can code it by heart now. I didn’t plan on memorizing it; memorization came from obsessive love, like your crush’s mobile number.
Katy Cassidy 