Putting It All Together - What We'll Build

Quick reference

• 00:04 Okay, so we're at the end of the course here.
• 00:06 In the next few videos, we'll build a fun little math flash card game,
• 00:09 just to sort of revisit some of the things we learn throughout the course and
• 00:12 have a little fun doing it.
• 00:13 So do you remember flash cards from when you were a kid?
• 00:16 Now what's 4 plus 8?
• 00:17 The answer is 12, correct, that sort of thing.
• 00:19 We'll need to use a little bit of math to do this and some if else statements but
• 00:23 nothing too crazy.
• 00:24 Just to give you an idea, it's gonna look a little something like this.
• 00:27 Just 7 + 10, enter your answer, 6, wrong.
• 00:30 This is a very basic set up, we're not gonna be doing HTML or
• 00:34 CSS to make this look nice, you can do that later if you want.
• 00:36 We're just gonna work on the actual functionality to build out this thing.
• 00:39 So it should be a whole lot of fun, and let's jump right in and get started.
• 00:42 I'm gonna pull up our script file here just to have an open file.
• 00:45 Now, whenever you build something, it's always a good idea to take a few minutes
• 00:48 and just map out what you're going to do, and a lot of people, a lot of experienced
• 00:51 programmers, they just sort of do that in their head, and that's usually a mistake.
• 00:55 You really just wanna write it out on a piece of paper, or
• 00:57 pull up a notepad on your computer, and just take a couple of minutes and just
• 01:01 make a list of the different steps that are gonna be involved in your project.
• 01:05 You don't have to go into a lot of details, just very quickly,
• 01:07 but it really clarifies things and makes things a lot easier down the road.
• 01:10 Even simple tasks, even simple projects can spin out of control if you don't take
• 01:14 a few minutes just to map out what you're gonna do.
• 01:17 Let's go ahead and do that right now.
• 01:18 And I'll just kinda show you the process that I personally use whenever
• 01:21 I'm building something just to sort of clarify things in my own head.
• 01:23 What are we doing here?
• 01:24 We're building a math flash card app.
• 01:27 What is that gonna need?
• 01:28 Well, first of all, we're gonna need a couple of random numbers and
• 01:30 we didn't talk about random numbers in the course,
• 01:32 I'll show you how to do that in just a minute, its very quick and easy.
• 01:34 So let's say the first thing we want is to generate one random number between
• 01:38 one and ten.
• 01:39 Now I'm just gonna kinda rough out a list here.
• 01:41 We're also gonna need another number because there are two numbers here,
• 01:44 generate another random number, see you notice we're not doing any code here,
• 01:48 we're just in English mapping this out.
• 01:50 After we generate them, we need to map them or
• 01:52 we need to output them onto the screen, we know how to do that.
• 01:55 Now we need a form so that our user can enter an answer.
• 01:58 So, let's create a form to enter the answer, and
• 02:00 that form needs an input field.
• 02:03 This guy right here and a couple of buttons, right, one button to submit
• 02:06 the answer and then another button to show the next flash card.
• 02:09 So far so good, nothing too crazy yet.
• 02:11 Next, before anything else happens,
• 02:13 we need to know behind the scenes what the correct answer is supposed to be.
• 02:17 So 7 +10, our program needs to know that the correct answer is 17,
• 02:20 we need to build it up to do that, next we need to compare our user answer to what
• 02:24 the correct answer is, that sounds like an If/Else statement, probably.
• 02:28 Then we need to output the correct answer to the screen with a little message,
• 02:31 whether the user got the answer right or wrong, basically, and
• 02:35 that's pretty much it.
• 02:36 We just now need to create the code for this next button, the next card, and
• 02:41 what that will do is clear the screen of any old of messages like this thing,
• 02:45 clear this from little box here and then clear these numbers and
• 02:48 then replace them with a new question.
• 02:51 So if we look through here, this is pretty much the whole thing,
• 02:53 this is what we need to do.
• 02:54 So I'm just gonna keep this up here and we'll refer back to it from time to time,
• 02:57 but this is what we're gonna do, and
• 02:58 this is what I always do whenever I build anything.
• 03:00 Just take, it took us two minutes here, less than that,
• 03:02 to just kind of write up what the steps are.
• 03:05 And you can look at this and see, we're not doing any code here,
• 03:08 we're just doing English, we're just writing out the steps in English,
• 03:11 very informally, and we'll figure out how to do all of these things as we go along,
• 03:15 but right now we just wanna get it on paper so we can refer back back to it.
• 03:19 And like I said, it keeps, it helps to clarify later on when we get stuck and
• 03:23 we get turned around and we don't know what we're doing and
• 03:24 where we went wrong, we can refer back to our list and sort of take a beat and
• 03:28 go okay, I need to do this now, and it just really helps.
• 03:31 So, in the next video we'll jump right in, we'll start building this thing,
• 03:34 it's gonna be a lot of fun.

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