…is to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
When I was a much younger boy, still in high school, thinking I knew everything, I took a programming class. Hey, I’d written some stuff before, just for fun. How hard could it be? The first day I came into class, the teacher broke us into groups and told us that we had to write instructions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Easy, no?
Immediately after that, she announced that the rest of the week, an “interpreter” would be using his supplies and making sandwiches from each set of instructions. Grading would be done based on the quality of the sandwiches.
This lesson taught me, in exactly one week, the difference between “mashing together working code” and “programming”.
It seemed easy enough. Open jar of jelly. Put jelly on bread. The problem is, those steps aren’t specific enough. HOW do you open the jar of jelly? Hitting it against the desk until the top breaks off leaves it exactly as open as carefully unscrewing the lid. So does drilling a tiny hole in the side of the jar. How much jelly goes on the bread? Should it be in or out of the jar? Do you apply it by hand or use a utensil? Is it one slice of bread or a whole loaf? Is said loaf wrapped or unwrapped?
The exercise was to illustrate to us both the amount of forethought a programming project can take, and the level of detail you need to be comfortable working in, to be a programmer. I’ll be the first to confess that sometimes I’ll start a project without having thought everything through thoroughly, but I have learned that the first thing you do (and the most important!) is to stop, define exactly what you want to do, and re-approach the project with a solid grasp of your ultimate goal.
So our first assignment, in our quest to learn to program a game, is to decide what kind of game to make. I’m thinking something similar to Space Invaders. If you have never played this, or a game similar to it, find a version of it to try it. It’s simple, yet engaging. While you’re playing, make a list: What are the rules? How do I control the game? What can I do? What can the enemy do? How is progress tracked? We’ll revisit this list this week, and decide what our first game is going to be.
For the record, you don’t have to make the exact same thing I’m going to walk through. Come up with your own design, it’s fun! Just make sure you pay attention to the details, and keep record of it somewhere – we’ll need to go back to our “design document” quite a bit at first.
It’s time for us to rotate our lids counterclockwise and acquire spreading knives in our right hands!
