6. Programming in the World Around You

In this activity, you applied six programming concepts to everyday items.

Then, you created a slide presentation about your ideas and shared it with a group.

The concepts you learned are the same building blocks programmers use to build powerful software and applications.

For example, a device like a programmable thermostat uses these same programming concepts.

You set a thermostat to keep a room at a certain temperature.

If the room gets hotter, then the thermostat turns the air conditioning on.

This is an example of a conditional.

The thermostat uses sequencing to first check the temperature of the room, then compare it to your settings, and finally, turn the air conditioning on.

The thermostat runs this sequence in a loop to adjust itself continuously as the temperature rises and falls.

It runs the sequence over and over, all day long.

The temperature of the room goes up and down throughout the day.

The temperature is stored in a variable whose value changes.

You could also program the thermostat to change the temperature at different times of the day.

These settings are like an array that stores multiple different values to be used by the program.

The thermostat also uses functions with parameters to turn on the display when the user is nearby and to turn on the air conditioning when the user adjusts the temperature.

Understanding basic programming concepts and how they are used will make it easier to write code.

Search the internet for help so you can explore more coding activities on your own!