About this lesson
This section provides the basics in order to use the programming environments: Scratch, Python and JavaScript.
Year band: 5-6, 7-8
Learning map and outcomes
In this lesson, students will:
- Learn how to concatenate data for output
- Learn how to store data in variables
- Put these together to make a very basic weather application
The Basics
For more on setting up and choosing a language, see Setting Up.
The following videos provide the basics for using general-purpose programming languages.
Concatenation
This video discusses the process of combining data together to form a coherent output.
Variables
Variables are like labelled containers for storing data. View the ‘Variables' video to learn more about how to create and use variables in your computer program.
Have students practise using variables. Interpret the following pseudocode and code it in Scratch and either Python or Javascript. Students should predict the output of the program (what it will display) before doing their code. Solution code is provided for checking.
About input/ output
This video encourages users to build a simple weather application to consolidate knowledge learnt so far.
BEGIN
a ← 50
Display a
b ← 23
Display b
c ← a + b
Display c
END
Solution Code
Resources
- Setting up online environments
- Online environments for coding in each language
- Cheat sheets listing basic commands for coding:
- Python Cheatsheet (from Grok Learning)
- JavaScript CheatSheet (Tip: Press the little blue tabs to move Variables, Basics, Strings and Data Types to the top.)