Learn to Program with Small Basic

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Foreword Computer programming is magical. Programmers make computers come to life, and with the right tools, the possibilities are limitless. But even today’s skilled programmers started with something very small and simple. I have often wondered what exactly makes programming exciting. The answer, I think, is how even tiny programs can make things happen instantly. When I was twelve, I was introduced to BASIC for the first time. The sheer simplicity of it struck me. It was inviting, not intimidating. And at the time, BASIC was everywhere—it had taken the new world of microcomputers by storm. My first program worked flawlessly and gave me the instant gratification that kept me wanting to do more. This is what it looked like: 10 PRINT "Hello" 20 GOTO 10
These two lines of code just printed Hello again and again and again— but that’s all it took to get me hooked. Fifteen years later, while working at Microsoft, I signed up to teach programming to a group of fifth graders. It was then I realized that as programming as a discipline had gotten more and more sophisticated, the simplicity of BASIC had been lost. There was no easy way for children to experience the same instant gratification that I experienced using BASIC. When researching tools that could make learning computer science fun and welcoming, I stumbled across the article “Why Johnny Can’t Code” 1 ). The article, published by Salon in 2006, argues that today’s children are missing out on computer science because there aren’t easy-to-use languages like BASIC readily available. This inspired me to create Small Basic, a simple and easy way for children to learn programming. But it’s been far from an individual effort. Since launching Small Basic in 2011, the outpouring of support from the community has been incredible. The programming environment has extended in ways I couldn’t have imagined—sensing hands and faces with Kinect, talking to robots, and even integrating with enterprise databases. Small Basic has been translated into more than twenty languages, and at the time of this writing, more than 280,000 programs have been uploaded to http://www.smallbasic.com/ by children around the world. The original vision of Small Basic is now being carried on by Ed Price and Michael Scherotter, along with the support of active community members like Nonki, LitDev, and many more. Majed Marji is no stranger to teaching programming. Following his success with Learn to Program with Scratch, I was really excited to hear he was going to author this book along with Ed Price. I’m happy to see Learn to Program with Small Basic come alive and be available for everyone who wants to take their first step into programming. The book does a great job of introducing beginners to programming concepts while keeping the content fun and engaging. Welcome to the magical world of programming. What do you want to create today? Vijaye Raji Creator of Small Basic Director of Engineering, Facebook Former Principal Software Architect, Microsoft 1. http://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/ xviii Foreword
Page 1 and 2: Learn to Program with Small Basic A
Page 4 and 5: Learn to Program with Small Basic A
Page 6: Brief Contents Foreword by Vijaye R
Page 9 and 10: Exploring Other Features. .........
Page 11 and 12: 7 Empowering Programs with math 83
Page 13 and 14: 12 building Graphical User Interfac
Page 15 and 16: Storing Records. ..................
Page 20 and 21: Acknowledgments This book represent
Page 22 and 23: Introduction Have you ever wondered
Page 24 and 25: • In Chapter 11: Event-Driven Pro
Page 26 and 27: 1 Introducing Small Basic Bill Gate
Page 28 and 29: BASIC language that would help kids
Page 30 and 31: Toolbar Help Area Editor Surface Fi
Page 32 and 33: Then click the New button to open a
Page 34 and 35: Helping Hands: IntelliSense and Syn
Page 36: Programming Challenges If you get s
Page 39 and 40: The Parts of a Program Let’s expl
Page 41 and 42: The method’s name and a brief des
Page 43 and 44: 5 + 7 12 Here’s the output of thi
Page 45 and 46: For example, to make the TextWindow
Page 47 and 48: TRY IT OUT 2-3 Now you have a chanc
Page 49 and 50: Programming Errors Just because a p
Page 51 and 52: 26 Chapter 2 4. Write a program tha
Page 53 and 54: In the system you use at school, po
Page 55 and 56: Drawing Shapes You can draw lots of
Page 57 and 58: Figure 3-6 shows what the output lo
Page 59 and 60: 22 GraphicsWindow.BrushColor = "Lig
Page 61 and 62: DrawText() takes three arguments. T
Page 63 and 64: GraphicsWindow provides two methods
Page 65 and 66: 6. Write a program that draws this
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4 Using Variables Have you ever wan
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Try changing the value in karenBear
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These two ways of updating the scor
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Figure 4-2: How a variable is added
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TRY IT OUT 4-3 Write a program that
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Two Kinds of Data Programs use all
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5 Drawing Shapes with Turtle Graphi
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Absolute Motion With absolute motio
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North 0 (360) 315 (-45) 45 (-315) W
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GraphicsWindow.PenColor = "Red" Gra
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The For loop runs Turtle.Move(60) a
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y 5). For the hexagon (the polygon
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Creating Polygon Art Using Nested L
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Endless Graphics In Listing 5-10 yo
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Write a program to have the turtle
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Talking to the Computer Until now,
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Figure 6-2: The text window waiting
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4 C = (5 / 9) * (F - 32) 5 C = Math
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9 noun = TextWindow.Read() 10 11 Te
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7 Empowering Programs with Math If
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Here’s a sample run of our progra
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Round() -4 -3.5 -3 0 3 3.5 4 Round(
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This code snippet shows you some ex
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Let’s walk through this program l
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Trigonometric Methods Trigonometric
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Programming Challenges If you get s
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Small Basic uses a few different wa
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You can test all sorts of condition
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Small Basic first finds the value o
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Your mom’s instructions assume th
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But wait, your mom just realized th
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This code asks the user to enter a
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9 Using Decisions to Make Games Som
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Condition 1 True Statement set 1 If
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This change to the program means th
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Door 1 Door 2 Door 3 Figure 9-6: Pe
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Listing 9-4 shows an example of usi
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Think of the Shapes object as a “
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Background image (Grid.png) Star.pn
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In Figure 9-8, you see that the gri
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This code asks the player to enter
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10 Solving Problems with Subroutine
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Gulliver later learned that 1 glum-
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TRY IT OUT 10-1 When Gulliver asked
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variables that belong to the main p
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4 TextWindow.WriteLine("Your turn.
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1 step away). If the arrow hits the
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Then you set the graphics window’
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24 Shapes.SetText(msgText, "") 25 T
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Step 8: Shoot Arrows with ShootArro
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Lines 3-7 animate the dragon’s fi
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11 Event-Driven Programming So far,
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GraphicsWindow Events Let’s start
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4 5 Sub OnKeyDown 6 GraphicsWindow.
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13 Else 14 GraphicsWindow.DrawText(
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Useful Tips Before moving on, we’
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21 GraphicsWindow.BrushColor = "Red
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4 XG = Math.GetRandomNumber(8) - 1
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Programming Challenges If you get s
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Today, most programs use a graphica
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located at (100, 100). By default,
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9 GraphicsWindow.MouseMove = OnMous
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Let’s look at the computations. Y
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You start by loading the two backgr
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(line 8). If the total resistance i
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TRY IT OUT 12-4 Write a program to
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13 Repeating For Loops Have you eve
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Each For loop starts with the keywo
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The program uses a variable named s
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TRY IT OUT 13-5 What does the follo
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Nested Loops The statements in the
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Figure 13-7: The output of Stamp.sb
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2. Although the pizza in the previo
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In this chapter, you’ll learn how
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Note Although it’s not required b
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asks the user for the correct answe
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to become a value other than 0 (thi
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Step 4: Announce the Winner The las
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15 Grouping Data in One-Dimensional
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One way to think of an array is as
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The string initializer lets you fil
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TextWindow.WriteLine("Enter 5 numbe
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how much money was rescued from eac
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To create this program, we’ll use
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The apples fall from the trees. Usi
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The subroutine uses a For loop to c
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9 If ((xdiff < 20) And (ydiff < 20)
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4. Open the file USMapQuiz_Incomple
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Associative Arrays In the previous
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The expression If("ernie" = "Ernie"
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Here’s the output from a sample r
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The ContainsIndex() method takes tw
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Figure 16-1 shows the user interfac
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1 Sub OnButtonClicked 2 GraphicsWin
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17 Expanding to Higher-Dimension Ar
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1 ' Random2DArray.sb 2 For r = 1 To
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Animated Squares Let’s write a pr
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12 TextWindow.Write("Enter student
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(line 8). Line 9 displays Scott's M
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You start by initializing the sum v
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4 For col = 1 To 4 ' For each colum
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note If you run into any problems,
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First, you set all the elements of
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11 If ((rowP < 1) Or (rowP > 10) Or
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Open the file Okla.sb from this cha
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(both uppercase and lowercase), dig
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Taking Strings Apart: Substrings Ju
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two arguments: the source string th
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Here’s an output example: Who's y
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More on Code Points The Unicode cod
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Line 7 gets the Nth character of th
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Igpay Atinlay Let’s teach the com
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17 TextWindow.WriteLine("Good Job!"
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9 pos = Math.GetRandomNumber(len) '
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When you continue with the second a
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TRY IT OUT 18-10 Use the techniques
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19 Receiving File Input and Output
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and their meanings. File extensions
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program’s folder (right-click the
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in the file would run together in o
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Let’s experiment with the first p
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line number. As with the WriteLine(
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WARNING If the destination path poi
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6 For N = 1 To count ' Displays the
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wizard asks the user to perform. Th
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Figure 19-8 shows a sample run of t
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Where to Go from Here So you’ve m
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Index Numbers and Symbols 3DArrayDe
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squares, 31-32 star, 65-66 triangle
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integrated development environment
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parts of, 14-16 publishing, 5-6 run
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NewGame() subroutine, 255-256 OnBut
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ages 10 and up “Welcome to the ma
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Learn to Program with Small Basic

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