This is my case study for you noncoders out there, why you should learn the basics of programming, and why you should not be afraid of it.
The worldwide pandemic situation forced us to stay more at home, which made my cats develop a new habit of constantly demanding attention. We catified our home the best we could, but that wasn’t enough for our cats and they still got bored from time to time.
A few years ago we bought a 2nd hand gadget toy mini Sphero. We thought that it was a cool tech piece, that you can control from your smartphone and play games with it. It wasn’t intended for cats and we were not aware that it could be coded.
Back to present time, I was yelled at by my cats, as they were getting bored by the minute. I was seeking a way to entertain them with as little effort as possible from my side. I remembered we had this Sphero ball, and I thought “Surely they have some solutions for cats”.
Illustration of a bored cat
They didn’t. Their official app (and the games in it) was designed for humans (especially young humans). But I discovered they have a Sphero Edu app — an educational app that teaches coding and STEAM with Sphero robots. I took a glance at this app at the Play Store and decided that if kids can code their Sphero, so can I.
My first attempt to code my Sphero robot was with “blocks”. Sphero calls them “blocks” but it’s actually Scratch — a programming language for kids. With Scratch, kids learn the basic principles of coding in a more visual way and without the need to learning the syntax of a specific programming language. Even though I’m a more advanced programmer than a kid who just learned their way in the coding world, I found it inconvenient to code, having to use words and type on my phone. So I chose the easier way of drag and drop.
My first program in Sphero Edu with “block”. A simple program that makes the robot roll in a perfect square path.
At first, I wanted to make my robot roll in a perfect square path. It took me about 7 attempts to understand the variables and how my input affects the robot’s movement.
As I added more to my program, it became much harder for me to handle the UI of scratch (I guess I’m too old for it). Something that I could write in a second (while/for-loop) took me minutes to figure out in Scratch. With more elements, drag and drop became less efficient and I made mistakes almost on every edit. Luckily, they have an undo button.
#code #cats-n-things #programming #stem #women-in-tech
