Continuously Coding Madness

For senior year I wanted to try something I have always had an interest in but never knew where to start. I thought coding seemed cool and wanted to figure out how we write code as humans and understand how a computer could "understand" anything we write. 

The first thing to note is that it doesn't understand everything we write as computers only understand the most literal of text. We did a few experiments in class to think about how literal and thorough you need to be. We first spoke commands as a classmate tried to follow them to complete a goal. This showed we need to take things like body size, movement distance, and perception into account. Generally thinking about thoroughness of instructions. After that we individually explained how we might describe a basic game and its rules to a computer. I chose hangman so I explain what a "word" or "phrase" might be to write and how a player would interact with the computer. Again, thoroughness. 

For this project though we are actually using the coding language python, to create two things. The first is a calculator and the second is a MadLib that requires inputs for make a story. At least, that what I did. For my calculator I made one that finds continuously compounding interest. It happened to be a concept that I was learning in another class so it made the process of braking down the problem easier. 

(Click the play button at the top of the code to try it out)

After that I created a MadLib based on an idea that I had said in class that you could use code to get credit card information:

To wrap this up, I had a fun time. The first one pushed me out of my comfort zone as first I hadn't used trinket before and second I had to go find my own formatting commands to make it get the correct number by using all of the decimal points of "e". From that point the normal writing was much easier but just as time consuming. In the future I want to still code and hope it stays with me.

-CDH