[Tutor] Center Grove Student Mentoring Question

[Cameron Simpson]

On 08Apr2022 14:02, Gavin Woods <woodsgav000 at students.centergrove.k12.in.us> wrote:
>3. If there was one thing you knew before coding, what would it be?

Since you have several verbose responses, I'll just address this. For 
me, the fun of coding comes from making myself a tool to do something 
and seeing it work.

The most important things about coding are to know:
- computers and programming languages are very literal - a computer will 
  do exactly what you ask and so precision is important, including 
  spelling
- there is no magic - if you cannot solve the problem mechanically ("by 
  hand") you can't instruct a computer to do it; that said, you can 
  learn yourself how to solve some probems by trying things with the 
  computer and seeing how they work and fail
- there is no magic - you need to provide enough information to solve 
  the problem
- computers do not get bored - once you've written a programme to solve 
  the problem, a computer can do as many solutions as you like - that's 
  a big reason to write small programmes - to have the computer do the 
  boring bits

And as mentioned by others: use the print() function when you have 
problems: seeing the actual values in the programme tells you a lot, 
particularly when you expected different values.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au>