BASIC Programming for Teachers
This was my first programming course. The biggest advantage was the instructor was a teacher and not just a programmer. There’s a big difference. A lot of people know how to do things, but not teach it. The draw back was the BASIC language does not take advantage of more robust and modern design principles like Object Oriented Design. Some say you develop bad habits that cannot be broken. You can’t change the way you do something if you don’t learn something different. There are so many bad habits that programmers have because the people in charge don’t make them do it right – that is another post.
In the class we had to share computers. My poor partner. I’m sure I hogged the keyboard. Since it was close to the holidays we had an assignment to make a multi-media Christmas card. Graphics on the Apple II were drawn one square/line at a time. You could do some loops and automate some of the drawing. There was a screen mode where you could have a graphic at the top and text at the bottom. I recall having the ability to have the text scroll across. This was where we put some greeting message. The image was of a fireplace with stockings hanging. I decided to take it a little further and have the fire animate. Using random numbers, I was able to get the flames to go up and down and alter the colors: red, yellow, orange. Pretty crude by today’s standards.
That project really pulled together everything we learned in the class. The professor was pretty impressed. It should have been an early warning that I should have taken my father’s advice and “got into the computer thing” much earlier than I did. Oh well, still no regrets.
