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Practice 6

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11 views5 pages

Practice 6

Uploaded by

thejaka aloka
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Session 6:

WHILE LOOPS
Loop and Conquer
Create your own adventure with variables, conditionals, and loops.

What’s a Loop?
A loop is a way of repeating something, like a command or action, over and over.

Let's imagine that you've been given the important task of eating all the candy bars in
your house! You take one candy bar, unwrap it, and start eating it. When you're done
with the first one, you grab another candy bar and do the same thing over again. As long
as there are still any candy bars left, you have to keep going. Once you're out of candy
bars, you've completed your task!

In computer science, we call this kind of loop a While loop. While you have candy bars
to eat, you eat them. When you don't have any to eat anymore, you're done with your
task. We can write this exact process in Small Basic like this:

candy_bars = 4
TextWindow.WriteLine("I have " + candy_bars + " candy
bars!")
While (candy_bars > 0)
TextWindow.WriteLine("*unwraps candy bar*")
TextWindow.WriteLine("*eats candy bar*")
candy_bars = candy_bars - 1
TextWindow.WriteLine("I have " + candy_bars + " candy
bars left!")
EndWhile

And this is what happens when you run the code from above:
The code above shows a variable called candy_bars being declared
and given a value of 4. After, we write "I have 4 candy bars!". This is
being stated outside of the loop, because everything that's inside the
while loop is being run from top to bottom each time the loop runs.
You can see this in action in the picture of the code after it runs.

If we said, "I have 4 candy bars!" Inside the while loop, the program
would say it has 4 candy bars each time the loop ran.

Once the while loop has been started, we give the loop a condition in parentheses. While
this condition is true (in this case, while the amount of candy bars is not equal to 0), the
loop will run.

Each time the loop runs, we write out the steps of consuming the candy bars, and then
we write how many candy bars we have left. We can calculate this by subtracting 1 from
candy_bars each time we get to the end of the loop. This tracks how many candy bars
we have left to eat.
Note: Don’t
forget the Once the loop reaches its end, we use the keyword EndWhile to signal that the
EndWhile while loop will end. That way the loop doesn't continue forever, creating an infinite
keyword! loop.

Challenge: Choose Your Own Adventure


Using your knowledge of variables, conditionals, and now loops, you'll be creating a
multi-choice choose your own adventure story!

Now let’s look at some tips and reminders to help you start off your program!

You're going to need to keep your story in a loop. That way if the user answers a
question in a way your program can't understand, the program doesn't just stop; it gives
the user another chance to answer the question with one of the choices you give it, and
then your program continues on with the story.

With that in mind, you need to prompt the user to answer questions. But, you also need
to save their answers. You can prompt a user to answer by using
TextWindow.Write() to ask a question, and then collect the users answer with:
TextWindow.Read()

You're also going to need to use conditionals to allow users to make

multiple choices.

Challenge: Draw a Chess Board


Using a while loop, draw a chess board that looks like the image below. The chess board
is an 8 by 8 grid of squares with alternating colors (black and white or any two colors you
want) in each adjacent square.

You will need some drawing skills that you learned from previous
lessons to get started. Do you remember how to draw a rectangle
using GraphicsWindow.DrawRectangle()? You will use that to
draw each block of the grid. The position of the squares can be
calculated using the coordinates (0,0), so that the top left corner of
the window is the beginning point of reference.

You will also need to use GraphicsWindow.FillRectangle() to fill in the color for
each block. It works similarly to GraphicsWindow.DrawRectangle():

GraphicsWindow.FillRectangle(x_pos, y_pos, width, height)

Do you remember how to set the color using


GraphicsWindow.BrushColor="ColorName"? You can set the color before calling
GraphicsWindow.FillRectangle(). Note that you could just use FillRectangle
(without DrawRectangle), but this way you also get the black lines in between the
colored squares (which is even more important if one of your colors is white).

Have some fun picking your favorite color to be used in the chess board!
Discussion Questions
What can you use to save the input from the
TextWindow.Read()?

How are you going to keep track of the user’s choices?

Where might you use a loop in real life?

Knowing what you know now, what are some examples of how loops could simplify
everyday tasks?

Additional Resources
 Small Basic Getting Started Guide: Chapter 5: Loops
o
 Small Basic Curriculum: Lesson 1.4: Conditions and Loops
 Small Basic Example: Loop
 Video: Small Basic Tutorial 8 - While Loops
 Video: Small Basic 1.07 while loop

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