Planning for Programming

Learning to code is one thing, but once you get beyond “Hello, World!” and “What’s your favorite color?” learning to program becomes about computational thinking. Computational thinking is about breaking down problems into the steps needed to solve them–in other words, thinking like a computer. Pretty much all problems can be broken down into the same fundamental types of steps: sequential steps that happen one after another, conditional steps where a decision gets made like in an if statement, and iterative or repeating steps such as loops.

When writing a computer program, it’s important to be able to break the problem down into these types of steps, and construct a plan for your program before you start coding. Otherwise, you can end up with a real mess of ‘spaghetti code’ the further you get into your program! This makes it difficult to complete the program, and also to make changes or improvements later. It also makes it really hard for any other developers to work with your code!

Code Avengers Planning Course

Two common ways of planning programs are pseudocode and flowcharts. What’s that? You don’t know anything about pseudocode or flowcharts? Well, good news! Code Avengers now has a ‘Planning for Programming’ course that will teach you the fundamentals of good planning practice.

It will help if you have done some programming in one of our other tracks such as Python or JavaScript before doing the course, but as long as you have an understanding of the basic structures like if statements, loops and variables in any language then you will be fine.

What you’ll learn

In this course, you’ll learn about why planning is important, what the different symbols on flowcharts mean and how to put them together, and also how to write good pseudocode. A good plan is unambiguous (in other words, two people reading it would be likely to write the same code), so we teach you as conventionally as possible without it getting too complicated or confusing.

Apart from planning the basics, like if statements and loops, we also help you to plan for flexibility and robustness in your code, as well as planning for modular code, object-oriented code and graphical user interfaces.

So, what are you waiting for? Don’t just learn to code; learn to write GREAT code today!

Try our Planning Course →