New Concept: Repetition and Patterns (Again)

The challenges on this lesson are very open-ended, and they can get long. Some students have written hundreds of lines of code to create their favorite song from a movie or video game. Most songs, like most code, is made up of patterns that repeat or at least use the same tools (notes and pauses, for example) to create something unique. So while it may seem intimidating to look at a huge block of code, remember to try to pick out the patterns and deconstruct the program into its pieces.

New Concept: Styling

The longer your programs become, the more important styling becomes. There is more than one way to style code, but your goal should be to make your code readable to yourself and to anyone else who reads it. Looking at the coding example above, you can see that everything inside the void loop() is indented one line. That's not so the computer can read it, it's so programmers can easily see where the loop ends (it's the closing curly brace that's not indented). Also notice the blank lines between each tone+delay pair. That doesn't affect how the code runs, but it breaks the program into 'notes' and 'rests' that are easier for humans to read.