Teaching Girls The Power of Code
We will meet in the board room at 25N, in Geneva, at 5:45pm on October 19, 2018.
Never been there? Here is a Map
Meeting Agenda:
We will meet in the board room at 25N, in Geneva, at 5:45 on October 12, 2018.
Never been there? Here is a Map
Meeting Agenda:
See you at our first meeting of the 2018-19 school year!
Fox Valley Girls Coding Club will meet for the 2018-19 school year on Friday evenings from 5:45 p.m.-7:45 p.m. at 25N Coworking on River Street in downtown Geneva. FVGCC is open to all girls, ages 14-18. Limited spaces are available so please sign up now! Contact us at fvgcc12@gmail.com.
October 2018 – December 2019: We will start with the basics of programming
January – February 2019: AI
March 2019: Project
April 2019: Gadget Month
Hey! Is everyone sick of the pool and ready to do a little summer coding!?!?
I was recently just working my way through the main React Native tutorial found here:
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started
…and I thought I would push my little app up to GitHub and share it with you girls to see if you want to work with React Native during the upcoming year or perhaps at an upcoming event… ahem… overnight event… er… in July… in CHICAGO… ? I think you know what I am talking about!
Here is my repo – but you don’t have to fork it or even clone it, but you can if you want to. Alternatively, you can just do the tutorial. My repo is loosely based on the tutorial and you can do the same! 🙂 If you get stuck, ping me in Slack!
https://github.com/robintschroeder/hello-fvgcc-react-native
For the IDE, I was using VSCode, which is free and you can use it on a Mac or PC. You can download it here:
https://code.visualstudio.com/
It has a built in terminal panel to do your npm commands. Go to View > Integrated Terminal to open it.
HAVE FUN!
Tonight we will meet in the boardroom in 25N.
This is our last working meeting of the 2017-2018 school year!
We will discuss our weather wear project and what the next steps should be, including deploying to azure and providing a web API endpoint to the Swift team.
We can also discuss plans for next year – schedule, meeting room, etc.
We will also continue with gadgets:
Tonight we will meet in the boardroom in 25N for more gadgets!
We will break into small groups:
April is ‘Gadget Month’!
Tonight we will kick off Gadget Month with a little Arduino programming as well as some fun with the Hololens. Tonight, we will play a little RoboRaid!
For Arduino programming, we can either use the online IDE or the desktop IDE – find them here: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
We have a few Arduinos with added hardware, such as Snapino.
We also have two Awesome Shields. Here is a video of what is possible with the Awesome Shield:
Looking forward to our meeting tonight!
Tonight’s meeting will focus on continuing the development of the WeatherWear Web Service and the Swift app to consume the Web Service.
String Interpolation in Swift: the term “string interpolation” refers to creating a character string that pulls values out of one or more variables and combines those values with other characters to form a string. The entire expression is enclosed in double quotes and each variable within the string is preceded by a backslash and enclosed in parentheses. Example “Hello \(name)” will print “Hello Gandalf” if Gandalf is the value in the variable name.
Optional Variables in Swift: Swift is strongly typed and insists that if there is a possibility that a variable (or constant) may not have a value at some point when the program is running, then it must be declared as optional. The variable may then either contain a value of the declared type or may be nil. The purpose is to avoid the null reference errors that can occur in other languages when someone tries to use a variable without a value. Declare a variable as optional by putting a question mark at the end of the type such as our WeatherForecast:
var forecast: WeatherForecast?
When using the values in an optional variable, the variable needs to be “unwrapped”, like removing it from a box. Consider a cardboard box labelled “Weather Forecast”; you can open it up to find a forecast object or you can find nothing, so you can’t treat it as if there is always a value there. There are several ways to unwrap and to check what is in the box, but for this problem we will force unwrapping explicitly.
The Problem with String Interpolation with Optionals:
When we tried to display the temperature in either Fahrenheit or Celsius by drilling down through the many nested levels of objects in our WeatherForecast we were getting this warning and the text on screen was gibberish:
The fix is to explicitly unwrap the values at each object level by putting an exclamation point in place of the question mark in multiple places, i.e., after each object name within the long nested object:
Last Friday, on a day off from school, 9 of our members enjoyed an amazing day at Jellyvision, getting an inside look at what it is like to work at this tech company in a very wide variety of different roles, technical, business, and creative. Many of the brilliant and talented people at Jellyvision gave their time to make this a very special event for all of us. Kate from Jellyvision will be attending our meeting this Friday and we will have an open discussion about the experience and insights gained. How were you inspired? What did you learn?
We will work in our Web Service and Swift teams to continue developing the Weather Wear Service and the Swift client app to send a request to the service and display results.
Some notes on what we have so far in our Swift Client:
