The Gauntlet | Think Like A Coder, Ep 8
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TEDEd Animation
Let’s Begin…
This is episode 8 of our animated series “Think Like A Coder.” This 10-episode narrative follows a girl, Ethic, and her robot companion, Hedge, as they attempt to save the world. The two embark on a quest to collect three artifacts and must solve their way through a series of programming puzzles.
Additional Resources for you to Explore
There's a series of conveyor belts resembling a binary tree, where most paths lead to destruction and one to safety. Your robot can make smaller copies of itself that can radio back instructions.
Main concept: Recursion
code.org (https://code.org) has great resources for students and teachers. It also includes an extensive curriculum mapped to K-12 curriculum standards (https://curriculum.code.org/csf-19/standards/).
If you’re looking for programming challenges, check out the Advent of Code, which is run by Eric Wastl, who consulted extensively on Think Like a Coder and inspired quite a few of the puzzles. The Advent of Code is a yearly event that takes place in December and involves 25 coding challenges linked together by an overarching plot. It’s also available throughout the rest of the year, and the challenges it features are a great way to stretch your coding and problem-solving skills once you have basic proficiency with a programming language.
FreeCodeCamp (https://www.freecodecamp.org) has thousands of coding lessons and programming challenges, and you can even get certified for a few different skills.
University of Michigan's Python for Everybody Specialization on Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/specializations/python) is a beginner-level intro to software development using python that focuses on interacting with data.
Microsoft has a 44 video series called Python for Beginners. In their words, “Even though we won’t cover everything there is to know about Python in the course, we want to make sure we give you the foundation on programming in Python, starting from common everyday code and scenarios. At the end of the course, you’ll be able to go and learn on your own, for example with docs, tutorials, or books.”
If you’re trying to decide what programming language to learn, a flowchart like this one may be a helpful starting point.
Books
Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World by Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, is an excellent introduction for programmers just getting started.
For more experienced programmers, Cracking the Coding Interview is a great resource for problem solving with a variety of different techniques, as well as preparing for coding interviews (as the title suggests). Some of the puzzles featured in Think Like a Coder were inspired by this book.
Main concept: Recursion
code.org (https://code.org) has great resources for students and teachers. It also includes an extensive curriculum mapped to K-12 curriculum standards (https://curriculum.code.org/csf-19/standards/).
If you’re looking for programming challenges, check out the Advent of Code, which is run by Eric Wastl, who consulted extensively on Think Like a Coder and inspired quite a few of the puzzles. The Advent of Code is a yearly event that takes place in December and involves 25 coding challenges linked together by an overarching plot. It’s also available throughout the rest of the year, and the challenges it features are a great way to stretch your coding and problem-solving skills once you have basic proficiency with a programming language.
FreeCodeCamp (https://www.freecodecamp.org) has thousands of coding lessons and programming challenges, and you can even get certified for a few different skills.
University of Michigan's Python for Everybody Specialization on Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/specializations/python) is a beginner-level intro to software development using python that focuses on interacting with data.
Microsoft has a 44 video series called Python for Beginners. In their words, “Even though we won’t cover everything there is to know about Python in the course, we want to make sure we give you the foundation on programming in Python, starting from common everyday code and scenarios. At the end of the course, you’ll be able to go and learn on your own, for example with docs, tutorials, or books.”
If you’re trying to decide what programming language to learn, a flowchart like this one may be a helpful starting point.
Books
Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World by Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, is an excellent introduction for programmers just getting started.
For more experienced programmers, Cracking the Coding Interview is a great resource for problem solving with a variety of different techniques, as well as preparing for coding interviews (as the title suggests). Some of the puzzles featured in Think Like a Coder were inspired by this book.
About TED-Ed Animations
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Meet The Creators
- Educator Alex Rosenthal
- Director Tolga Yıldız
- Narrator Addison Anderson
- Producer Serin İnan, Bethany Cutmore-Scott
- Concept and Character Design Ali Anılır, İbrahim Hakkı Uslu
- Character Modeling Elif Kaya , Hür Serhat Öz
- Scene Modeling Saman Khorram, Tolga Yıldız
- Editor Serin İnan
- Project Coordinator İpek Nurullahoğlu
- 3D Animation Ece Gener Doğan, Çağatay Özkan
- 2D Animation Sena Celebi
- Lighting and Shading Alperen Özgür
- Texturing Ali Anılır
- Composer Tolga Yıldız
- Music Tolga Yıldız
- Sound Designer Deniz Doğançay
- Director of Production Gerta Xhelo
- Editorial Producer Alex Rosenthal
- Puzzle Consultant Eric Wastl
- Special Thanks Sara Kladky
