Foundations of Visual Coding

This unit introduces learners to core visual coding concepts, development environment practices, and basic debugging strategies while guiding them to conceive and begin building their own projects. It builds on prior introductory ideas and prepares students to develop, refine, and showcase more complex, event-driven and hardware-augmented projects in subsequent units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze the purpose and differences of common visual programming blocks and introductory text-based syntax by comparing at least two languages or representations
• Apply integrated development environment setup and navigation skills to create, save, run, and manage multiple beginner projects in the MakeCode/visual coding environment
• Demonstrate the ability to identify, classify, and correct syntax and logic errors in provided programs and explain the debug steps taken
• Evaluate and iterate on a self-designed, event-driven project (with optional simple hardware integration), prepare it for sharing, and produce a short showcase presentation describing design choices and next steps