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Hacks/Hackers Austin: Intro to Programming for Communicators

Twenty-four members of Hacks/Hackers and the Online News Association community in Austin attended Cindy Royal’s workshop on Dec. 3 at Austin American-Statesman: Intro to Programming for Communicators. This 2-hour workshop was meant for people with no experience, to introduce them to the most basic concepts of programming. Royal used JavaScript as the platform, but emphasized the concepts that were common amongst most programming languages.

Topics covered included:

Why do I need to learn to program?
Programming languages
The Document Object Model
Strings and numbers
What’s a variable?
Math and concatenation
Methods
Alerts and prompts
Booleans – true or false
If Statements and Loops
Functions
Arrays
Events
HTML integration – getElementById()

Check out the presentation above and the handout below.

Cindy Royal is an associate professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, just south of Austin. She has been teaching Web design and digital media concepts for more than a decade.

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