PHP Camp -- Day 2

Today was PHP day. The main task was to learn enough PHP to pull parameters from the page query, and to generate the HTML tables programmatically. Here's the day's agenda:

• First we reviewed the progress from Day 1. I wanted them to see their work live on the internet, nicely linked together.
• Next we spent less than an hour reviewing PHP basics. Although I had prepared some review pages for this, I did it live on the whiteboard instead.
• Then to the computers to practice. Each student did two exercises: one to multiply two numbers and display the result in the web page, and the other to average the elements of an array.
• Short break for shave ice and Skittles (too much sugar?)
• Then I taught them how to create and call functions
• I asked whether they felt they knew enough to add PHP changes to the web site, and they said no. So I made the changes to the home page while they watched. Then Dan and I made changes to the game page while Alex and Elliot worked on the Add Game page, and Austin worked on the GameMaker page.
• After camp I spent a half hour or so cleaning up the day's work and completing the abstraction of the game page.

You'll notice that the pages today don't look much different than they did yesterday. That's because we were changing the method of creating them without really changing the content.

All in all, I think we made good progress today. The boys were able to understand the basic programming concepts. They're certainly at the point where they could pick up a good PHP tutorial and work on their programming skills using the same tools we're using in class.

Tomorrow we'll work on the database. There's a tool that lets you look at the database and make changes to it, so we'll use that to actually create the database tables we need. Then I'll show them how to "query" the database. Simple sentences are used to request information from the database. Once we've figured out the proper sentences, then we move those sentences over into the PHP code, and we'll be displaying game information from the database!

Stay tuned...