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Writing your first program

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Let's try it. We'll code up a short program that will write two words in the orange bubble below. On the left below you'll see the two bits of our program. Click on the words "Hello World", and, holding down the mouse button, drag them onto to the white space on the purple "say" block to make the program.



Well done: you've made your first program. It seems basic, but this "Hello World" program is what pretty much every coder starts with; it's a tradition. It shows you can get the computer to respond and checks it's working.


To build our program here we use "Scratch" which is a programming language (way of talking to the computer) that uses blocks you drag together. There are other languages, as we'll see. Most of them need to be typed. Here, for example, is Hello World in the language "Python":

print ("Hello World")

So, having made a program, let's look at what can possibly go wrong