3 Coding Projects to Break the Coding Barrier (w/ Instructions Included)

hey my name is Forest welcome back so it's been a few years since I made this video about my favorite computer science programming project of all time and it was my favorite because that's the project that broke down that coding barrier for me that threshold where you go from just knowing you know some of the basics to that ah moment where you gain the understanding of of kind of how everything works together in a program and you're actually able to write some of your own code yourself and thinking for yourself really taking those Basics and

and putting them to action but the reason this project broke the coding barrier for me is not because of the project itself it's not anything necessarily unique or special it's a wrestling tournament simulation what really did it for me is how I approached building this application and this is the most important part of this video sure you can scrub through that you know I have timestamps of when project 1 2 and three are going to be listed and you can jump ahead but this video is really about how you build a project not necessarily the

ideas cuz they're just that ideas good ideas I think but if you don't build them properly they're not really going to help you how you go about building these projects is everything well with a little hint of what the project is about let me explain so when I built this project there was no tutorial that was one of the biggest things there wasn't someone who had already figured out everything and I just sat there and copied down the code that they had already figured out and implemented no that would be like you know reading a

book and typing every single word of that book and expecting to become a good story teller or good author that's not how it works so why would you expect you know you follow a tutorial or two and now all of a sudden you're a good software developer and look I'm sure there is value in that it gives you an understanding a little bit of how things can be intertwined together you know how someone tells a story and how this character in place now ties into this character in place and kind of their grammar and ver

and there's aspects like that so like when you're coding you can kind of see how different functions or classes and variables and parameter like these little things how they are working together kind of it'll give you a slide idea of how things are structured and tied together but that's really all so whatever project you build make sure you do not follow a tutorial what you do because I know what you're thinking you're thinking well how am I supposed to code something if I don't know how to code that's what everybody says is well just just

code well I don't know how well if you don't know how to ride a bike how are you going to ride a bike you get on it you ride you fall you figure out why you fell you try again you're going to fall again a slightly different way and for a different reason and then you'll try again just repeat that process coding is the same you learn by doing failing fixing banging your head against the wall and R and repeat but to quickly touch on that you don't know where to get started that's a lot

of people's kind of issue is I don't know where to get started it's like you know the bike analogy well what are these I don't even know like are these pedals what the heck do they do these handlebars what do they do this seat what what does that do I don't even know what these things are named I don't understand any of it well you see how an application is or like a little program is or like a little tic-tac-toe game in terminal where you can you can kind of look at that and decipher oh

well there's a board and I mean what do you do in real life you draw out a tic teoe game okay and then you go you put a x over here I go put a o over here and then if I get someone gets three in a row they win well you can kind of break that down okay well how do I display the board that's what you start with and you can Google things and I'll get to this in a little bit more detail you can Google things but not until you really think about

how you can take these Basics that you already know loops and functions and variables data types that use those and try to figure out how can I draw a a Tic teac toeboard and terminal what characters would I use do I want to Loop through those how because there's multiple of each how would I do that that's kind of where you would go and you just start playing around in the ter in the code editor and trying to print that out in the terminal that's what you would do so there's that that's how you would

like approach something but here's the thing if you really want to learn how to code beyond the basics do not Google how do I build XA in absolutely no AI now let me show you how to approach coding a project building a project with limited coding knowledge first and foremost pick a project about something you already understand that way you can solely focus on learning the code and the logic and that stuff for example the wrestling tournament simulation that I mentioned was very straightforward to me because I understand how tournaments work and wrestling pointing systems

and things of that nature work and I found it interesting that is also very important but later once I had a more of an understanding of how to code I coded an lud comp solver where I then spend a lot of time learning about linear algebra and how lower up or decomposition factors a matrix as a product of a lower triangular Matrix and an upper triangular Matrix the only exception to this is if you are incredibly interested in building something an idea that you want to build like in this instance using that example you really

want to learn about linear algebra and you also want to learn how to implement it with code that is perfectly fine you just have to understand that you're going to be learning many different things at the same time as opposed to just focusing on code which is many different things within and of itself but you know learning linear algebra is many different things in and of itself so you're going to be learning both of those things instead of just focusing on one thing because you already understand the other you see what I'm saying so you

pick a project you already understand and you want to make sure it is extremely Limited in scope don't say oh well what what do I understand well I understand how a social media site works or app works so I can just build one of those well I would recommend against that because they are very intricate you may see it but you don't realize just all of the nooks and crannies and things moving around that there are within you know a a complex site like that because if you did really want to build you know like

a unique social media app you probably wouldn't be watching this video and instead you be coding that application because there are slightly different goals there one is I really want to build this app so I'm going to figure out how to build it the other is I really want to learn how to code so I'm going to build apps that I'm still interested in but really focus on learning how to code whereas this one is just focusing on how to get things done okay so you have an easy done understand project with extremely limited scope

now break it down and I'm going to show you exactly how to do this with project one and yes I took off my flannel it got hot it's it's a whole thing so project number one is going to be a card game engine that's a fancy term really you're going to recreate a game like war or crazy8s or what have you whichever is your favorite as long as it's simple because what a card game like this can teach you is class hierarchy you have cards and decks and players and games so you have enough but

not too many collections management because you have um shuffling and dealing you'll have game State handling turn-based logic random number generators to Shuffle you'll be working with data structures like cues and stacks you'll track the score and you have input validation a lot of lot of basic things right but that tie together so beautifully into something that you can already imagine in your head as I explain it right now it just it just helps okay so that is an easy to understand project with limited scope now let's let's break that down I already kind of

did but like I mean really let's do it for example let's say we want to go with war a simple card game like War what do we actually need well we need cards right that is like the main thing we need cards and that's probably I mean what what do you think that would be a class and you can create objects from that class based on different values with each card needing what a suit and a value and then what do these cards normally come in they normally come in a deck that's 52 cards of

all the suits all the values in each suit that's another class that holds all of these cards and then what do we do with these cards well we play with them right so we need players two players War one over there one over here this game by the way if you don't know is when you literally just you have half the deck I have half the deck and you just flip the the top card from your deck face up and so do you and whoever has the higher number gets the cards and your goal is

to get all of the cards whereas the other person runs out if you run out you lose and then there's also an extra part of this is when you tie so you put down a 10 I put down a 10 then we're going to have to go to war so you put three cards face down with the fourth one being face up and then whoever card is higher then you get all of those cards the original card the three face down as well as the one faced up if it's a tie again then you do

it again so yes we will need two players and we're going to give the cards to the players right so keep that in mind but then we need the actual game logic so like comparing cards moving the cards between players you see how we're breaking this big idea of a card game into all of these little bite-size pieces that are I mean much more manageable it really actually allows you to break down and see just how limited and scope your idea is some of you are going to be like oh this is an easy idea

and then you start to break it down you're like whoa this is a lot but you know a project like this it it it's it's just enough so that you can really understand all of the different things that I went over before and how they tie together while also not being overwhelmed and actually you know building a project that you'll finish and not spend 6 months on and still not even be halfway done don't ask me how I know that I still have projects like that unfortunately but yeah so we're breaking all of this down

into smaller more manageable pieces that's what you need to do with whatever idea you choose and now remember we know the basics so that's why we can kind of say oh well yeah maybe cards that would be a class and then the deck would be another class or or H how are we going to handle the cards that are in your hand are we going to put that in an array oh I know what an array is that that stores a list of things list of cards okay hm well how are we going to you

know take one card and put it in the middle for both players oh I remember watching that one algorithm's video about pushing and popping from you know the far Night YouTube channel oh yeah okay I know how to do this slight little plug sorry of literally this channel that you're watching anyway but seriously like you know you know variables you know Loops like four Loops you know if statements you you know classes and and things of that nature you may know them all separately but you still know them so now what you want to do

is not Google how do I do X Y and Z but like how how could these fit into those things they may not be the most optimal but they they can work so like I said for a card game you know you want to store those uh cards in an array Or List which isn't a list in Python just an array but it's dynamically resizable so it's like an array in JavaScript I don't know I'm not a python Dev but then also you're going to use random number random numbers to shuffle them right because you

want them to go randomly and then in order to compare your card to my card we can use nift statement right hm if this is greater than that then who gets the cards oh let's add these cards over to so and so's array whoever the winner is Or List you know to their cards to the bottom of them okay not to the top to the bottom that's how it works or actually technically you put it in another array and then once you run out of cards in your current array you Shuffle that array and then

use that as your current array to then use on the people play War differently you do it however you want and then once you do this once you have like an idea maybe you're writing it down or you can even be in your your code editor in writing comments like oh you know let's cards class and then player xcards array that's not a very good name but you get the idea if you don't remember how to do any of this just go to whatever the documentation is for the language you're using in my head I'm

doing it in Java so in Java go to the Java docs and figure out how to properly declare an array initialize it um assign values to it just read all of that in order to get an understanding of how the syntax works if you can't remember properly because when you figure all of this out that's that's really that is your starting point that's really how you want to approach it and you want to spend a lot of time on this oh I can't figure it out I can't figure it out no one said it was

going to be easy but just read the documentation see maybe maybe you'll get some ideas based on all of these things that you have broken down from the big project and you have you know classes and arrays and this variable whatever and after you have done that and you if you still can't figure out how to shuffle a deck of cards Shuffle the deck of cards don't look up how to shuffle a deck of cards in Java well what did you what did you write down that you're going to do oh well I I want

to randomize this array right well how do I how do I randomly sort an array that's what you want to look up how do you randomly sort an array because now you've already figured out EX exactly what you want to do down to the minute details of okay I want to randomly sort this array then if you just don't know how to do it then you can look it up or you tried to do it you can't figure it out then you look it up but after you've already done all of that due diligence if

you will that's the only time you really want to start looking things up and you have to look up the actual programming concept like I just said not how to shuffle cards but how to randomly sort in Array and whatever you do do not copy and paste the solu ution into your code and hope that it works no what you have to do is actually read the information around it read the code itself do everything you can to understand what it is what it's doing how it works so that way you can then go in

still not copy and pasting type out everything figure out why it's doing what it's doing and then go from there that's the only way that will help you understand the core concept as opposed to just getting the thing to work and if for whatever reason you're working on something so unique and so crazy and so this and so that a very Niche thing that you've already broken down and figured out kind of but you can't like really figure it out and you read everything and this and that that is the only maybe potential use case

of AI with your coding when you are learning how to code and I feel like it's Blasphemous saying it that you can actually use some AI to learn to code but really only in that very Niche spot and I'm only mentioning this because I want you to use AI correctly as opposed to me saying don't ever use it and then when you use it you don't use it correctly so don't ever use it but if you do this is how treat the AI as something that you can just kind of like bounce ideas off of

do not use AI to solve the problem for you or write the code for you that defeats the entire purpose you do those things the you cannot let AI become a crutch I've seen this happen nowadays so many times it's just you got to remember why you're doing this in the first place you're not coding these projects just to get them done and if you're in school and you're like well yeah I am just so I can get a good grade you're not in school to get good grades you're in school to learn the material

that you're being taught you're going through these courses on your own online in class self-taught what have you you're doing all of this to learn how to code better not to just simply get it done and that's not just writing code or syntax it goes from identifying the problem to to figuring out potential Solutions trying to figure out how to implement those Solutions and then writing the code to implement those Solutions hoping they work and they probably don't so then going back to the starting board did I identify the correct problem okay yeah maybe I

did what about this other solution can I try that how do I Implement that let's write this in code and then now see if it works if it doesn't rinse and repeat that's quite literally quite literally if you take nothing else from this video take this that is quite literally I hate when people say literally all the time but I'm serious how you learn to code is it it's trial and error that's it and if you are Outsourcing the trial and error to an AI or to someone else then you're not the one learning all

right now let's move on to the next two project ideas and I'm not going to go as depth as the first one but I hope that give you an idea of how to approach ideas like this so that you can do it yourself that's kind of the whole goal like I said one is going to be a wave for it or I guess it's project two weather station data analyzer not just you're not just accessing an API and displaying the data which that is also solid because you get API I mean that's a very general

popular one this is it's basically everybody's uction to apis right external apis and G getting information anyway this is where you build a program that processes an analyzes weather data and some of the key learning elements here are well you're going to have to take that data and store them in some sort of data structure data structures you're going to want to do file input and output right you're going to want to parse that data and validate that data you're going to want to you can do some basic calculations to get the average temperature or

the minimum or the maximum how do you do that you know how to do that in math right now you can implement it with code and then where you going to store that information once you do those calculations and then what about those averages and minimums and maximums for the summer or the winter and then you can kind of manipulate the data that way and group the data that way and then you're going to want to filter through those however you see fit and generate a report based on that information there's a lot you can

do with this and it's something that is it's pretty cool because it's it's again very straightforward that's the point of the and you get to use a lot of things that you already know I really like this idea and if you want to take it a step further then sure go ahead and gather that data via an API if you really want to but you don't have to you can just literally download the report and figure out how to get that information into a data structure within your code that's your starting point right there now

project three sorry it's not going to be super unique but I have to do it even though I made an entire video on it and I've recommended it in at least one or two other videos and that is quite literally the wrestling tournament simulation but it doesn't have to be a wrestling tournament it could be I mean the World Series is going on right now it's over by the time you're watching this I think congrats to probably the Dodgers if I had to guess but whatever sport or whatever thing like it can be a chess

tournament don't do chess operations just you know oh this winner over here this winner over there um how do their elos change and things of that nature like you can do whatever interest you just in tournament style they're talking about doing a BMF belt tournament for the UFC even though Max Holloway already has the BMF belt so how is he part of the tournament if he's the actual like he should be people should be in the tournament to face him anyway except that he just got knocked out by Ilia tooro that's unfortunate sorry I Sidetrack

Max Hollow has been my favorite fighter since I got into the UFC many many years ago so it's sad but anyway so this whatever you choose it'll it'll model a real world system with real um rules you're going to use classes for for wrestlers and schools and conferences and whatever this could be countries ELO rankings you see again I'm not supposed to do this for you you're supposed to do it for yourself you got to figure out how you want to go about seeding the tournament you know think about the logic there however you want

to approach it doesn't have to be wrestling again approach it however you wish but if you want to take this a step further check out the thinking and code course on brilliant.org it's a level one course course in their CSN programming section and it'll take you through writing programs practicing writing programs simplifying those programs like I talked about practice doing that Loops patterns recognizing those patterns and everything you would really need to know in order to really prepare yourself to tackle a project by yourself to break the coding barrier brilliant isn't just limited to that

I mean just take a look at all of these learning paths you have programming and CSS you have data analysis foundational math science advanced math in just an entirety of 60 plus courses courses that are interactive that are easy to understand while still letting you figure it out and take a look here you can also see some of these other computer science courses about designing programs and computer science fundamentals as well as algorithms and data structures over here python if that's your thing earlier in the video I said I'm not a python Dev I'm not

but maybe I should take this and it's a site that I personally love I don't need to take some of the basic level courses right but I love to spend just a little bit of time learning something new and a lot of the times I'm doing that on brilliant so go to brilliant.org Forest night because there's a special deal waiting for you that special deal being 30 days entirely free as well as 20% off their annual plan thank you to brilliant for being the sponsor of this portion of today's video If none of these projects

are appealing to you I hope some of them are again I I really like them but if none of them are you can check out this video about programming projects that take you to the next level or this video which are programming projects every computer science student will build or you know simpar projects I mentioned lud comp right that's featured in this video maybe one of these will be more enticing to you hopefully if you didn't like any of the ones I went over in this video whatever you choose to do just make sure you

actually do it and you do it yourself