Learning to Code with Python: Lesson 1.5 - Saving and Running Programs

Key Takeaways

welcome back to learning to code with python this time we'll have a brief lesson on how to save your work and run programs that you've already written so up till now we've been typing all our commands one at a time into the python shell that works well enough for simple things and for trying out new commands but you might want to try something more complicated and you definitely want to be able to save your work if you've made a program that's more than a few commands long here's how we do that first choose file new file from the menu now you have a blank window that looks like this this is just a normal editing window if you've used any text editor before it works the same way you can type copy and paste and so on now let's create a program first I'm going to add the commands to create a turtle window notice that nothing's happened yet that's because we're just typing our program everything that we want it to do and when we're ready we'll run the program all at once okay here's our simple program the computer is going to read this program just like you would one line at a time starting at the top and ending when there were no more lines left with practice you'll be able to look at a program like this and have a really good idea of what's going to happen when the computer runs it okay now the program is saved and we're ready to run it in the menu choose run run mod module you can also press F5 on your keyboard now the program will run and the computer will follow all the steps that we've written now let's say we want to make a change instead of blue I want the color to be red and then maybe I want it to change color to Green before it draws the second Circle you can make as many changes as you like and then when you're ready you can go ahead and run it again notice that it asks me to save since I haven't saved it this is really nice if you ever forget to save your program the computer will remind you when you try to run it so now when we run our program it starts over at the beginning and follows the instructions I've given it at this point you can add more commands if you want build up more and more steps this is how you'll work in future lessons we'll write some code try it out then add some more to it try it out again it's always easier to do a little bit at a time than to try to do everything at once okay practice writing a few programs and saving them and in the next lesson we'll start to learn some new commands I