Dogs ’n’ data

An activity to help understand how to structure information into programming formats like arrays and objects.

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Dogs ’n’ data

What & why

We’re going to explore creating data structures that are common to programming—by describing dogs.

Often information needs to be structured with a limited set of data types.

Data structuring is critical to understanding configuration and program information storage.

Data structures

  • string — just some text
  • number — just a number
  • booleantrue or false
  • array — a collection, like <ol>
  • object — a named collection, like <dl>

Simple example

name: Paddington
size: Small
weight: 5
colours:
  - Brown
  - Black
  - White

Set up

  1. Form into pairs
  2. Get assigned a dog
  3. Get a pencil & a piece of paper
  4. Describe the dog’s attributes using data structures
    In a way that would work for every dog
  5. Present the structure so we can build a specification

Paddington

Corduroy

Wellington

Brooke

Casey

Enzo

Felix

Henry

Triton

Winston

Start

Dogs ’n’ data

An activity to help understand how to structure information into programming formats like arrays and objects.