Learn to Program with Small Basic: An Introduction to Programming with Games, Art, Science, and Math

Small Basic is a free, beginner-friendly programming language created by Microsoft to inspire kids to learn to program. Based on BASIC, which introduced programming to millions of first-time PC owners in the 1970s and 1980s, Small Basic is a modern language that makes coding simple and fun.

Learn to Program with Small Basic brings code to life and introduces you to the empowering world of programming. You’ll master the basics with simple activities like displaying messages and drawing colorful pictures, and work your way up to programming playable games! You’ll learn how to:

• Store and manipulate data with variables
• Process user input to make interactive programs
• Use if/else statements to make decisions
• Create loops to automate repetitive code
• Break up long programs into bite-sized subroutines

Inside, you’ll find hands-on projects that will challenge and inspire you. You’ll command a turtle to draw shapes, program magical moving text, solve all kinds of math problems, help a knight slay a fearsome dragon, and more! Each chapter ends with extra practice examples so you can take your programming skills to the next level!

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introducing Small Basic
Chapter 2 Getting Started
Chapter 3 Drawing Basics
Chapter 4 Using Variables
Chapter 5 Drawing Shapes with Turtle Graphics
Chapter 6 Getting User Input
Chapter 7 Empowering Programs with math
Chapter 8 Making Decisions with If Statements
Chapter 9 Using Decisions to Make Games
Chapter 10 Solving Problems with Subroutines
Chapter 11 Event-Driven Programming
Chapter 12 building Graphical User Interfaces
Chapter 13 Repeating For Loops
Chapter 14 Creating Conditional While Loops
Chapter 15 Grouping Data in One-Dimensional Arrays
Chapter 16 Storing Data with Associative Arrays
Chapter 17 Expanding to Higher-Dimension Arrays
Chapter 18 Advanced Text Magic
Chapter 19 Receiving File Input and Output