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<aside> 🤖 This AI transcription/summary was created on September 19, 2023. Listen to the original recording here.
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The speaker explains why Pokemon is a great example subject for learning how to code. They mention three main reasons: universal recognizability, teaching data structures, and the availability of a free API called poke API. Pokemon is universally recognized and popular, making it engaging for learners. The game is rich in data structures, such as Pokemon attributes and moves, providing ample opportunities for practice.
Additionally, the poke API offers a convenient source of data for building projects. Overall, Pokemon combines familiarity, data structure practice, and API usage, making it an ideal learning subject for coding.
Hey there, it's Thomas Frank, and I'm going to record a couple of minutes of test audio that you can use as a test file for setting up my Notion voice notes workflow. And since I'm going to speak for ideally a couple of minutes, I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you why if you want to learn how to code, I think the best example subject to build a project around is actually Pokemon. Well, actually, it's not the best example project, because the true best example is whatever you think is interesting to you. If you are interested in what you're learning, then you're going to be more motivated to push through the difficulties, the bugs that you run into, and the overall complexity of learning how to code.
But if we were to try to identify a universally best example subject for everyone to build projects around, if I were a teacher, and I got to teach a coding class to every kid in the world, I would pick Pokemon as my example. And I have three main reasons why. So the first reason is it's universal recognizability. Almost everyone knows about Pokemon, especially if you're around my age or younger.
But especially if you are my age, when I was a kid, everyone was playing Pokemon, everyone had the cards, everyone was playing the games. It was a global phenomenon. And it has staying power, it is still extremely popular today. So it's a property that spans multiple generations.
So it has that recognizability aspect going for it. And the reason why it's so good for learning how to program in general, or specifically is, I can't think of many other things that lend themselves so well to teaching data structures. And when you think about it, programming really is all about managing and manipulating data structures, typically lists or objects, which are just kind of boxes with key value pairs of information that hold data, strings of text, numbers, links to images, data. Pokemon is wonderful for teaching you to understand different structures for holding data.
Every Pokemon has a number, every Pokemon has one or more types, they have default move lists, they have moves they can learn, moves they can't learn, different items that have different effects for them. So if you're learning to, for example, sort an array alphabetically or by number, Pokemon gives you all of that data. There's just so many data structures inherent in the game, in the property, in the trading card game, that you can build all kinds of projects around it. And in fact, a lot of programmers have cut their teeth on building pokedexes.
The third and final reason is there is a free API called a poke API, you do not have to register for it, it has an extremely generous rate limiting rule. So you can basically pull as much information as you want from it. And that makes it really good for learning how to work with API's. And for example, if you wanted to build your own pokedex, you don't have to go manually get all the data for it.
You can use poke API to get all of the names, the movesets, the pictures, the sprites, they have it all. So it is basically set up to give you all this interesting data that you probably are at least somewhat familiar with to build a great example project. Thanks. Bye-bye.