Red Green–A different Hello World

Hello World is more or less the ubiquitous first program for most development environments. I hate it. It’s boring. It made a lot of sense in a command line environment but for a more graphical development especially with event driven programming it seems like a dull start.

The purpose of “Hello World” is really just to get students familiar with the development environment. One wants them to create a project, do something simple with it and run the resulting program. It’s about familiarity and early success as much as anything else.

For the last several years, when introducing Visual Basic we’ve been using a program I call Red Green. It consists of a pair of buttons – one labeled “Red” and the other labeled “Green.” Clicking on a button changes the background color of the form to the named color. The code is obviously, and deliberately, simple. A simple assignment statement is all it takes for each button. Once we do the first two buttons as a class I ask the students to copy the buttons and add other colors to the mix.

What I like about it is that I get to explain some basic things like how to maneuver around Visual Studio. They create a project (and I can make sure it is saved on the class’ network drive), they add a few objects and we get an early start talking about object properties. There are assignment statements but nothing more complicated that they have to understand. After this we can start with real programming concepts and move along. But students start with something fun that gives them a little taste of success.

Many students start to explore more options right away though. They load pictures into the buttons for example. Or play with other properties (fonts and foreground colors for example). Students learn that they can in fact learn on their own and that it is ok to do so.  I want them to try things!