Computing for Everyone 1: Experiment

Nothing will teach you about computing faster than self-directed experimentation. Experiment confidently. You will not break your computer.

I had a Game Genie growing up. Game Genie gave you three "wishes" to change how your NES games worked by entering 8-character codes from a guide book. Infinite lives, invulnerability, and infinite ammo were popular wishes. You could also skip levels or just make bizarre things happen.

Game Genie: Natural Video Game Enhancement

The Game Genie also came with a book that would tell you how you could tweak the codes they provided for different games to write your own. If there was a code for a game that would let your character start with 5 lives instead of 3, they had tables so you could tweak that code for 7 or 9 lives instead.

I used this table on Super Mario Bros. 3 to tweak a starting world code. SMB3 had 8 "worlds," and Game Genie would send you to any of them. I had to see what world 9 was like, and Game Genie showed me. It was a bizarre, but made a delightful experiment. Notably, my NES was never in danger of exploding.

You will not destroy your computer by experimenting: and low-risk, self-directed experimentation is how you will learn the fastest.

Exercise:
Save this blog post to your computer's hard drive as HTML. Open the .html file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad if you're a Windows user). What you see there should match what you see if you right-clicked this page and selected "View page source" in your web browser.

Open your locally saved copy of this .html file in your web browser: you can drag the file on top of your Chrome/Firefox/Internet Explorer icon or use File -> Open... in your web browser's menu to find your local copy. You'll know you have the right copy of this article open if your browser's address bar starts with "file://" instead of "http://" or "www.".

You are now looking at two views of this web page: one in your browser, and one in your text editor. You can now experiment by making and saving changes to the .html file and refreshing your browser (F5 or Ctrl+R in Windows, Cmd+R on a Mac). Some things to try:

• Easy: Change some text, save, refresh your browser, look at what happens
• Exploratory: Find the HTML image tags. HTML tags are the things surrounded by angle brackets (< and >). The image tags look something like '<img src="blah blah blah" />') in your text editor. Change one of the images to a picture of a cat by manipulating the "blah blah blah" part. Here's a nice picture you can use.
• More exploration: Change other parts of the page, add effects, look at hyperlinks on the page by skimming through w3schools free HTML tutorials (formatting, links and images should be pretty instructive). As a bonus, w3schools has a "try it yourself" functionality to help you quickly experiment.

Extra credit:

Start exploring the files on your hard drive. Look at files related to your operating system: C:\WINDOWS if you're a PC user or /System if you're a Mac user. You definitely don't want to change these files directly without studying them first, but exploring these files can teach you a lot about working with your computer.

Bonus:

• Game Genie codes for the NES