Planning the Game

Southwest Coder Dojo


Southwest Coder Dojo is a member of Coder Dojo International, an organization of free, volunteer-led coding clubs. We were founded to provide introductory coding experiences for youth and teens (ages 11-18). Our volunteer mentors are software developers and software industry professionals from the Twin Cities.

Register with Hennepin County Library to attend our Dojo events. Tickets are free, but seats are limited. No experience in programming required. Remember to bring your laptop!


This session, we spent time on an often overlooked part of programming: the planning stage. Specifically, we did the following:
  • We made sure everyone had a working copy of the code
  • We laid out the final screen (see below) by reserving space for our word and places for our players to enter letters
  • We learned how to create a button and how to start a program when the button is pushed
  • We create a new page to hold our words and retrieved random lists of words from a website
The final game will look like the picture below.

Next Time

Next time, we'll be using JavaScript to read the list of words into an array and then randomly select that word from the list. We'll also break the word into an array of letters and produce a list of dashes to let the user know if the letter appears in the list.