Small Basic Challenges of the Month - August 2015

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These challenges are intended for people who are learning to program for the first time or for those returning to programming who want to start using Small Basic. Some will be easy, some will be hard - but they will all make you think, and more importantly be GREAT FUN!

Please post your solutions / partial solutions / questions / feedback etc. into this thread that will remain 'sticky' for the month. The only rule is that your solution must use standard Small Basic methods (no extensions).

It would be good if people could post their problems with these challenges so that a discussion can start so that everyone can learn from each other:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/686e4fe0-e21f-4171-994e-c4d195793eb9/challenge-of-the-month-august-2015?forum=smallbasic 

Also post feedback on the kind of challenges that you want to see more of in the future.

Small Challenges

  • Write a program to count the number of clicks in a GraphicsWindow program a user makes and the total distance the mouse moves
  • Write a program to input a user's name and address, then display it in a fancy way in the TextWindow using the TextWindow methods, BackgroundColor, ForegroundColor, CursorLeft and CursorTop.

 

Graphics Challenges

  • Make an animation of rain, snow or wind that can be used with another game to make bacgrounds more interesting
  • Draw a shark swimming
  • Create some emoji for Small Basic

 

shark_icon.jpg

Text Challenges

  • Write a program to correct the capitalisation of any occurances of a set of keywords.  For example replace for with For or ENDSUB with EndSub.
  • Use this program to write a larger program which can define a set of keywords and apply the corrections to a file.  This could then be used to format a Small Basic program file.
  • You could also have an option to convert all other (non-keyword) text into lower or upper case.

 

Physics Challenge

  • Create an animation of a missile being fired (parabola trajectory).  Its landing position will depend on the angle it is fired up at.
  • This could be used in the Tank Game challenge.
  • Here is a previous question on this.

 

Community Suggestion (By Nonki)

  • Write a program to edit following Wiki markup.  These markup should be formatted like this.
    *bold*
    _italics_
    +underline+
    ! Heading 1
    !! Heading 2
    !!! Heading 3
    * Bullet List
    ** Bullet List 2
    # Number List
    ## Number List 2
    [image:Turtle.png]
    ||Table Heading 1||Table Heading 2||
    |Row 1 - Cell 1|Row 1 - Cell 2|
    |Row 2 - Cell 1|Row 2 - Cell 2|
    ----

 

Community Suggestion (By Jibba Jabba)

  • Inspired from Zock, setup and write a Tank Game
  • The image is from this blog post featuring a tank game by Zock77

 

   

Do you have an idea for a future challenge? Please post it here!  

    

So please head to the Challenges forum thread and jump on in!

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/686e4fe0-e21f-4171-994e-c4d195793eb9/challenge-of-the-month-august-2015?forum=smallbasic

 

Small and Basically yours, 

- LitDev & Ninja Ed