Hi, welcome back to the circuit playground Express online workshop. In this section, we're going to learn about MakeCode. MakeCode is a block-based editor, that’s perfect for the beginner programmer. So, let's look.

You don't need any dedicated software to run MakeCode. You can run it from any browser, on just about any device. So, if we go to makecode.com, it's free to use and we'll select the circuit playground express option. Here all your previous projects will be saved, and new tutorials are available to get you started on programming with new projects.

So, we'll start a new project to get into the editor. Once you've opened the editor, you'll notice in the top left there's a virtual circuit playground Express and this is interactable, it plays any of the code that you've created right there, in the top left of the screen. If you have a button press trigger then you can click the buttons on the board and things such as light sound and temperature are simulated on this, so you can fully test any program that's contained within the board, within the web browser without actually having to load it onto your circuit playground Express and this is a great educational and troubleshooting tool, because every time you drag new block into the field it immediately updates and you can see the results right away.

We have our blocks available in the menu in the middle, which is where our programming commands come from and as you can see the different sorts of blocks snap together so it's impossible to, nearly impossible to make unworkable code, completely unworkable code, because it forces you to click them together in a certain way.

For more advanced users there's JavaScript available as well, so you can switch to the actual JavaScript rather than the blocks which is what's running in the background, or you can create your own blocks to move around and drag in with custom JavaScript code within them.

If we look down at the bottom we click download to download our code into a dot uf2 file, which is what the type of file that the circuit playground Express recognizes and then we just drag that into our circuit playground Express, but we'll go over that in the next section.

So that's a brief overview of MakeCode and what it is. Stick around for our next section I'll show you how to connect your circuit playground Express and how to power it up.