Hi and welcome back to the Circuit Playground Express online workshop. In this section, we're going to learn, how to load our first program onto the Circuit Playground Express using MakeCode. So, let's get started.

The first step is to connect our Circuit Playground Express with a USB cord. Now if we go into MakeCode, I've got the web browser version open here, with a simple program going that plays a rainbow animation on the board and we can see it's working on the virtual board on the screen. So when you're ready to download your code, you just hit download and you'll be prompted to open or save the file, we'll save it and whenever you do this it gives you a reminder of the process you need to go through in case you forget, so it's really easy to find and as we can see in downloads we have our program downloaded, see it's a .uf2 file, which is the file type that the Circuit Playground recognizes.

The next step is to enter bootloader mode on the board and we do that by pressing the reset button at the very centre. When we enter bootloader mode all the lights turn red initially and then they change to green. You may need to press the button twice in it to enter bootloader mode and either a window will pop up with your Drive called CPLAYBOOT or if you need to go into this PC. It will appear on your devices and drivers just take your uf2 file and drag it into your CPLAYBOOT drive and your board will reset and start playing your program right away. So now we can see we have our rainbow program playing on the Circuit Playground Express.

For those of you that are using the windows app version, it's a lot easier to load programs onto the board. The only time you need to drag it into your Circuit Playground Express manually is the very first time you use the board, from then on you can just do it within the program. So, we'll make a different program here we'll have a light animation of let's say sparkling lights and we can see it working in the virtual board we just go down to down already like before and the Windows app version of MakeCode recognizes that there's a Circuit Playground Express connected to the computer finds it and loads the file automatically and starts playing it. So, you don't need to find the file in your downloads folder and drag it over and you don't need to enter and re-enter bootloader mode to do it. So, it's a lot more convenient that way and there's a couple other advantages to the Windows app version as well so that's the that's the version that I recommend using if you can.

So that concludes this section on how to load your first program onto the Circuit Playground Express using MakeCode. Stick around for our next chapter we'll be learning how to program and how to program with MakeCode.

See you there.