Maybe you can already program in a language like C, you just don’t know that you know it yet?

This week at Hackers, we had some wide-ranging discussion about:

• Turing Equivalence (the idea that different programming languages are can do the same job, if they have some key features)
• Alan Turing (computer scientist and code-breaker, after whom Turing equivalence is named)
• The Turing Test (Alan Turing’s test for whether an AI system can be considered to be intelligent)

Our main focus, however, was on relating a programming language that everyone is familiar with, Scratch, with the language that is used to program Arduino, which is based on C/C++. C and C++ are professional programming languages, text based, that don’t look much like Scratch.

However, it turns out that they share important key features that make them Turing equivalent, and these are the basis for basically all major programming languages:

• Variables and operators
• Loops
• Decisions

Therefore, if you can come up with an idea of out how to write a program in Scratch, you can probably translate that idea into a language like C.

Here are the notes in PDF: CoderDojo-Hackers-IntroToC

We also spent a bit of time lighting an LED by connecting it to a battery in series with a resistor. Next week, we will use this as the starting point for making an Arduino-controlled electrical circuit.