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Learn how to use a Python visualiser!

visualiser1Learning your first tube.programming language takes a lot of hard work! No one is born knowing how to program. You will almost certainly make use of some text books but mainly, you will use many of the brilliant Python web sites and video tutorials on YouTube. One of the problems that you will face as you learn to program is trying to visualise and understand what your code or some example code is actually doing. How is everything changing from line to line? What is going on? How does the logic work?

This is where a visualiser can really help you. You can type in your code into an online visualiser, or copy any program into it, and then run it one line at a time. Each time you run a line, the visualiser updates a visual diagram of what your program is doing and shows you the values held in the program. You will also see any changes that have been in the program since the last line of code and this is really useful for working out what the code does.

A really good visualiser to use can be found here at www.pythontutor.com and you should spend some time working out how to use it. You can get some help getting started here.

The visualiser will look a little strange to start with, but you should keep working with www.pythontutor.com because it will get easier to use the more you use it. It will really help you work out what code is doing!

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