What is Simon’s level in coding and problem solving?

Simon carried out a project on his new RaspberryPi today that allows to see his programming and problem solving level quite well. Luckily I was there on time with my iPhone camera to film and take pictures.

It involved a simple Blink-an-LED code for Python, but note that Simon wrote it completely from memory. Also interesting that since he was missing the M/F jumper wires required for the project he decided to use his broken M/M wires instead, which I thought was quite inventive.

He used Terminal to create a program called led.py, saved and closed the file and opened the File Manager. He looked for the led.py file, but it wasn’t there. So he hit Shift-Ctrl-F to search for it and found it. He opened the file by right-clicking on it and selected Python 2 (IDLE). He made sure the correct screen appeared and that the Python code was complete. He then ran the code by typing “sudo python led.py” . Unfortunately a syntax error message popped up.

After a moment of hesitation (when I though he maybe would give up) he said he knew what the error was: he missed a couple of comas. After inserting the comas in the Leafpad file he ran the code again. And it worked!! We were both so happy as if we witnessed sheer magic.