Heads or tails? You probably know that there are two faces to a coin and that when you flip the coin, you are equally likely to get either heads or tails. In this chapter, you’ll build a coin flipper simulation — a tool that digitally represents the actual process in the real world. Whether digital or real, the flip produces a random outcome — you don’t know whether heads or tails will appear on a flip. Randomness creates variation and surprise in our world.
Lots of things in the real world have random outcomes — even the start of football games is decided on a coin flip! Using random numbers in your code helps you produce many different — but possible — outcomes. Coding randomness means picking outcomes at random. Adding this skill to your coding work is valuable because it lets users experience the program differently each time they run it, making your programs more interesting and realistic.
To make your Coin Flip program, you’ll create one coin sprite with two face costumes uploaded from the web. Then you’ll write code to make a random coin face appear on each flip. Each time you run the program, you’ll get to see the outcome of the flip.
United States Mint / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Brainstorm
Brainstorm the design of your simulation. It can feature any object with two “states” and an equal likelihood of either one being selected at ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
