The simplest form of coding is a series of instructions or steps that the computer running the code will perform one at a time. If you’ve ever followed a cooking recipe you would have followed a similar set of instructions. You start at the beginning and perform each step until you get to the end. If you were baking a cake it wouldn’t make sense to start by putting the cake tin into the oven and then putting the flour into it. The order of the steps is very important. Here’s a real coding example using the scratch.mit.edu website:

In the scratch project above there are 7 code blocks that are ‘run’ from top to bottom after you click the green start flag. You can see the green outline on the blocks are they are run by the computer. You can also see the result of the code as Scratch (the cat) moves and displays the speech bubbles. Once the last block has finished ‘running’ the program ends.