Q. How do you eat an elephant?
A. One bite at a time.
First, let's architect the application. What is it supposed to do? Make
a chart of all the things it is supposed to do. Where do the numbers
appear? Is there a grid it displays on? Can people see the other
number/letters that are called?
Now it's flowchart and variables time. Make one list of variables
you'll need. These might be things like a variable for the letters
(would generate a random number from 0 - 25 because we have 26 letters
in the alphabet), a variable for the numbers that go along with the
letters (not sure how high this is but no more than 99 I think), and
variables for the placeholders in the grid of the bingo card. Or you
could populate these with an array.
Then you'll flowchart each step. Does someone push a button to start
the numbers rolling? Then how many letters and numbers have to be
generated to populate the fields? Does it match automatically and
highlight the matches? How are those values held for the next round?
What happens when you have a B-I-N-G-O match? There will probably have
to be fields and variables to hold those values; how do you calculate a
diagonal match? Horizontal? Vertical?
I find that by diagramming it out, you can progress from diagrams to
lists of variables to flowcharts, then to pseudo-code and from there to
actual code. Good practice for real life, where the problems can be
quite complex and without a roadmap, you're lost.
I hope this helps. Hang in there, and just remember that it's one bite
at a time. Eventually, the elephant will disappear.
