Accessing parent methods in Ruby - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Accessing parent methods

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are creating a simple program to manage animals. You want to show how a child class can use a method from its parent class.

🎯 Goal: You will create a parent class with a method, then a child class that calls the parent's method using super. Finally, you will print the result.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a parent class called Animal with a method sound that returns the string "Some sound".

Create a child class called Dog that inherits from Animal.

In the Dog class, create a method sound that calls the parent sound method using super and adds " and Bark" to the returned string.

Create an instance of Dog and print the result of calling its sound method.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

In real programs, child classes often need to use or extend the behavior of their parent classes. This helps keep code organized and avoids repetition.

💼 Career

Understanding how to access parent methods is important for software developers working with object-oriented languages like Ruby, as it is a common pattern in many applications.

1

Create the parent class

Create a class called Animal with a method sound that returns the string "Some sound".

Ruby

# Create class Animal with method sound
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use class Animal to start the class and def sound to define the method.

2

Create the child class

Create a class called Dog that inherits from Animal. Inside it, define a method sound that calls super and adds " and Bark" to the returned string.

Ruby

class Animal
  def sound
    "Some sound"
  end
end

# Create class Dog inheriting from Animal
# Define method sound that calls super and adds " and Bark"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use class Dog < Animal to inherit. Use super inside sound to call the parent method.

3

Create an instance of Dog

Create a variable called dog and set it to a new instance of the Dog class.

Ruby

class Animal
  def sound
    "Some sound"
  end
end

class Dog < Animal
  def sound
    super + " and Bark"
  end
end

# Create an instance of Dog called dog
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use dog = Dog.new to create the instance.

4

Print the dog's sound

Write a puts statement to print the result of calling the sound method on the dog instance.

Ruby

class Animal
  def sound
    "Some sound"
  end
end

class Dog < Animal
  def sound
    super + " and Bark"
  end
end

dog = Dog.new

# Print the dog's sound
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use puts dog.sound to print the sound.