Method overriding in Ruby - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Method overriding

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are creating a simple program to describe different types of vehicles. Each vehicle can describe itself, but some vehicles have special ways to describe themselves.

🎯 Goal: You will build a small Ruby program that shows how a child class can change the behavior of a method inherited from its parent class by overriding it.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a parent class called Vehicle with a method describe that prints a general description.

Create a child class called Car that inherits from Vehicle.

Override the describe method in Car to print a more specific description.

Create objects of both classes and call their describe methods to see the difference.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Method overriding is used in many programs to customize or extend the behavior of existing code without changing the original code.

💼 Career

Understanding method overriding is important for working with object-oriented programming, which is common in software development jobs.

1

Create the parent class with a method

Create a class called Vehicle with a method describe that prints exactly "This is a vehicle."

Ruby

# Define class Vehicle with method describe
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use class Vehicle to start and def describe to define the method.

2

Create a child class that inherits from Vehicle

Create a class called Car that inherits from Vehicle.

Ruby

class Vehicle
  def describe
    puts "This is a vehicle."
  end
end

# Define class Car that inherits from Vehicle
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use class Car < Vehicle to inherit from Vehicle.

3

Override the describe method in Car

Inside the Car class, override the describe method to print exactly "This is a car."

Ruby

class Vehicle
  def describe
    puts "This is a vehicle."
  end
end

class Car < Vehicle
  # Override describe method here
  # Your code here
end

Need a hint?

Define def describe inside Car and use puts "This is a car.".

4

Create objects and call describe methods

Create an object vehicle of class Vehicle and an object car of class Car. Then call describe on both objects.

Ruby

class Vehicle
  def describe
    puts "This is a vehicle."
  end
end

class Car < Vehicle
  def describe
    puts "This is a car."
  end
end

# Create objects and call describe methods
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Create objects with Vehicle.new and Car.new. Call describe on each.