The arduino is a breakout board for the atmega328p chip. The arduino comes with a software call the arduino IDE (integrated development environment). With this program you can program the atmega328p to do anything. The programming language that you program is C++. I am used to programming with c# but they are very the similar. I am familiar with arduino but don't us the given IDE, instead I use Visual studio + Visual micro to program as Visual studio had better navigation tools. For this example I will be using the given IDE.
What did I learn? I learned how to use Arduino to control things around us. I also learned that being very detailed is important because mistyping a line of code can take hours to find and fix. This will help me with my final project because I am doing my final project based around an Arduino controlling lights based off of a program.