Android Development Stage 2: Harnessing the Power of Objects. Why do we need boolean wasDispensed in PezDispenser.java?

You set it to false because at some point it will be false. Your code is what will happen to it once it is false so that it will become true. If you only add the code as true or if the value remained true forever, then you would not need the code that follows IMHO. Happy Coding :)

My problem is that we created a variable 'wasDispensed' and only used it within this method 'dispense()'. It doesn't come up again in the code so to me it seems insignificant unless we write a later statement that is dependent upon 'wasDispensed == true/false'. The fact that we set 'wasDispensed = false' also bothers me because at the end we set it to true so whenever this code runs it will always return 'wasDispensed = true', so even that first line setting it to false initially seems unnecessary. If anything that should be set at the start of the code as a public variable outside the statement. Also saying 'return wasDispensed' afterwards returns what? I take it to just be returning true.

I actually had a hard time understanding this one as well but after re reading the code dozens of times and trying to understand why wasDispensed was false as it's default value I understood. I believe it is because of the while loop. Because the way the while loop works is:

while(condition in here is true keep running the code){
//code running
}

so the if statement in that dispense method says if is not empty then remove a pez with mPezCount-- which will make the wasDispensed true. But when mPezCount is 0 the if statement in the dispense method is no longer valid and wasDispensed = false (it's default value) making the while loop false and not run the code.