A class is essentially a data type. Whenever we create an instance of a class we declare it so say I want to declare 10 dog ages i would go and say int dogAge1= 3; and say int dogAge2=12; This is inefficient and is a waste of time. Within a class we have methods and we have attributes. An attribute is similar to variables in that they hold information for us. We want to have 2 attributes for our dog class the Name and the age.