what does it mean to not return anything

You'll notice that, in many cases, your functions will contain the "return" keyword. This means that when they are called, they give back a value that can be assigned to another variable (as in: cereal = getCereal() where getCereal() "returns" the name of a cereal ). Sometimes we create functions that don't need to give us back a value. Like if we made a function called "changeCereal()" that changed the cereal variable. It doesn't give us anything back, it just does some action.

These functions are preceded by a "void" rather than "String" or "int" because they don't return data of any type. Sometimes a void function will print something to our screen, but that print statement can't be assigned into a variable as in cereal = printCereal(). This would throw a compiler error because it's not "return"ing any data to us. Not returning anything basically means that there are no return statements in the function. That's a simple explanation, but not a perfect one.

I hope that helps a little. I'm not the greatest at explaining but hit me back if you need to chat about it further.