The Future of LiveCode in Education

[Monte Goulding]

> On 1 Mar 2016, at 7:16 AM, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
> 
> Right now we see Scratch used for some of that, but the boundaries of any point-and-click system are encountered pretty quickly.  For young users it can be a good starting point, but most outgrow it fairly quickly.

My son regularly immerses in Scratch. There’s a couple of things that make it a good learning environment beyond the drag and drop code blocks:
 - web based so no download and install for schools without the resources to do that easily
 - a tightly integrated project sharing and social network of users

Now that we have HTML 5 it may be possible to cover these points and we are at least part way there on the sharing front. It would be nice to be able to sandbox code to a particular group if we wanted a single stack IDE that might work on tablets and in the browser. Some kind of canModify for a group in a cantModify stack might be nice too…

Anyway, the other point I wanted to make is I think we could do well to actively target a Scratch -> LiveCode transition. One way would be to import a user’s projects into LiveCode from Scratch via the Scratch API and some well commented code generation: http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_API_(2.0) <http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_API_(2.0)>

Cheers

Monte