The Future of LiveCode in Education

[William Prothero]

Richard:
Agreed. It always seemed odd to me that I had to rebuild, for every app, standard UI interfaces that most folks use. The Widgets capability in LC is masterful. It’s definitely a biggie.

My problem is getting my friends to actually try Livecode. I think I’ll need to do a bit of demo-ing of my own app and selling at UCSB to get interest.

One drum I am beating hard on this list is how badly there needs to be an interface to the commonly used Learning Management Systems, like Moodle (“Common Cartridge”, LTI, etc). I am simply loathe to dip my toes into that world. But perhaps, I’m just apprehensive of the “crocodiles” lurking beneath the surface. Looking further into this topic is on my “to do” list though.

Best,
Bill

> On Feb 29, 2016, at 12:16 PM, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
> 
> William Prothero wrote:
> 
> > Richard;
> > Agreed. Perhaps it’s my age. Yes, of course it won’t be a good
> > strategy to compare Livecode to Hypercard. I only brought it up in
> > an attempt to contrast the wide early adoption of Hypercard by
> > educators, to the current environment where there are so many
> > choices and also where knowledge of specific programming languages
> > seems to be tied to employment requirements at some IT companies.
> > That said, I think that livecode has amazing potential in education
> > and elsewhere. I hope to support that.
> 
> Personally I see no reason LiveCode can't become the go-to choice for teaching CS basics.
> 
> 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.
> 
> I've seen some who move students directly from Scratch to JavaScript or even Java, and I'm no educator but I've read just enough Piaget to believe that's not a good choice.
> 
> By far the most popular learning language today is Python, which is in most respects a pretty great language.  But the distance between "I want to build an app" and "Look, I built an app!" needs to be as short as possible to keep young learners engaged, and since Python follows the traditional approach of treating UI as an afterthought a lot of foundational work needs to be done with learners before they can build even a simple app.
> 
> With LC, of course, the UI stuff is as deeply integrated directly in the language as event handlers and control structures, so the programming logic tends to reflect the end-user experience more than how the computer delivers that experience.  And since all of us use computers, it seems to gel more quickly to work from a UI-centric perspective.
> 
> -- 
> Richard Gaskin
> Fourth World Systems
> Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
> ____________________________________________________________________
> Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com
> 
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