The Future of LiveCode in Education

[Jim Byrnes]

On 02/29/2016 02:16 PM, Richard Gaskin 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.

Funny you mention Python.  I learned of Livecode's existence on on 
Python list.  Someone was looking for a drag and drop UI builder and 
someone said it wasn't python, but Livecode seemed to be what he was 
looking for.

Regards,  Jim