English Like?

Alejandro Tejada capellan2000 at gmail.com
Thu May 18 20:13:53 EDT 2017


on Thu May 18 2017, William Prothero wrote:
<snip>
> I think that comments by relative newbies, who don’t have
> the same experience with LC are very important.
> I’ve mentioned several times that some of the tutorials
> and lessons can miss things that the author takes for
> granted. I’m particularly sensitive to this because of
> my long experience teaching college students having
> them use my software.

In my personal experience, most teachers and students
just want that every computer program looks and
behave like Microsoft Word... :-(

> It is very difficult for the developer of the software
> to avoid making assumptions based on experience and
> it takes special attention. One organization I worked
> with did eye-tracking with naive users to validate their
> web applications. I don’t think that’s needed for livecode,
> but more attention to this, when publishing teaching
> documents would be very helpful.

Probably, the answer is HyperText...
In every tutorial or Livecode Lesson, please include hypertext
links or modal pop ups that explain most programming concepts
and LiveCode Script (LCS) keywords. Then, check which
links are most visited and include that information in
other tutorials. This information is really valuable
for creating new tutorials.

> This was a very significant problem with the first course
> on using LC to make apps that came with the iPhone.
> I ended up dropping out because I was wasting so much of
> my time trying to figure out bugs and what should have been
> in the tutorial. These resources may be the first time a
> person really gets into Livecode and the kinds of difficulties
> I encountered could be very off-putting to a new user.

Ideally, every course or lesson should start with a
downloadable stack or executable. In this way, you would
know beforehand if this code will run in your own setup...
for example: All multimedia tutorials are useless in Linux,
because still we could not play sounds or movies.

> Anyway, I encourage the authors of tutorial software
> to pay significant attention to learning resources
> they put out for the public to make sure the learning
> goes smoothly.

An indispensable feature for 21st century tutorials is
the ability for changing content to match users
personal learning's style.

Al



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