Learning from Scratch

[Richmond]

Personally I'd far rather learn from LiveCode and NOT "Scratch"

(awfully sorry but that was just too juicy to pass up on!)

I posted something that is really goofy on the Forums: basically what I 
do with
LiveCode when I'm not being a nutty fruitcake with Sanskrit, but 
actually making money
shoe-horning English into young minds.

When I was about 7 years old (that's 50 years ago: spooky when I think 
of where all that time has gone)
I went to French lessons and all we had was a monochrome book with small 
line drawings, and, oddly
enough we were satisfied with that and we learnt French from Monsieur 
Derek whose only other piece
of equipment was a blackboard and bits of coloured chalk: and he did a 
d*mn good job too.

Nowadays, young "people" have been "poisoned" by Jobs and his 
Technicolor Raincoat and so on.

So, as kids seem to absorb what my generation absorbed from plain paper 
from computer screens
that is the way we have to go faute de mieux (Thanks, Derek Swift - 
French teacher of mine (1969-1972)).

However (I want "However" chiselled on my gravestone just below "But"), 
all the commercial
EFL software that comes strapped to the back of EFL books has these faults:

1. It uses a higher order of language to issue instructions than the 
level at which the learners
who are supposed to benefit from that software are supposed to be at.

2. It features screens that are cluttered with "eye-candy" to such an 
extent that young learners cannot see
"the wood for the trees" (Thanks, Julian Pyttches - History teacher of 
mine (1976-1978)).

I go for the minimalist, targetted approach.

LiveCode lends itself very well indeed to rapid elementary content 
reinforcement and delivery software;
something that may be being overlooked. A teacher should be able to go 
from "Zero to Reasonably Competent"
with this sort of thing in a matter of about a week.

You can find my post here: 
http://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=33287&p=184914#p184908

and download the example stack (28 MB!) here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m7cd4c8gtz2x5rf/Boys%20and%20Girls.livecode.zip?dl=0

Oh, and, by-ther-way: Please feel free to use that stack, hack it to 
bits, and rip off
any ideas you find useful there.

Richmond.