Primary Student Livecode Interface (Simplified Developer Interface)

[Devin Asay]

RIchmond has an excellent point: your development environment is less important than your goal.

The reason that all of us immediately typed ’set the userLevel to 5’ in HyperCard is that you wouldn’t get far in your task until you needed a bump-up to a higher level of capabilities.

I also teach beginning programming (beginning application development is actually a better term), but to college students rather than primary kids. I realized recently like a bolt of lightening that I have been spending far too much instruction time describing the development environment and too little on setting tasks and then telling the students about the tools in LC that let them accomplish the task. I don’t know why it took me so long to come to that insight, because “need-based” learning is how I learned both HyperCard and LiveCode. (And probably how most of us learned.) Now I’m thinking about ways to incorporate more task-based instruction into my classes.

But then I’m faced with the paradox that, according to some of the research I’ve looked at on teaching programming, large problem solving assignments are less effective than focused focused practice in teaching fundamental programming concepts. What I take from that is that students are helped by “drilling” a concept with canned, focused, smaller tasks than they are by setting them a complex problem to solve. So my evolving approach is 1. present a concept, 2. do some drill and practice on the concept, 3. set them a more complex task that requires them to apply the concept.

I had imagined by this time in my career that I’d have figured this all out. I might just be slow. :-)

Devin


On Oct 10, 2019, at 11:48 AM, Richmond via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com<mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>> wrote:

Well: for starters you are going to have to trawl right through LiveCode and decide
which capabilities fall into which of the 5 levels . . .

Then decide who you are going to block, for instance, access to a button script at level 4;
or partial blocking as you are going to allow buttons to do some things.

I designed a HyperCard-like set of tools for LiveCode a few years ago because,
over on a Yahoo group, various people who haven't worked a few home truths out were
bemoaning having a sophisticated interface to LiveCode instead of a dumed-down version: mine
was so dumbed-down it was almost moronic. For "some odd reason"
there were no takers as far as I am aware.

I teach Primary kids LiveCode every summer and we do just fine with the standard set of tools:
the kids use exactly what they require and are generally self-limiting.

Richmond.

On 10.10.19 18:53, Devin Asay via use-livecode wrote:
Hi John,

This idea has been discussed over the years, but I don’t know of anyone who has implemented it.

The userLevels were:

1 - Browsing - the ability to run and explore stacks, but no ability to make changes.
2 - Typing - added the ability to type and edit text in fields.
3 - Painting - added the ability to use the Paint tools to change the appears of cards and backgrounds.
4 - Authoring - added the ability to create buttons and fields and to link buttons to cards and stacks.
5 - Scripting - gave you full access to all developer components, including scripting.

The “magic words” were ’set the userLevel to 5’.

I found this information in my cobwebby brain, but was helped by the information on this page: http://folkstream.com/muse/teachhc/using/hcusing.html

Best of luck. I think there are other people here who would be interested in this if you find or make something.

Devin

On Oct 10, 2019, at 9:41 AM, JOHN PATTEN via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com<mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com><mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>> wrote:

Good Morning from SoCal,

Quick question, anybody ever develop a simplified LiveCode “developer interface/tool“ project?

If you’ve been around awhile, you might remember how HyperCard had multiple development modes. Level one allowed you to use drawing tools create buttons that would allow you to ”go to next card” etc. Pretty much no script access.

Levels 2-3 gradually provided more capabilities.

If you new the correct procedure, you could completely unlock Hypercard, with access to all developer components (Level 4?)

Has anybody created a simplified Livecode developer interface for newbies?  Something that could be used to introduce, but not initially over whelm a new user?

Just trying to not reinvent the wheel, if someone has already gone down this path and would be willing to share :)


Devin Asay
Director
Office of Digital Humanities
Brigham Young University