Judy,
I might be too late to the thread but I'll offer a slightly twisted
perspective of where to go with this. These are adults, right?
Don't ask them so much about what they like, instead figure out what ticks
them off the most, or wastes their time the most or elicits the response
'it's a friggin computer, it should be able to......'
To me, and I don't mean any offense to those who suggested them, but to
build a calculator, address book, music library, etc etc, would having me
rolling my eyes with I've already got one of those, why reinvent the wheel -
with one that is worse than the free one I've already got. I'd switch off in
that class immediately.
But a special kind of calculator - for specific task as per the Therac-25
suggestion, or a music library that allows me to search the lyrics - because
iTunes doesn't, now that would interest me.
as Peter Brigham said in another tread:
but I think that the most user-friendly apps are those produced by the
> people who use them...
>
> my own practice management stack is miles ahead of anything else I've seen
> but then I designed it for just the way I think and work
>
To me the key is to have your class members identify a number of small
'real' problems that you filter to those you know that LC can quickly solve.
These might take YOU anywhere from 1 - 6 hrs to solve. You might also
discover that a couple of problems fall into the same category, like text
parsing - my favourite ;-) It might then be possible to work with the class
as a whole to solve one problem, then assign homework to apply their new
found knowledge to solve the other.
As an example, I'm interested in buying a second hand car, and I visit two
websites to check out what's available. It's a hassle flicking through the
pages and trying to remember how many kms the 2005 model for $14,990 had. So
for each site I've created a script that takes the data and scrapes it for
only the info I'm interested in: model, year, kms, number of owners,
transmission, price. The data is then stored in a db from which I can group,
compare and order the cars so that I can figure which appear to be better
value for money.
As for lesson 1, I reckon a 100% chance that someone will have a text
manipulation problem so after discussing what people want their computer's
to do, I'd cover how easy it is to work with text in LC. Simple stack, two
fields - one to enter data, the other for output. Start with a button, but
eventually go with 'on closeField'. Show them how they can extract the
first, second, last and char/word/line 24 from the field. How they can add
or remove char/word/line. How char/word/line can be rearranged. If the text
happens to be a list, how they can be referred to as items. How if the data
has any form of consistency, then extraction of specific data is easy; this
can be because it's always on line x, it's always word y, it's always the
word before 'kms', or are the chars immediately after $ - you can avoid grep
and still find the data, that's the great thing about LC. But if you spark
someone's interest, you can always teach them a grep solution too :-)
And just to give you my personal favourite, I'd teach them the switch
statement.
switch (tInput)
case ("yes")
hYesHandle
break
case ("no")
hNoHandle
break
default
answer "An answer I wasn't expecting" title "Case Error!"
breakpoint
end switch
I hated nested if-then-else statements which can be extremely hard to
understand, so unless I'm 100% certain that it's yes/no, true/false, or 1/0
, I always use a switch statement similar to above - with the default set to
tell me I'm missing something followed by a breakpoint. As soon as I get a
"maybe" input, I'm prompted that I need extra code, presented with the
Script Editor exactly in the handler where the extra code is needed and the
Variable Pane showing what's in tInput so I can immediately figure out why
the script didn't proceed as expected. For newbie programmers this can save
a huge amount of time wasted (read - turn you off programing frustration)
trying to figure out why the outcome is wrong.
Good luck,
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