List-users who are NOT interested in my "Social Commentary", but are
interested in what my Summer Kids did with RR/LC should scroll down to
this mark: ####
Right, Alejandro, you asked for it . . . :)
Richmond wrote:
[snip]
Certainly in Britain (and here in Bulgaria) the end result of
years of pseudo-socialist thinking has resulted in a feeling
that the state must provide: all parents have to do is
produce children and after that provide food and bed,
and everything else will be provided
"from the cradle to the grave" by the nanny state:
what happens is one gets a race of slack-jawed
passive observers instead of the actively engaged, thinking
individuals one needs in a healthy society.
Mummy and Daddy should NOT provide little Twinkle-toes
with a computer hooked up to the internet so s/he can
go blotto on online games and associated crap.
Mummy and Daddy should provide a computer stuffed with
stuff to stretch little Twinkle-toes' mind; and that means
programming environments.
But as 90% of parents are f*ckwits, and the state likes
that because those sort of 'people' (are they fully human?)
can be manipulated by the state; that doesn't happen.
Richmond, you are describing a society of living dead.
To be honest with you, a cruise round the housing estates of St Andrews
(Scotland) and the tower blocks of Plovdiv (Bulgaria) all I can see are
living dead. Any children who show signs of being capable of rising
above that will be quickly suppressed by the "education" system,
parental stupidity, or the endless pap of TV and computer games.
I remember part of my Master's degree from the "University" of Abertay
(the only bit worth anything)
involved my trialling my Agent-led Software generation system
(completely authored in RR/LC) at
the Primary School in St Andrews (Greyfriars RC). The teachers loved it
as they were sick-to-death of teaching 7/8/9/10 year olds how to write
"Dear Mummy and Daddy" letters in WORD, and endless PAINT programs.
However the headmistress (a very sharp Irish lady) told me that I had
about as much hope getting funding to continue development from the
local council (Fife) as a bar of gold falling on my head out of a tree.
She said that the unpleasant truth was that education was always pitched
at the lowest common denominator in the state sector.
Ringing up a friend who taught in a private school I was told that the
pressure to take standardised exams was such that teachers would have no
time to use anything (let alone a fully automated software development
system) that moved outside the rigid confines imposed by the exams.
[My father took early retirement for the simple reason that he was sick
to death of teaching kids to pass exams instead of teaching them the
subject.]
Britain, particularly, hates success and thrives on a culture of
mediocrity. What I liked a lot about the United States when I stayed
there was that success was admired and there were not so many things to
stand in your way as there are in Britain.
In Bulgaria, you are dead on the ground, unless you are a big business
interest in bed with a
government that encourages business monopolies.
-----------------------------
This reminds me of 2 statements that are both true:
"Why are most people in Scotland so witless? Because those who have any
'get-up-and-go' have
got up and gone." However, to be fair that probably refers to Scotland
prior about 1990.
"Have you noticed that the only Arabs that have contributed to society
in the last 100 years are ones
who have NOT lived in Arabic countries."
Needless to say, Bulgarians who have contributed ALL live overseas.
In the world where we are living too many people do not
understand that the state of wealth in which they live is
a consecuence of specific actions and attitudes from
previous and actual generations... not a natural event,
That may be because History is taught as a series of mind-numbing dates
(do you know when the
Byzantine emperor had constipation?) of Kings and Queens and Wars. What
might be better is a curriculum that demonstrated how ALL we have now is
built on the work of previous generations.
Bulgarian children are told the first computer was built by John
Atanasov (a Bulgarian born in America to Bulgarian parents); which is
palpably NOT true. Arguably the second computer was built by Charles
Babbage (and programmed by Ada Lovelace), the first by some
Graeco-phoenician some 2,500 years ago. And where are Turing and so forth?
While Atanasov may have co-authored the first software reprogrammable
computer, that is not the same thing at all as what is claimed for him
here in Bulgarian schools. In context his achievement can be seen for
what it is, rather than some impossibility.
pace Isaac Newton.
like rain, wind or sun or an entitlement or birth right.
A city just have to run out of water, energy or jobs,
to awake their habitants of their pleasant state.
At which point 90% of people will sit around saying "they should do
something about this" until
they die. Of course there is a school of thought that says this might be
a good thing.
I will be out there digging up the garden to plant potatoes, finding a
couple of cows for milk,
getting in a supply of wood for winter heat and so on.
Returning to the title of this thread:
How did goes your classes to teach LiveCode to a
group of your English students???
Did they concluded with sucess?
####
I am not entirely sure what you mean by "success".
Of the 4 kids (aged 10 - 23) who attended:
All of these young people worked with Runtime Revolution 2.2.1 (a FREE
version offered by NOVELL via a chap called 'Stompfi' for Linux), and
have computers running Linux either as the sole OS or on a partition at
home.
1. (12 year old boy) Couldn't get his head round the simplest of ideas:
e.g. that a field could be a
visible container for data, and that one could "call into being" an
invisible container for data, a "variable". This boy, however, is 90%
passive in his English classes, waiting there for me to shovel stuff
into him, and then regurgitating it like a cormorant, rather than
processing it.
2. (10 year old boy) Got cheesed-off extremely rapidly when I wanted
them to move string sentences
between fields, combining them with an end-user entered string; he was
so obsessed with "I have to build a game" that my "let's learn to crawl,
then run, and eventually run" wasn't good enough for him.
Not a stupid boy at all, but one who is used to getting what he wants
instantly with a minimum of effort.
3. (13 year old boy, with a place at the Mathematical High-School in
September) worked his way through the Metacard training stack at the
pace I set, but went off on all sorts of interesting and creative
tangents in his spare time.
This boy started English with me 7 years ago: he sat in the classroom
going nowhere for about 4-5 months. His mother and I had a weekly
shouting contest when she told me I hadn't a clue how to teach English,
and I asked if that were so why she kept on paying me and why she didn't
just take her boy away. Suddenly, after 4-5 months of next to nothing,
he suddenly started outstripping all the other children! He has a highly
individualistic way of learning (bless him) which, if the 'system' in
Bulgaria will let him, will mean that he could end up as an extremely
creative programmer. Unfortunately the poor lad is going to get a nasty
shock when he comes up against C++ at the Maths school; luckily he is
well aware of this.
4. (23 year old man/boy) Now authoring stuff for my language school;
have a meeting set up for the last week of August to see if I like what
I see and am ready to pay him for the work. He has also worked his way
through the code of about 90% of my EFL standalones. I have given him a
list of criteria as well as copies of the textbooks I use with
guidelines on the topic areas that I feel I have not provided adequate
coverage on. As this fellow has a degree in tourism from a shitty
college here in Bulgaria that is worth next to nothing, but has enrolled
to do an MA in Applied Linguistics at the one semi-decent University
here in Plovdiv, he is extremely happy that he has found a skill that is
sellable, and is now putting his nose to the grindstone like nobody's
business; I have suggested that IF his programs for the summer are worth
having I will find a way to buy him some sort of LC licence so he can
produce standalones for Windows as well as Linux.
This is Ilko Birov:
http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2012-June/173435.html
As this "course" consisted of 4 x 180 minutes (each class starting with
30 minutes with the computers
OFF and my explaining concepts such as local and global variables on a
whiteboard and with cups and beans, followed by 150 minutes of hands-on
with my sitting amidst the 4 computers) we progressed as far as
modelling a simple pocket calculator (+, -, *,/,=,M,M+,M-), a
fortune-telling program based on a person's birthdate, image movement
and drop-targets.
The difference between #3 and #4 is really a simple question of
maturity: the younger one can work things out very quickly indeed, but
then takes quite some time applying them; while the older is
quite the other way around.
As I am sure most readers will be well aware RR/LC 2.2.1 does NOT have
the capabilities of RevMedia FREE, and in my classroom we played around
with that a bit on the G3 iMac I have there so the kids could see what
'the next step up' was capable of.
Any chance to read a detailed account of their
learning process???
Al
I will use this occasion to beg for something of the order of RunRev
2.0.1 for Mac, Win and Linux to be released for FREE; possibly with a
fair few of the capabilities removed.
Richmond Mathewson.
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