On 02/29/2016 02:16 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
William Prothero wrote:
> Richard;
> Agreed. Perhaps it’s my age. Yes, of course it won’t be a good
> strategy to compare Livecode to Hypercard. I only brought it up in
> an attempt to contrast the wide early adoption of Hypercard by
> educators, to the current environment where there are so many
> choices and also where knowledge of specific programming languages
> seems to be tied to employment requirements at some IT companies.
> That said, I think that livecode has amazing potential in education
> and elsewhere. I hope to support that.
Personally I see no reason LiveCode can't become the go-to choice for
teaching CS basics.
Right now we see Scratch used for some of that, but the boundaries of
any point-and-click system are encountered pretty quickly. For young
users it can be a good starting point, but most outgrow it fairly quickly.
I've seen some who move students directly from Scratch to JavaScript or
even Java, and I'm no educator but I've read just enough Piaget to
believe that's not a good choice.
By far the most popular learning language today is Python, which is in
most respects a pretty great language. But the distance between "I want
to build an app" and "Look, I built an app!" needs to be as short as
possible to keep young learners engaged, and since Python follows the
traditional approach of treating UI as an afterthought a lot of
foundational work needs to be done with learners before they can build
even a simple app.
Funny you mention Python. I learned of Livecode's existence on on
Python list. Someone was looking for a drag and drop UI builder and
someone said it wasn't python, but Livecode seemed to be what he was
looking for.
Regards, Jim
_______________________________________________
use-livecode mailing list
use-livecode@lists.runrev.com
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
