Kids Dare with LiveCode
Neil and Elanor are just back from their workshop at Dare to be Digital

by Neil Roger

We had a great time teaching at Dare to Be Digital in Dundee yesterday. Elanor and I arrived early, so that we could check in on the setup, see what the students were doing with Future Studios, and make sure we were all ready to pick it up for our 2 hour workshop.

We had a class of 13 students, aged 9-16, and they were all very keen and enthusiastic. It was surprisingly easy teaching them. Both Elanor and I felt it was easier than teaching adults, possibly because they did not feel the need to ask why things worked the way LiveCode does them... they just got on and did it! Elanor was leading the class, teaching how to create a simple ebook, and I was there providing support for the kids that had questions, needed help or wanted me to go over anything with them. I got good exercise running between the tables!

It was great to see that some of the students were steaming ahead, working with areas we hadn't even shown them. None of them had used LiveCode before. By the end of the afternoon, they had all produced an individual multipage visual effect animated ebook, with different stories and imagery. Overall, they were engrossed in the whole lesson. Importing elements and working around the IDE was a strong point for them. Once they got the grasp of simple LiveCode concepts (e.g run and edit mode, script editor etc) a lot of the students managed to keep up with no major problems. Some syntax was a little confusing for some to begin with, e.g. they tended to write on mouse or onmouseup instead of on mouseUp.

An unexpected issue was that some of the students were getting a bit confused as they were trying to use coordinates in a more structured manner than LiveCode requires:

set the location of image "bubble" to x = 100 , y = 233

instead of

set the location of image "bubble" to 100,233

I had to explain that LiveCode "just knew" what they meant... Clearly the teaching of maths in the classroom covers x and y coordinates well enough for this formatting to stick.

We felt the whole session was a great success, and hopefully at least some of the students were excited enough to continue using LiveCode on their own.