Balloons and Rockets in York
Reporting from the National STEM Centre

Neil Roger Interviewed By Heather Laine

Students at National Stem Centre, Neil Rogers presenting in background

Our training team, Neil Roger and Elanor Buchanan, were in York on Wednesday, taking the LiveCode roadshow to the masses. This event was organised by the National STEM Centre, and was a full day of Hands on Computing, for students, teachers and parents. I caught up with Neil to ask him how it went.

Me: So how did it go in York?

Neil: It went really well! The kids loved it, the parents loved it and the teachers loved it.

Great! How long were your sessions? All day?

We were teaching all day, in 8 one hour sessions.

What were you teaching?

We put together an interactive animated stack which students customized and constructed for themselves. Its a very very simple game using balloon or rocket images. You can download it together with the scripts and assets here.

What were the standout moments for you?

A customer called "Rod" was called "Katie" by the LiveCode app he was making.
It had saved a little girls' name in a variable from the session before and he didn't declare his global so there was some amusement at that. The kids were over the moon when their rocket/balloon whizzed about the screen in the app they were making. We found the kids were actually teaching their parents/teachers - they just sucked the information in, it was great to see.

How many people were you teaching?

Class sizes ranged from 30 at a time down to almost one on one with parents and their children.

So you had quite a throughput going on then!

Yes. Elanor did the majority with her awesome presentation skills and I gave my first proper one alone which was pretty nerve racking. Some teachers were over the moon with LiveCode as they have been using alternatives and reported having had nothing but trouble as (the previous software they were using) is all online.

What else happened during the day?

We were given a talk on the history of computing, ranging from the first teletype machines to super dooper gigabit fibre optic internet connection. I even got my name typed on the teletype machine and was given the punched out paper as a souvenir.
We are indeed lucky to have such advances in technology today! All in all it was a great experience, go go go all day!