Building the Future
Scorekeeper app uploaded by student, reporting from Scottish Learning Festival

by Heather Nagey

If you've been following this newsletter at all lately, you'll have a sense of our commitment to LiveCode in Education. The latest show we've attended was the Scottish Learning Festival, this week, and I hear it went extremely well. Below is a photo for you and feedback from Caroline, but first I'd like to update you on a student success story.

Scorekeeper App
This week I have a rather lovely app to show you from Jarren Harkema. You may recall he was a winner in our Game Academy competition, and is enthusiastically introducing LiveCode in his high school work now. Some time ago he wrote me:

"I've also been at work the past couple of weeks building an app for a robotics team I help coach. The organization they are a part of is called FIRST, and it helps inspire kids 7 through high school to get excited about science and technology through engaging research projects and hands on robotics competitions. I was in the middle of developing a scoring app for iPhones and iPads, to help teams keep record of their robot scores in practice, and chart their progress throughout the competition season."

Jarren has now sent me a link to his app, released on the Apple App store:

Description

With the FIRST LEGO League Senior Solutions Scorekeeper, your team can now easily time, score, save, and share your robot game progress! Intuitive visual controls clean the screen of unneeded text, showing only the information you need. Scores are instantly saved, and can be viewed and shared at any time! Information about each mission, along with the full rules are also available from within the app! Help support FIRST LEGO League Team "The Sharks"! And track your scores in the simplest FLL scoring app!

Features

• Simple visual interface using images and colors makes it easy for anyone to understand and use.
  
  
• Timer doubles as score field as soon as the time expires, and updates in real time while scoring.
  
  
• Info buttons show full mission description, along with scoring and restrictions. Available offline!
  
  
• Record, view, sort, and send your scores! Sort by value, time, and date.
  
  
• View the all of the Senior Solutions rules within the app, with direct link to the Robot Game Updates!
  
  
• Proceeds go toward supporting FIRST LEGO League team The Sharks!

Well done Jarren! This looks great, and you should be proud!

Scottish Learning Festival

This festival took place on Wednesday and thursday this week, and was attended by over 6000 delegates including Michael Russell, the Scottish Minister for Education, and of course Kevin Miller, CEO RunRev Ltd, and Caroline Finlay, our Sales and Marketing manager.

By all accounts it went extremely well, and we talked with many influential educators who demonstrated a sincere interest in moving programming up the agenda for schools.

There was a lot of interest from teachers who had actual experience of teaching students programming and they recognised the considerable value of LiveCode in terms of ease of use especially in today's app driven world. An additional plus point the teachers called out was that LiveCode is OS agnostic, many schools have a hybrid infrastructure which includes Mac, Win and many teachers themselves use Linux and they struggle to find anything which will run happily on all platforms whilst being fit for purpose, so LiveCode ticks many boxes for them.

Teachers also showed huge interest in our work to create syllabus aligned class plans and training materials, from Standard Grade through to advanced Higher. The course materials are being refreshed to support the requirements of the Curriculum for Excellence.

As previously announced, RunRev has joined CAS, Computing at School. It is a UK wide not for profit organisation which works in collaboration with the British Computing Society and is committed to Educate, Engage and Encourage best computing practice in schools. We fully support and are engaged locally with the CAS Scotland team and were delighted to see them at the Scottish Learning Festival. CAS will be holding its first Scottish meeting/workshop in October which has sold out and over 100 teachers will be attending the daylong event. CAS has invited Kevin to deliver a joint presentation with Steven Whyte from Gracemount High School, so more about that soon!

We were able to demonstrate the value of LiveCode in engaging young people with coding to a large number of new faces, and look forward to moving forward in Scotland with making LiveCode the default teaching tool in IT classrooms.

About the Author Heather Nagey is Customer Services Manager for RunRev Ltd