There’s a hot discussion taking place about how to get young students interested in programming.  Not just interested, but loving it!  Teachers and administrators have been battling this challenge for years, but the fact is that engaging students early in technical areas such as Computer Studies is difficult to impossible, beyond perhaps one or two engineering obsessed students in the school.

However, with the number of IT related jobs growing by the thousands every year, and the tremendous need for mobile app developers for the long term, it is more important than ever to make Computer Studies as fundamental in K-12 curriculum as math, language, or science.  While it may sound impossible to get children to grasp the relevance of web and desktop development early on, the abundance of mobile apps and games have created new opportunities for educators.

Children are drawing, playing games, and watching videos on their parents’ mobile phones before learning their ABCs.  They begin to show interest in tinkering with devices in grade school. (Remember being the only one in your family who could program the TV remote when you were a kid?)  Many students want to create, build and fix anything they can get their hands on, but immediate gratification and relevance to their lives are critical factors for getting and keeping them engaged.  And a little fun thrown in helps a bunch.

Students as young as 10 are grasping the fundamentals of technology development, and teaching these young tinkerers to create simple games and mobile apps is helping breath new life into Computer Science curriculum.  At the core of much of this newfound passion for programming is LiveCode.  The easy to use platform makes it simple for educators to learn the language, and, for the first time, students just get it!

In response to the growing success of LiveCode in education, we have created a RunRev Education Microsite.  The site offers case studies, course materials for all grade levels, teacher training materials, forums and support, and free trials – everything educators needs to get started with LiveCode.

Take a look at Gracemount High School’s informative white paper and please share your own stories as well!

Language learning specialists EuroTalk are experts in their field with 20 years of publishing experience and over 10 million customers.  EuroTalk uses LiveCode during the authoring process for many of their titles, and has been working for a number of years in Malawi together with the Scottish Government looking at different solutions for delivering education to primary schools. 

These are rural schools with no electricity and very large class sizes, and often the teachers have very few resources.  All classes at standard 1 and 2 have at least 250 children and this particularly school we’re blogging about has 5000 children.  Some nearby primary schools have 18 to 20 thousand children.

A LiveCode created app, the Chichewa Learning App has been a great help to the children and provides the key words needed and a fast, scientific way of remembering them.  Described by users as:

“Fun intelligent interactive learning games.  Worth the money.”

“Unlike many other apps, this one makes learning fun and doesn’t get boring.” 

HOW IT WORKS

This interactive product is the result of extensive research into how the brain learns fastest.  It uses:

– Images: to stimulate both halves of the brains, visual as well as logical;

– Fun quizzes: because we remember best what we’re interested in;

– Speech, recording and playback: to perfect your accent by comparing with native speakers;

– A point scoring system: that gives feedback on progress and rewards success.

Here are a few pictures of the children who don’t speak much English but took to the Chichewa Learning App almost instantly.   

And this girl typed her name into the device and was so proud to see it on the unit menu.

 “If we can use tools like LiveCode to 
 develop and iterate quickly, and use 
 handheld devices to deliver, I think 
 we are on the verge of a revolution in 
 terms of delivering education.”

Read on to find out more about EuroTalk and their successful Maths app for children ages 3 – 5!  

Bett was held at the Custom House in London Excel this year and was a veritable feast of the great and the good. With over 35,000 attendees expected I spoke to people from many parts of the world.  The DLR was so overloaded with people attending that at one point the service was stopped at Canning Station and everyone had to walk to Custom House.

With all the news coverage about how vital it is for teenage students to learn how to code, I was surprised by the lack of relevant coding platforms at Bett 2013.  This year the show seemed to be very well patronised by data and analytics – gathering data, measuring data and reporting on data.  Whilst that is all good and well, how are teenagers going to learn to code?  The app market continues to prosper, students are tech savvy, have increasingly sophisticated technology in their pockets and the importance of knowing how to code has never been greater. 

It must surely be both a challenging and rewarding time to be a teacher.  Today old school meets new school in the classroom and the potential for amazing results is just waiting to happen.  All that is needed is some creative thinking from the top down as well as the bottom up and the ability to let go of the past and embrace the new. 

Stephen Heppell, was inspirational with his approach to new ways of learning.  Stephen’s approach is to teach students how to learn then trust them to determine what works best for them in terms of classroom environment and use of technology.  It was great to see the ease with which lots of youngsters used Scratch on his stand at Bett.  Coding is close to Stephens’s heart and when LiveCode’s ancestor, HyperCard, came to market in the late 80’s Stephen created a HyperCard stack with which it was launched.  Stephen is a breath of fresh air in the Digital World of learning and his approach has a proven track record of success. 

Dell had a Formula 1 racing car on their stand sitting next to a racing simulator which was hugely
popular.  The new Windows 8 Dell Tablet is ideal for using apps build on LiveCode by students and many students and teachers who tried it out for themselves, thought so too. 

Everyone fell in love with the very human Nao Android Robot it will be interesting to watch how this evolves to be used as a teaching tool.  The Active Robots folk were keen to try out LiveCode to see if it could drive the Nao so watch this space it may just happen

Looking forward to Bett 2014!