Name: Cyril Pruszko
Occupation: Teacher
School:Â Eleanor Roosevelt High School
LiveCode in Education: “Because of LiveCode, more students have taken CS classes and our school has become a primary feeder school for the University of Maryland’s Computer Science program.”
Teach the Concepts
The 5 years I spent teaching LiveCode were the best teaching years of my life. It's what every teacher wants - students were engaged, they were learning, they were going on to have coding careers. With LiveCode you can teach the essential concepts of coding, without losing students a third of the way through the course. Python was too difficult. Other languages have artificial constructs that get in the way of learning, or are too simple, or too focussed on one device. LiveCode is a beautiful stepping stone to other languages.
LiveCode First
I started out teaching Python first, and then LiveCode for app development later. Then I decided to switch them, and teach LiveCode first. In the second semester I taught Python. The students went through 5 months of learning in 2 months, and nobody dropped out. Because they had learned the basics with LiveCode, they took to the more advanced language easily. Like learning to drive, you learn first on an automatic, learn the rules of the road, get your license - and then learn to drive with a stick shift. It makes perfect sense.
"Let's Learn it Together"
I was a maths teacher originally. Teaching with LiveCode we were learning together. I'd never coded with LiveCode before and I was honest with the students. We learned it together. This gave the opportunity to teach problem solving - where did I go wrong, how do we debug it? How do you break down a problem into solvable pieces? It was doing this that really demonstrated to me how good LiveCode was at teaching logic and computational thinking. Students today don't respond to traditional "I'll teach, you take notes" approaches. A working together approach - that works beautifully.
Competition Winners and Maxed Out Classes
My classes went from 6 students to 37 - in all 6 classes. My high school students entered nationwide competitions - and won, even against university students! Learning programming became a way to keep disengaged students interested and in school. They were learning something relevant, and producing apps they could share, with their friends and their families. In other languages they could create something they were proud of, but they couldn't share it. Being able to build an executable made that difference.
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