Video or Written Documents?

by Heather Laine on May 1, 2014 24 comments

How is it best to deliver help and instruction? I started musing on this question when I got feedback from a customer on just how much he hated video tutorials as a medium to learn programming. Really, I thought? How common is that? His argument was that it’s much faster to read text, pull out the relevant bits and absorb the information you are looking for, and sitting through a video takes longer. I wonder how true this is and in what context. 

Of course, working in support, I’m acutely aware that most people would rather put their hand in a fire than read the instructions. In a perfect world, software would just leap out of the screen, grab you round the throat and yell "Don’t do that to me! Do it this way instead!" Or putting it another way, the interface would be so self explanatory that no-one would need any kind of instructional materials at all. For a complex programming environment like LiveCode, that’s a pretty tall order. You are just going to have to learn the language, sometime, somehow. Read the dictionary, work through some lessons, join one of our summer courses or get some Academy tutorials. But which? Some people prefer to read a book in the bath (our dictionary will probably keep you clean for a year), others might prefer to follow along to a video. The academies are a nice mix, you get both. Every video has a written accompanying document you can copy and paste from. I’d love to be a fly on the wall to see how people actually use them. Do you watch the video? Do you just read the document? How much does the video contribute to your understanding of the document and vice versa? 

I’m the kind of person that likes to learn specific things, when I need them. I am unlikely to sit down and read a book on Dreamweaver from cover to cover, but if I need to know how to do a specific thing like create a rotating gif, I’ll go and look it up. Usually not in the Dreamweaver help, which sucks, but by googling it, and grabbing a nice text tutorial. Yes, I realized in thinking about this, I would not look for a video. Videos annoy me. They mean I have to turn my music off to listen to them, and you can’t copy and paste from a video. I am the Queen of Copy and Paste!

My daughter, on the other hand, will never read anything if there is a video alternative. Reading seems to be something that does not come naturally to the younger generation. 

Relevant to these musings also is the question, is it better to have short self contained tutorials on specific things, or a longer more themed book, tutorial series or video course, going through a subject in depth? Our lessons are an example of the former, they are based around the theory of answering one specific question – how do I use Google Maps in LiveCode? How do I connect to an SQLite database? For me, this is a good way to learn. I’m not overwhelmed by a tome on the theory of storing and accessing data and including it in an app, I just do what I need to do, today. Over time, as I do more and more of these specific tasks, things fall into place and I reach that "aha" moment where it all starts to make sense and I can flexibly create new items from what I have learned and understood. But other people might be happier with a soup to nuts guide before they start on their own first app. 

So where do you guys fit? What comes naturally to a programmer? How and when did you reach your "aha" moment?

This is Lily’s take on this complex issue, after considerable thought:

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Heather LaineVideo or Written Documents?

Stacks, objects and messages… oh my…

by Neil Roger on April 21, 2014 7 comments

So what have I been up too since my last blog post? I certainly haven’t been following a yellow brick road through a spooky forest (feels like I am sometimes), although, I almost made it to Hogwarts but just missed the train at platform 9 ¾….

hp
(Unfortunately Harry was on his Easter holidays)

All joking aside, the above picture is from London’s Kings Cross Station where I arrived and departed from during my recent work related travels.

Myself and work colleague David Williams, were visiting “the big smoke” last week as we were the lead trainers for a LiveCode training course that was being held in the fantastic Lift venue in Islington.

class

The main goal of the course was to provide some basic training for users who are new to the LiveCode platform. We covered things such as LiveCode fundamentals, database integration, media integration, location services, social networking and deployment. The initial feedback we received from the attendees was great and it was fantastic to see what our users are using LiveCode for first hand.

After each day we travelled back to our hotel by bus (The great bus service in London rivals what we have in Edinburgh), freshened up and then headed out for a bite to eat. Our first night led us to a nice little Indian restaurant and the second night found us in a very traditional English pub which served fantastic Thai food.

pub

plates
(Need some plates?..take your pick from the wall)

The sessions were a great personal experience as I have not had a chance before to lead a training course and really enjoyed building the content and making sure that it would be interesting, relevant and helpful. Interacting with the attendees was very inspiring.

I am very much looking forward to our next training sessions, it was a fantastic experience, with some challenges along the way which left me more than ready for my bed at the end of the day.

If there is anything you would like to see in a training session or any areas that you would like us to visit, please leave a comment below and with interest building more and more, we might end up taking a trip to somewhere near you 🙂

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Neil RogerStacks, objects and messages… oh my…

10 things you didnt know about LiveCode…well maybe.

by Steven Crighton on March 12, 2014 2 comments

Hi, I’m Steven. When I decided to write this blog post, I started to think … what can I write about? I had a browse through the great blog posts that came before me and It appeared obvious, you love the tech talk.

Being in Digital Marketing, what could I offer you in terms of tech talk that rivals what our incredible development team are talking about? It was at this point I got smart. My marketing genius shone through!

I challenged the dev team to come up with 10 things that they think are very useful in LiveCode but most users might not know about it.

A tricky challenge, considering that the experts in our community can likely show us a thing or two on how to use the LiveCode product, but the challenge was accepted.

Did I get 10 things from the team? Sure. Did I get 10 things that things that you don’t know about LiveCode? I guess that’s up to all of you, from beginners to experts, to let me know in the comments.

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Steven Crighton10 things you didnt know about LiveCode…well maybe.

LiveCode CoderDojo

by Elanor Buchanan on March 4, 2014 No comments

Over the last year or so we’ve done quite a lot of training events, for programmers, teachers and kids but last month we did something special, we ran 2 CoderDojo events in our office here in Edinburgh.

CoderDojo is a global, open source, volunteer led organisation providing free coding clubs for young people. So it’s perfect of LiveCode to be involved with. We organised and ran the sessions here with the help of Craig, from CoderDojo Scotland.

Although the sessions were aimed at 12-17 year olds our attendees varied quite a lot in age and coding experience, from none at all to one boy who uses LiveCode in his high school computing classes and likes it so much he came to do more in his free time, although that might have been for the tiny bit of coursework assistance we gave him. Regardless of age or experience we saw a lot of impressive apps, a lot of creativity, and we had a lot of fun too.

The idea behind the session was to introduce LiveCode, show how quick and easy it is to make an app, demonstrate some interesting features and give the kids some free reign to personalise their apps.

The app we created was an animated e-book called Balloon Adventure, we covered importing images, using fields, buttons and dialogs, creating animations, controlling a player, collecting points, personalising and tailoring the look of the app within LiveCode and much more.

During the session we asked the attendees to guess some of the LiveCode commands, functions and properties we would use to achieve certain results, and in most cases they got it right, although we often had to ask them to guess even simpler terms than the ones they initially guessed, it’s also surprisingly difficult to ask someone what the name of the command they would use to animate the balloon along the path they drew might be, without giving the answer away by using the word “move”.

These sessions were a lot of fun, for myself and Neil, and the attendees seemed to enjoy them. It was great to see LiveCode being used in this way and the variety and creativity of the apps we saw, even just using a small set of options within LiveCode was great to see. We are looking forward to doing more events like this in the future.

If you are interested in any of the materials used during these sessions we would be happy to share them. You can request them by emailing support@runrev.com

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Elanor BuchananLiveCode CoderDojo