Teaching Programming with LiveCode at Brigham Young University
LiveCode is a fantastic software development tool to introduce students and people alike to the world of programming. We interviewed Devin Asay, Lecturer at Brigham Young University, to find out why LiveCode is used on their computer programming courses.
We asked Devin to tell us a little bit more about the course he runs at the university and why he chose LiveCode as its main programming language.
"I have a lot of hats, and one of my jobs is teaching a course in introduction to programming for non-techies. These are humanities majors, language majors, philosophy majors, English and linguistics, all the people for whom a little bit of programming might be useful but who don't have the time or the temperament to take 2 or 3 years of Computer Science.”
“I teach LiveCode in two courses. I think it gives the students a good tool to create custom things that they need in their future careers as teachers, or indeed in whatever they end up doing”.
"We asked Devin if he finds that the students use these programming skills further down the line with their degrees. “There’s a always percentage that really do. Of course there are some that are just glad that they got through that class! But we always find that there are a number of students every year that go on and take the second semester course. And every once in a while I'll hear back from one of them asking ‘how do you do this in LiveCode again’”.
We asked Devin how he came across LiveCode and how he started using it in his course.
“We'll I came from the HyperCard world, I’m a Mac guy from years ago. I started using HyperCard in 1989 and our original courses were based on HyperCard so we did that for close to 10 years and everybody knows the story that HyperCard withered away. I spent two years searching for the real successor to HyperCard with modern features. I looked at nearly everything including RealBasic, iShell, SuperCard and whole bunch of different things. But I found LiveCode and the rest is history”.
Do you find that the students pick it up quite quickly?
“It varies for a number of reasons. Some just don't think that way and others latch onto it and say that this is the best thing since sliced bread. I feel that everybody that gets through the course at least has the experience of learning to think in a new way. That’s what programming is all about. It’s learning to think in a way that’s logical, step-by-step, deliberate and I think that is very valuable in itself.”
“I have a number of students who never in their wildest dreams never thought that they would be able to do programming of any kind but who went on to take the second semester. They become my assistant, or they do some programming project work. And it changes their career focus and direction a little bit”.