Snail Bob

[richmond62]

Snail Bob is a series of online games that, personally, make me vomit:

https://www.crazygames.com/game/snail-bob
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But some of the children I teach like them, and as long as I, in my evil way, can lever them for teaching purposes
I'll "hold back my vomit".

Now the first stumbling block was that, while Bob (that's the snail) moves from left to right, on clicking on him he stops, and
on clicking on him again he starts moving again. I left the children alone for 30 minutes and drank a large cup of Carob to remove
the bad taste of snail slime from my mouth.

No dice . . . all completely bogged down.

So, at great personal expense to myself and my aesthetic snobbery . . .
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[richmond62]

Then one child got stuck with this:
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At which point I said something fairly bad-tempered about NOT spoon-feeding babies.

BUT I did point out that there could be buttons to increment or decrement the amount Bob moved in each
cycle of the repeat loop.
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[richmond62]

I cannot stress enough that one extremely effective way to engage children
and motivate them is to build on things they are familiar with, and
copying the functionality of a computer game with which they are familiar
is one of the best ways of doing that.

Obviously a few things need to be explained to those children:

1. You will need to source your own graphic elements (images) as you
cannot copy directly those used in the original game.

2. You cannot sell your end result.

3. You cannot open a game written by someone else and try to
examine the underlying code.

[richmond62]

The Log Pulley lever:
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[dunbarx]

Richmond.

I wish I had LC students like you do. Seems like so much fun.

Not sure what is bogging you down with the snailBob stack. Works fine for me.

But why so much stuff? Why not just, in the image script:

Code: Select all

on mouseUp
   repeat until the mouseClick and the mouseLoc is within the rect of me
      set the left of me to the left of me + 1
      wait 1
   end repeat
end mouseUp

Craig

[richmond62]

Not sure what is bogging you down with the snailBob stack.

Nothing has been bogging me down; but it did bog down the children as they
jumped into that as an assemblage of all that I had taught them in bite-size classes
and had difficulty connecting the dots.

Snail Bob was chosen by one of the children, and at that point I had a choice:

1. "Come the heavy father" and say "Not likely!" and so demotivate them.

2. Guide them in some way where they could 'connect the dots' that they had already learnt.

Why not just, in the image script

2 and a half reasons:

1. My mind works in a different way to yours. AND this is one of the points to write about what is, perhaps, LiveCode's
strongest point, its incredible flexibility insofar as one can effect things in a multiplicity of ways: a multiplicity of
ways that can reflect how almost any programmer's mind (logical thinking) works.

2. My experience with children under 12 tells me that an extremely verbose script is easier for them to
understand than an elegant little script like yours.

2.1. I had been banging on about repeat loops for quite a few days, and the idea of incremental changes.

While I teach programming I must always remember that I am teaching it to children of 12 and under
who have not yet got to what Jean Piaget termed the Formal Operational Stage:

"Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in their mind."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget

The 'trick' about teaching is NOT to explain things the way you want to explain them to yourself or your peers
but to explain them in a way your target group will understand things . . . or. to put things another way, you
have to think yourself into the skin of a 9 year old . . . this is quite a tough call sometimes.

AND . . .

on mouseUp
repeat until the mouseClick and the mouseLoc is within the rect of me
set the left of me to the left of me + 1
wait 1
end repeat
end mouseUp

why do you need the lines I have marked in red?

[richmond62]

Actually, one of the things I have noticed hereabouts is very little discussion
of the pedagogical considerations when teaching computer programming to
children (or adolescents or adults for that matter).

All very gung-ho about LiveCode (which is redundant as in these Forums we are largely preaching
to the converted) and a feeling that all one has to do is bung a stack in front of some poor soul and they
will understand everything is some miraculous intuitive leap, which they simply WILL NOT.

---------------------

About 15 years ago, before I started teaching LiveCode to children, my older son (who was then 14)
was having PASCAL 5 classes at high school here in Bulgaria (and why PASCAL 5 in 2006 is another
discussion) . . . "teaching" consisted of the "teacher" handing out printed programs on paper and
telling the children to type them in and running them . . . no explanation, no nothing.

Obviously my son was F*CKED OFF and came home and started shouting about what a load of
"old tiddley-push" those classes were. I agreed with him, but I also pointed out that the school system
was stuck in the 1970s and short of bombing the school (which did not necessarily seem a bad idea
from my point of view) there was b*gger all that could be done about those classes.

I popped out to a manky-franky computer shop and picked up a Pentium II for about $5 and installed
FreeDOS with the GEM GUI on it. FreeDOS comes with PASCAL 5 installed! the GEM GUI is a black and white,
single application WIMP interface.
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https://www.freedos.org/

We sat down and after 6 hours we'd both had enough: enough for my son to pass the test at the end of term
with top marks while all the other children failed. I went and saw the headmistress of the school, lugging my
Pentium II with me, at which point she said 2 things:

1. The "teacher" did not understand how computer programs worked.

2. The Ministry of Education had stated that THAT was THE WAY to teach computer programming.

Luckily the education system here is no longer stuck in the 1970s, it is now stuck in the 1990s, and
in a few "enlightened" corners there re computer programming teachers who teach a lot more
effectively, although an awful lot of children are excluded because unless they can master all
sorts of needlessly complicated Mathematics they are excluded.

-------------------------

4 things have influenced my approach to teaching programming:

1. My Maths teacher when I was 13 who started by drawing a flow chart about making one's Mum a cup of tea.

2. The unbelievably shitty "lectures" on programming at the University of Durham on 1984 (bloke sitting
in a lecture hall reading verbatim from a badly written textbook).

3. That situation with my son.

4. My experience teaching EFL (English as a Foreign Language) to Pakistani, Arabic, Gujarati and Bulgarian children.

[richmond62]

As an illustration of what I mean:
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getting children to explain what happens 'here' in terms of functionality
proves extremely difficult, and until they can do that there seems little point
in opening a scriptEditor of any description whatsoever.

"The lift moves upwards with the snail." is all very fine, but moving from that to talking and thinking about:

A series of images . . .

Some sort of animation . . .

How an animation might be initiated . . .

Is quite a step for young minds.

[richmond62]

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Basic illustration of one type of animation.
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[richmond62]

https://www.instructables.com/Lets-Make-a-Flipbook/

[dunbarx]

why do you need the lines I have marked in red?

Because it does not work at all if you don't have them?

And I understand your verbose way being more readable and accessible. I was just playing around, meant for your eyes only.

Craig

[richmond62]

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https://www.dropbox.com/s/vln7x3ky2a094 ... e.zip?dl=0
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Try saying Phenakistiscope three times without feeling very odd indeed.

[richmond62]

Because it does not work at all if you don't have them?

If I have to ask that sort of question, just imagine trying to explain
that to a 12 year old.

[richmond62]

As a fantasist of the worst sort I could even imagine a section of the
LiveCode website devoted NOT just to guff stating how wonderful LiveCode
is for teaching, BUT addressing the very real pedagogical issues of teaching
programming and not churning out the utter drivel that a lot of so-called
teachers are blethering on out about Block-coding and so forth associated with
the cult of dumbing down things to such an extent they have little or no
practical value.

[richmond62]

Here is a wonderful opportunity to introduce children to intersect:
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