LiveCode Forums

Over the last 6-7 years I have had children in my Summer courses who are
"all Gung-Ho" (inevitably) for creating little 2D games they can show to their friends,
but they all seem to have a problem understanding this sort of stuff:
This is mainly due to the observable fact that children's brains are insufficiently developed to cope with abstract ideas,
and they have very great difficulty visualising a screen (or LiveCode stack) as something chopped up into squares (i.e. pixels).

Until children get to about 11-13 they are still in what Piaget termed the 'concrete operational stage', and while they can play chess
with pieces on a board they are unable to visualise a chessboard inside their heads and imagine moves of pieces on that board.

[Frankly, having stated that, I can cheerfully say that at 58 I still find that a bit hard.]

"Normally" (i.e. when I am teaching programming in a physical classroom) I explain this by using a 20 x 20 grid I printed out on
some paper and ran through my laminating machine, or mess around with a Canadian checkers board.
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Thinking about my upcoming online programming classes I really didn't feel very good about faffing around with a webcam
getting things badly wrong on the kitchen table.

So I ran up this fairly simplistic LiveCode stack which should serve in the same sort of way to my monster chess boards:
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What it DOES do is report the grid position of any of the octagons when they are dragged onto a square on the board.

What it DOESN'T do is tell you how to keep "little twonkums" focused while you're explaining the thing.

Stack removed as improved version made available lower down.

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http://www.devpsy.org/topics/piaget.html

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Bruce Merritt pointed out elsewhere an obvious error in my first offering.

Judy Perry asked out elsewhere . . .

"What about taking that grid, send it to the back and just barely visible, and script a button that S-L-O-W-L-Y
moves a character image along something short but interesting, and at each point along the ways pause the motion,
shows a field with the rect coordinates and then repeats until the character image reaches its end destination?"

Not convinced about the " S-L-O-W-L-Y."
- - That is certainly an idea: but, experience tells me that primary children need their hands held (even if only 'virtually').
This idea might be better for either a 'teach yourself' setting, or for older learners.

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Does things with pseudo random numbers.

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Drags its tail behind it.

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Wow: I might have to check myself into a mental institution.

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One reason to buy a monitor than can cope with 1800 pixels across.

Would this help the younger students understand location reference and Move command? Jim Lambert

I doubt it because of 2 things:

1. It does not have a visible grid.

[This presupposes that children can "see" a grid mentally.]

2. It is too fine grained.

One of the problems is that, at Primary school, for graphs, I was taught,

"You go in the house before going up the stairs."

Which is just great until you start playing around with LiveCode and have to unlearn that and remember this instead:

"You go in the house before walking down to the basement."
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Ah, I see.

The kids need to picture the coordinates not as points in space but as a grid of boxes.
They need the grosser representation of a location that a box provides rather than the discrete location inherent in a point.

But at some point (so to speak!) they will graduate to thinking of a location as a point.