Rambling Teacher's Blog

At the moment, I am not aware of other schools teaching App Development in Corona SDK. I am sure that such schools are out there and I would love to get to know the teachers. Being a beginner in this field, I am sure I can learn a lot from those with more experience. Here is why I believe Corona SDK is a good platform for teaching programming: App Development is more likely to engage the kids' imagination than, say, database programming; Corona supports both iOS and Android devices; Lua, the language used by Corona, is a flexible, minimalistic language. Eg: variables don't need to be given a type and semicolons are not required at the end of each statement; The SDK includes objects that give access to the mobile device's screen with great ease; It is a new platform that is gaining a lot of momentum among developers; The Apple University Consortium (AUC) has started offering courses on Corona SDK. A great endorsement; Every evaluation I have read of the performanc...

Today, there were 31 students in the after-school App Group. One student had apologised for a medical reason and another one was absent from school. We started on a simple game that would help consolidate what we have learnt so far note my use of the first person plural, as I am sorting things out myself. This is what was achieved today: Words falling across the screen (using transition.to) An event handler for the "touch" event. When the user touches the words, they disappear. This may not seem like much, but this simple App made them understand the concept of event handling. They also had to do some debugging, which was nice. For the first time, they had to write their own code and then look over it to find - mostly spelling - mistakes. A few of them replaced the words with an image and one student had three different sentences coming in from different parts of the screen. We will make this App a little more involved next time. I hope to have and iOS developer license...

After getting over the installation problem discussed in the last post (using the laborious process described in that same post), we had a great class last Tuesday after school. 30 girls filled the lab and worked in pairs. Among them, 3 year 10s sat on the floor and worked on their laptops. Here's what we did: I demonstrated a "Hello World" program, where the words fall across the screen. This was a tutorial posted on the Ansca videos page . I explained about Red, Green, Blue and why 255 was a significant number inside a computer (largest unsigned integer that fits in 8 bits). I left the students to reproduce this themselves. The students moved on to a tutorial published by Peach Pellen : Display a picture in the middle of the screen Listen to a "touch" event on that picture and make it disappear It was great to see the girls modify the exercises to suit their own purposes. Some simply swapped Peach's picture with their own. Others used a pictur...

Late last year, I decided to start an App Development club at my school. I wanted to use a programming environment that used a language that was less intimidating that Objective C. The idea had to have some differentiating feature, as previous attempts to teach programming had not met with great success. I decided, in consultation with a few others, that it would work best as an "extension activity" for those identified as being among the school's top Maths students. I spent sometime in the summer exploring LiveCode. It looked good but I couldn't find a clear learning path. In the last week of the holidays, I discovered Corona SDK . On the last day of Term 1, I sent out ninety odd invitations to girls (no boys at my school) in years 8 to 12. I specified 6 Tuesdays on which we would meet for an hour after school. I was very pessimistic but, while rejecting late submissions, I had to accept a total of 33 students. A mate of mine, Maths/Science teacher and all round sc...

Last week, I was on camp with the Year Sevens. A colleague of mine and I were in charge of 17 year 7s and one year 10 "peer-helper". One morning, the team had an activity called "Team Rescue". It was their task to get through a crocodile infested river using a minimal set of equipment, until they arrived at a helipad. The girls had to carry a mannequin on a stretcher. They decided the mannequin's name was Janet. The activity brought out many individual characteristics in the girls. One girl displayed some selfishness, while others were great foot soldiers. A few girls carried Janet through obstacles without complaining once about their burden. The most remarkable girl was Jenny. She was a great leader and this article is an attempt on my part to consolidate the lessons I learnt about leadership by observing her. Jenny was full of creative ways to get through the course. She conveyed them to the other girls in a courteous manner and they accepted her suggesti...