Recently I was sent some great teaching materials created by Portobello High School, and I caught up with the IT teacher there, Alison Cowie.

How long have you been using LiveCode in the school?
Since 2010

Where did you hear about it?
Suggested by Dave McKee (from the Digital Learning Team, City of Edinburgh), who came up from England to manage the Computing department while Brian Clark (current Curriculum Leader) was on secondment. When Brian returned, he supported the use of LiveCode

How have you found using it with the students?
It has been an excellent step up from Scratch because it is quite easy to make visually pleasing programs without having to have too deep an understanding of coding.  Compared with other high level languaes, It is relatively simple to incorporate all the available objects (buttons etc.) along with images and audio to create a contemporary user interface. This makes it possible to engage the less experienced students while the resources and dictionary available make it easy for more experienced students to reach ahead.  In addition, the programming environment itself is very accessible - there is so much there that we don't even begin to touch on but we can build school-level programs without having to know too much

Would you say it has improved their engagement with learning programming?
Yes - I think, in particular, the fact that you can make a stand-alone app so easily has caught students' imagination

Do you think it has or will improve the outcomes for the students in terms of exam results and qualifications?
We've had good results at Portobello for a long time - we routinely get about 14 pupils taking it at Advanced Higher which is one of the biggest class sizes in Scotland, I think - and I think that's because we teach programming from the point of view of the data structures being used and the storage of these structures in RAM. So I don't think it improves our results necessarily but LiveCode does make it easier to approach the teaching of programming from that point of view e.g. put 20 into n  means "store the value 20 in the location called n" . The syntax and grammar is very accessible for high school age programmers.

What were you using before LiveCode?
Pascal (no graphics front end so only used with S3 and up), Scratch, HTML, CSS, JavaScript

How did you find the available teaching and learning materials? Were there any in particular you found useful?

I have found the dictionary very useful and so have some of the more able students. Some of the simpler examples from the Resource Centre and the LiveCode lessons have been useful e.g. drag and drop, skinning, etc. but I haven't looked at all of them by any means. YouTube is useful. I am aware that there is a whole web scripting/database side to LiveCode that I haven't begun to explore yet. Our main priority has been to develop teaching resources for the new National courses. We haven't made any decisions about the new Advanced Higher - it seems that there is a real move nationally towards PHP/Python/SQL at that level which is a whole other area for us to get stuck into

You've written some great tutorial materials, do you have any objection to other schools using them with their pupils?
Not at all

That's great Alison, thank you very much! Here is a link to the videos created by Portobello High School, showing how to use and teach LiveCode.