Report on My LiveCode Workshop at AECT 2015 in Indianapolis

Yes, I'm currently in Indianapolis attending the annual conference for the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). I conducted a LiveCode workshop at the conference on Wednesday, making this the fourth year in a row I've done so. Although AECT had inadvertently dropped my workshop from the conference promotions, all turned out well as I had 16 people who registered. The workshop went well, thanks mainly to the great attitudes of this friendly group of people. I also must thank my graduate assistant, Tong Li, for assisting me. Tong did so solely out of his interest in coding and the chance to meet and work with a group of like-minded people.

I used one of my new "LiveCode First Projects" that I first created and tried out this past summer when I was teaching in our online design studio at UGA. Three hours goes by quickly, but we were able to do the "Visit the USA!" and "Mad Libs" projects. These, and others, can be found on my LiveCode Workshop site. (Yeah, it is about time I update this site to make it at least a little less ugly.)

I also created a Google presentation for the workshop that is definitely still in the "construction" process. This is not meant to be a stand-alone resource, so if you didn't attend the workshop, don't expect it to guide you in some special way. But, if you did attend the workshop, it should help to guide to various projects and resources covered during the workshop. I definitely recommend that everyone go and get Stephen Goldberg's free PDF "LiveCode Lite: Computer Programming Made Ridiculously Simple." I would nominate this as a top contender for the "Missing LiveCode Manual."

There is a link to a variety of videos in the presentation. Here is one that I showed during the workshop that I think does a great job of providing some inspiration and rationale for the need to learn some coding:

It's definitely geared, I think, to a high school audience, but I think it also works well for any adult audience.

I'll be updating the Google presentation quite a bit in the weeks and months to come, especially because I'm scheduled to teach three LiveCode workshops for the following groups in the coming months:

1. Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy (CHEP) at Virginia Tech on February 9, 2015 - here's a direct link to my workshop page; 
2. OLLI at UGA - This will actually be a "mini-course" consisting of four sessions beginning on February 23, 2015.
3. UGA's Center for Teaching and Learning Speaker Series - I'll be doing a very short workshop, really just a short overview, of LiveCode probably sometime in March (they are currently finalizing the spring schedule).

So, I extend my thanks to all the people who attended my workshop and to AECT for again giving me the chance to do it.

Back to the conference...