HyperStudio Reached Teachers

[Marty Billingsley]

Mark Swindell <mdswindell at charter.net> writes:
>
> On May 22, 2005, at 7:18 AM, Mark Greenberg wrote:
>
> > ...Even the educators who signed up for that HyperLogo scripting
> > workshop had spent very little time trying to script on their own.  My
> > point in relating this is that educators need a lot of encouragement
> > to try programming.  Left to themselves, they won't try it.  There are
> > exceptions like us, of course.
>
> As a somewhat adept HyperCard scripter back when,  I could never figure
> out HyperLogo from the tutorial that came with it.  Maybe it was just
> me, but I was a motivated user with previous experience.  What I saw
> HyperStudio doing for students was basically... PowerPoint.

Amen.  I was completely not thrilled with HyperStudio because I
saw the programming language as inaccessible.  I used HyperCard
to teach programming to kids, refused to switch over to HyperStudio,
and know other teachers with similar curriculum who also didn't
switch.  (Two years ago I migrated my curriculum over to RunRev
and am trying to convince other teachers to do the same.)

I have a software engineering background and couldn't easily
figure out HyperLogo.....how were my students going to learn it?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm part of a group presenting
at NECC on multimedia alternatives to HyperStudio.  I'm advocating
for RunRev (of course); others are showing eZedia, CREATE Together,
Blackspace and Flash.  We also planned to include Squeak, but
our Squeak expert couldn't come to the conference.  Any of
these are useful for multimedia presentations, but my view
is that RunRev is the most powerful with a short learning curve.

  - marty

--
Marty Billingsley (marty at ucls.uchicago.edu)
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools