I've been using B4A with my students for over a year now. It's an UK A Level (age 17-18) class for students who have done a little programming before.
I went with B4A due to how easy it is to develop software that is directly relevant to high school age students. I've taken one class through externally assessed coursework with it and had very positive results. Also the tools work well with Virtual Machines, which it's likely, like my school, other schools will need to use to give students a proper environment to develop whilst still maintaining general network security.
To teach my class how to use B4A I did a couple of hands on / step by step lessons to begin with. I then made a couple of apps for them to use for example code. One just includes lots of unrelated sub routines that show programming fundamentals, like loops and using controls etc. The other app is a fairly simple two screen app that uses an SQLite database to run a basic tuck shop for a young peoples club / camp. BTW the code for this last app doesn't include any comments in it because I wanted my students to try and figure it out, rather than just bad practise on my part! I've attached both projects to this post.
If any other teachers come across this post whilst looking for programming languages to use I'd highly recommend using B4X. I have to teach other classes VBA and VB.net 2010, and B4X is just so much nicer and more effective to use.
I went with B4A due to how easy it is to develop software that is directly relevant to high school age students. I've taken one class through externally assessed coursework with it and had very positive results. Also the tools work well with Virtual Machines, which it's likely, like my school, other schools will need to use to give students a proper environment to develop whilst still maintaining general network security.
To teach my class how to use B4A I did a couple of hands on / step by step lessons to begin with. I then made a couple of apps for them to use for example code. One just includes lots of unrelated sub routines that show programming fundamentals, like loops and using controls etc. The other app is a fairly simple two screen app that uses an SQLite database to run a basic tuck shop for a young peoples club / camp. BTW the code for this last app doesn't include any comments in it because I wanted my students to try and figure it out, rather than just bad practise on my part! I've attached both projects to this post.
If any other teachers come across this post whilst looking for programming languages to use I'd highly recommend using B4X. I have to teach other classes VBA and VB.net 2010, and B4X is just so much nicer and more effective to use.
