Hi,
One thing I am interested in, and faced with from advanced students, is how the coding we are doing in special environments such as App Lab, relates to student ability to program anything in the “real world”.
Using your “Share” option and the “Export for Web”, I have been able to download, unzip, and access an intelligible version of (via Visual Studio) the index.html page (which references jQuery and 3 other JavaScript scripts), a style.css file (and I found a description of Droplet from their site), the code.js file (with the student-written code), and the applab-api.js files. I think this puts me in a semi-good position to start to explain/handle this question.
What I would love to have, however, is a nice write-up from someone much more knowledgable than I am about what all is going on behind the scenes to make an App Lab app happen – and how, exactly, a student could relate the JavaScript learned in App Lab to the vanilla JavaScript/jQuery one might learn in,say, w3Schools.
Is there anyone who could provide a response on this? Many students are very interested in (over–anxious in many cases) getting out of the Scratch-type “playpens” and into the real coding world ASAP. I need to be able to show them that what I’m teaching has a bridge to the “real world”. I love your block/text toggle, but I would like to be able to relate their text coding to JavaScript they might learn elsewhere.
Thank you,
Lee