On making your animation lab "huggable":

Yes, teaching animation applications is incredibly fun, and you'll probably be hard pressed to find a more dedicated band of followers ;) But, is your lesson plan "huggable"? Meaning, are the basic programming concepts in your teaching application understood by your students outside that application? Can your students program event handling (i.e. how to move their characters using the keyboard) in Alice as well as in Scratch without a lot of coaching? Can they create a "loop" in both?

When I teach, I cover at minimum 2 animation applications because I want to make sure how I teach computer programming "hugs", reaches broadly, to teach the basic concepts so that kids understand how to build event handlers and loops across applications. To remind myself, I think of it using this mnemonic:

H = having
U = universal
G = game
S = snippets (sample code)

the challenge to me as a teacher to have multiple code samples to demonstrate a standard animation action.  For example, my standard animation action is "moving your character around the scene editor", to demonstrate event handling. In Alice, you approach this by going to the Event panel, click "create new event", then make a selection from the drop down that appears. In Scratch, you click on the "Control" category, then drag over "when xxx key pressed" building block. In Kodu, you click on "When", make your action selection, then "Do" and make the dependent action association.

Wow, the programming across these 3 applications for controlling something as basic as how to make your character move ("move my character to the right when the right arrow key is pressed") is enormously different. Easy to see how kids could miss how to generalize the "event handling" concept from one application to the next. But, real world programming is like this, which is why we need to make sure lesson plans talk about what "event handling" is, and concretely demonstrate different approaches so kids "get" how event handling can differ, application to application. And then, when someone down the road asks them to work with an "event handler", they have some basic idea of the different ways they can tackle this request and the confidence to troubleshoot.