RunRev have launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to make their popular programming platform, LiveCode, open source. LiveCode is a HyperCard-like environment that lets you make games and mobile apps as well as more traditional programmes.
This is fantastic news for schools and teachers. Both myself and Jeremy Scott from the Royal Society of Edinburgh have been in discussions with RunRev about how valuable access to LiveCode would be for schools and both of us were stunned and excited when RunRev told us the news.
Explaining why the company need to do this fundraising, Kevin Miller, CEO of RunRev said “Our small team supports a code base that is now some 20 years old. We support more platforms than we have engineers.” It is Kevin’s hope that “millions of school children can be inspired in the same way that I was when I was 12 years old and starting out.”
Once RunRev meet the fundraising goal they will make the existing platform available to the supporters. The current version has half a million lines of code in it, some almost 20 years old. Over the next few months the developers will work on creating a new open source version with community-friendly modules so that other developers can more easily create extensions and make changes.
As with every KickStarter project there are ‘rewards’ for supporting a project. One reward that might be of interest to teachers is the £55 reward level. As well as a heap of resources such as ebooks and mobile app, games and database academies this reward level includes a full day’s CPD in using LiveCode based in Edinburgh (including lunch!) Computing At School are working with RunRev to help them tailor this day for teachers and educators on how to teach young people programming and computational thinking skills.
Kevin told us “This is your chance to support an idea… I hope you see this Kickstarter project as a chance to make something happen. Because that is what this is really about. This is the most audacious, ambitious plan we’ve ever dreamed up as a company.”
If you’d like to support RunRev in this project or sign up for the CPD day, then go to their Kickstarter page at http://www.kickstarter.com/
If you’d like to try out LiveCode and get access to resources, it is free to all Scottish teachers using this link.
Access is denied to the kickstarter page, and how do you get the “free to all Scottish Teachers” deal
You could always access it from somewhere else like home or using a mobile device with 3G. You access the Scottish Teachers deal by clicking on the link in the article. You will then see that LiveCode for schools has been added to your basket at a cost of £0.
Katie
We have been looking at Livecode since the talk at CAS. The only problem is that all purchases through school have to go through iproc and we have no other way to allocate money. Any ideas? Thanks
Kate I tried the link and got it added to my basket for free but still got charged for this – money has been deducted from my bank account. I’m in touch with RunRev about this awaiting their reply….
Banking error! Got my free copy. Really hope this goes open source
Is there anyway to download it without having to supply credit card details?
Kev
Don’t think sobut wouldn’t hurt to email them and ask
It would be brilliant if everyone could support RunRev’s open source campaign in some way, then none of us would need to supply credit card details to use LiveCode and schools wouldn’t need to purchase an annual subscription. If you’ve been wanting to use LiveCode why not consider getting a day’s CPD for £55, which will also help the open source campaign!
Wow! RunRev has met and exceeded its target funding of £350K. So we can look forward to a new modularised LiveCode available to teachers for start of session 2013/14. Exciting or what?
Very exciting! They’ve met their first two stretch goals too and are on their way to the third. It’s not too late to sign up today for the one day course for teachers – either in Edinburgh or online (there is also New York but you’d have to pay for your own transport there! 😉