Welcome Back, VBA!

Welcome Back, VBA!

Are you too old or too young? Clicking the button runs a VBA script, as explained in an article in Digital Education.

It's nice to hear that VBA -- Visual Basic for Applications -- is one of the programming languages of choice for teaching the Computing curriculum.

I thought I was being an old stick-in-the-mud preferring it to Python, but on the STEM course I was teaching on recently, several delegates said they used it. They even encouraged me to republish an article I wrote in 2007 on how to teach iteration using VBA in Excel. I'm bringing that up-to-date (the menus in Excel have all changed since then), and it will be one of the articles in the next issue of Digital Education (which I'm also working on).

What's nice about VBA is that it's fairly intuitive. For example, a line of code like:

MsgBox "That ain't no number! Please try again"

may not be the most sophisticated programming ever seen, but it is pretty obvious what it does.

Read more.

cross-posted at www.ictineducation.org

Terry Freedman is an independent educational ICT consultant with over 35 years of experience in education. He publishes the ICT in Education website and the newsletter “Digital Education."