Education

Hi

I'm working in a college teaching computing & game design and on the look out for programs/ software that make programming easier to learn AND embrace new technologies such as HTML5 & publishing to facebook. IS anyone else a taecher and looking at this?? What are your thoughts?

Any feedback appreciated

Jude

Well you've landed in the right place! Have you seen our tool Construct 2? Click the home tab at the top for more information.

Im using C2 to create IPad and IPhone apps. Its working really nice! Now that I just finished to create thats apps and now Im creating a game. So, C2 can be used to create HTML5 apps too.

Hi,

I've just signed up after stumbling upon this site. (Doing my research ;).

After Christmas, I'm teaching a 2D Game Engine module for a GCSE-level course to 35 students. This looks like it could be just the thing.

I like to ensure the stuff that I'm doing will be relevant for the future and HTML5 is definitely that. The unit is more about games design than programming, (they have to design a 2D game element), but the important thing at this level is that it gets them thinking about the construction of the game elements, mechanics etc. It gets them used to development. Then after that we can bring in code.   It's also great that it can run on a plethora of platforms in the browser without any fiddly recompiling etc - a great way to sell it to the learners: "Look! What you've done can run on this system, and this system, and this system".

We are running XP on the desktop at college and so the default IE won't run HTML5. I've put a request in to have a better browser installed in the computer room we use but worst case scenario is to use the Opera USB version which seems to work great.

It's also a big bonus for the programme to run off USB. We can get software installed on the network, but the technicians can only do it every so often. If a new release comes out it's great to be able to run it immediately off USB.

I'll be playing around with this software a lot over the Christmas break :)

Cheers

Steve

Tom, can you PM me with details of Edu licences? Thanks

Hi!

I'm a teacher, but not a computing teacher. I have in mind creating some educative games using scirra, but at this time I've just done some tests.

Scirra Construct 2 looks easier to run than, say, the soon defunct AppInventor or its MIT succesors (you can see more "game makers to teach computing" in the MIT page). It is great, with things such as Physics that you can use to teach how "realistic" games are mad.

The main flaw Construct 2 and all game makers, is you need artistic abilities, because free sprites use to be very limited.

P.S. If your default browser is Explorer, install Chrome (or Firefox portable if you don't have privileges) and set the "Preview Browser: Chrome" property in each project.

jobf - you could try installing Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer. It enables Chrome to run certain web pages in IE, and Construct 2 supports it. You can install it without admin permissions too. I think that is true of the Google Chrome browser itself too, actually!

I'm a computer science professor in New York, and I will be using this software in my Video Game Programming course in the spring semester. My present thought is that we'll probably use Construct 2 mainly for rapid prototyping; only after some additional features are added (families, if-else, or, functions) would I consider incorporating it more extensively.

Yes, I am aware of work-arounds and plugins for some of these missing features, but IMHO it feels inelegant -- kludgy, even -- while these features are not part of the main software. However, that being said, I still think that Construct 2 is the best software of its kind out there and I will be sticking around this community for quite some time.