My experiences teaching Stencyl

majormax

  • Posts: 126
At the end of last school year me and my science teacher applied for a grant for macs to make apps with stencyl. We got $5000 and bought 4 macs and are planning on buying stencyl and apple licenses to publish apps.

So for a little less that the last quarter of the school year I taught stencyl at an "app club" at my school. Overall I had a very good experience with it. When we first announced the club, many people (over 20) showed up for the informational meeting. Though less people showed up later in the year, we still had some good turnouts. We also had the principal and the superintendent of the district show up to meetings. People who were there for a few weeks picked up on Stencyl in less than 1.5 hours (30 minutes after school every monday). We had about 6 regulars and 2 people who made music. Usually there were a couple other people who would show up.

Stencyl was the perfect tool for us to use because it let us develop on the windows machines we had a bunch of and also publish to iOS with the macs. We never ended up making an app but we did make a simple game that we used flash to make. I wasn't glad about how little time we had but next year we will have at least 30 meetings and should be able to get a lot more done. I know I got at least a couple people really interested in the tool and I hope they might see this post. It was a pleasure working with Stencyl and all the students.

Photics

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  • Posts: 718
That sounds cool. :)

I think it would be harder to work on a project in 30 minute sessions. It would be too many interruptions. Maybe a lab setting might help. That would allow students to work in longer sessions.

Although, since Stencyl runs on Mac, PC and even Linux, it seems like the students would be able to continue work on their project at home. That could be an alternative if creating a lab is an issue.
Michael Garofalohttp://photics.com – Author of The Interactive Stencyl Textbook 8)

Caligari

  • Posts: 22
I'm just starting to teach some kids using Stencyl.

The first barrier to them being able to take things home and work on them there, and to collaborate with others, seems to be that it isn't all that friendly to source control (which was my first thought).  I'm assuming that we can throw a Game's directory onto a USB drive and work on it somewhere else, and then bring it back and copy the changed version over what was there before. But I'm going to want to try that before I get the kids to try it with their projects.

Are a game's files able to be transferred from Mac to Windows? I'm assuming that will be fine.

Justin

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  • Posts: 4716
Yes, game files can be transferred between OSs with no problem.

The easiest method is to use the import/export game feature. From the File menu, choose Export Game... and save it to the USB drive, and then at home or school, the .stencyl file can be dragged right in to Stencyl, or you can use the Import Game... option.

Another method is to do the work yourself with a file explorer. You can open your file explorer to the location where games are saved using the menu bar: Debug > View > View Games Folder. It's also possible to change where games are saved on the computer using the workspace setting: File > Preferences > Workspace > Workspace Folder

Finally, you could also use StencylForge to upload a game for private storage.
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Vectrex71

  • Posts: 534
Or just use DropBox as i do.  DropBox/Workplace/Stencyl/Games

So you have in school and at home the same stuff


t4u

  • Posts: 418
5000$ - that's probably how much my highschool used to get for two months to operate... -_-'
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