Minimum Age for teaching Stencyl

I have been teaching Scratch to 8-12 year olds.

Do you think that Stencyl can be used with this age range?

It looks as if it could be quite complicated for the 8 year olds.

Cheers

Andrew

I think it could be used with 8-12 year olds. You might want to do the Crash Course and use Stencylpedia to show examples of how the blocks work. In fact, I’ve actually seen people in that age range using Stencyl before, so it shouldn’t be too complicated to teach them the basics.

One time I ran a "make your your video game" class at the local library. It was intended for teens, but some parents ended up bringing their young kids. The young kids ended up needing a lot of help from their parents or older siblings, but they did seem to catch on to setting up actors with behaviors, laying out a scene, etc. Someone with more experience with kids could have done a better job than I did with them. (I teach at our university and so I'm used to working with adults. Effectively teaching young kids requires a skill set I don't have).

My takeaway from that experience: 8-12 is a wide range. If you want to focus on programming, Scratch seems like the better choice for the young kids. Older kids who are growing out of Scratch will probably welcome Stencyl's block interface with its expanded range of possibilities but familiar interface. If you have some advanced kids, maybe introduce them to Haxe?

I was hoping to give my two classes of 8 3rd-5th graders a brief introduction to Stencyl before the end of the school year since they do programming in Scratch 3.0, so I was interested in your experience with the library group.  But it sounds as if I would need to buy a classroom license for 30 students for a year just to have them try doing a project in Stencyl for $299, since the FAQ says that there is not any free usage for schools.  Did that apply to your library situation?