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Nice writeup, Tom.

If possible, can you describe a little bit about the school, the nature of the class you are teaching and the student themselves? How's 2.0 working for you folks so far. If any of you locate a bug, please let us know.

Thanks for the update! This is great to hear.

I'm really sorry to have taken so long to get back here. (As well as running the games class I'm primarily responsible for video production teaching and a heap of administration tasks that I wouldn't bore you with.)

In fact one of the students told me about the Newgrounds competition, a few of them are going to enter, and it reminded me to report back.

The 'pinball/physics' challenge went really well and I think everyone came up with something clever for their 'first ever computer game made in 3 weeks'. Most of them started by looking at the kits for advice and then trying a variation of an existing idea but then putting a spin on it (e.g. Asteroids but with poisonous spiders). Some of them looked really gorgeous as well. If they give permission I'll make a page with some of the better outcomes.

The 'adventure' challenge was more mixed. Stencyl is really good at tiles and play fields made up of small elements in arrays - but it's not great for large images. The guys that made side scrolling adventures did OK, but the Myst flip screen games hit memory limits very fast. This was partly my fault for providing a Myst style example that had run OK in GameSalad but I guess doesn't fit into the way the Flixel engine 'thinks'. One girl tried to use the video loader to make up dynamic backgrounds, which wasn't a great success. In general, loading external images as backdrops and then trashing them for gained memory is a procedure that needs more investigation.

Oh yeah, and LOTS of problems with sound that was mostly VBR MP3 files.

So their final challenge is up now and we'll see what they come up with for their own freestyle work.

To answer Rob's questions - I am teaching at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, which is part of the University of New South Wales. I inherited the Games course when another staffer quit and was horrified to find it WAS ALL BORING THEORY!! Being a non programmer I had to find an authoring system I could use, which is now Stencyl. I'm not going to be running Games next year (too much other work), but I've handed over to the Computer Science guys. They have been using code, but that frightens off the artists, so they will now use Stencyl and ActionScript.

I guess the theory part of it is similar to the writings of Jesse Schell and Chris Crawford.

Thanks for the update.

We don't support VBR MP3s -- only 44.1 kHz MP3s with 16-bit resolution. I guess this is a moot point now, but we recommend Audacity to perform the conversion.

Thanks for the update.

We don't support VBR MP3s -- only 44.1 kHz MP3s with 16-bit resolution. I guess this is a moot point now, but we recommend Audacity to perform the conversion.

Or Format Factory!

This has been a fascinating read by all involved. There was only one post from Primary school which is the area i work in and so it would be nice to find out the best approach for getting young children involved.

I run a game making club but we're currently using KODU which, even though it's great and fun, doesn't have quite the same creative input as Stencyl and i'd really like to get the children making things rather than just programming them.

I teach multimedia and game design at a college. My interest is mostly related to the art side and interactivity as art. The other posts here are dated a year ago. Has anyone move forward? I don't see a lot of real support from stencyl...

We've absolutely been moving forward, but this topic just happened to fall out of the limelight. Send me an email (see signature), and we'll chat!

I work in Higher Education, but have been working with a few parents at our children's elementary to implement some basic programming / game development courses into the courses using Scratch.  We're planning to expand into an after-school program for the older children to do actual game development using Stencyl.  Scratch is a great bridge into Stencyl.  Our goal is to align the program with the Math, Science and ELA standards.  We're looking forward to the curriculum guides you mentioned.  Thanks.

Hi, I'm from Brisbane, Australia and teach in a K-12 school. We are looking at Stencyl to fill a place in our computing science curriculum that uses Scratch, BYOB and App Inventor as part of the program for developing computational thinking. These tools are all use a similar block-like structures to manage the logic and hence we are looking at Stencyl as a replacement for Gamemaker, to provide this continuity of expressing ideas for students. I'm wondering how the development of the curriculum resources is progressing and if you have an ETA on its release?

Regards, Bryson

I am interested in receiving quotes to purchase for my school.  How can I go about this?

I am interested in receiving quotes to purchase for my school.  How can I go about this?

Stencyl has a contact us page here: http://www.stencyl.com/about/contact/

I know this is a very old thread, but I'm testing out game engines for a new gamedev club and remembered posting here a few years ago (2013).  Are there some recent examples of Stencyl being used in Education? Is Stencyl still actively maintained? I've been working primarily with Scratch, but think Stencyl is great next step after Scratch and my top choice at the moment. Thanks

Stencyl is still in active development and is widely used in schools across the world. Like you, many like the Scratch approach but want that "next step", and Stencyl offers exactly that.

We'd be happy to discuss specifics over e-mail.

Please contact us using our contact form.
http://www.stencyl.com/about/contact/

Great! I will follow-up with any questions.