Hello fellow Constructors. My name is Jim and I found Construct 2 from a LinkedIn post about the death of Flash. I just had finished with my project when Apple chose to put a stack right through Flash's heart. So begrudgingly, having already learned several other programming languages starting with Basic in the 80s, I began the task of learning HTML5 the hard way in order to recreate a project when all of a sudden out of heaven came Construct 2. Hallelujah!! It is so easy because it works the way the our minds think. Based on images (sprites) driven by logic. I do not care about the code, I just want it to work and boy does Construct work well.
I am a K-8 teacher who was studying to be an engineer and took a hard right turn in my career. Civil Engineering was boring and constrained by city departments which thought they knew best. In college, I was always teaching and helping college students with their tech problems, many whom would comment on how I would make a good teacher. Well I receive my K-8 credential in 1996 with a supplement in Computer Applications in Education. I used all my schooling and wide array of other experience to teach and mentor students in pulling network cable (Telephone communication in USMC), network infrastructure installation, programming, video, audio, graphic, web design, etc. My teach experience was mostly project base learning instruction integrated into all other core curriculum.
Currently I am recreating our Flash based course on how to become a better writer which use the fact that we think in pictures not words. So why not use pictures to teach how all the grammar is in real photographs or images in our mind. We just need to understand how to pull the data from the image and organize it into sentences, then paragraphs, and onto essays. I am working with a college professor who has thought writing for 30 + years and turning his lessons into a game, (which means highly interactive and engaging content when I talk to other teachers). I love how fast Construct 2 keeps meeting my needs each time I have strived to understand what Constructed 2 could do, and the next thing you know, it does way more than it did just the day before. Thank you all you code lovers for all those plugins and of course the Scirra team.
I have always been the mad scientist type since I was little and love teaching students how things work. Unfortunately now days, I would be in jail for many of my most exciting experiments I did as a child. I hope to some day work with another charter school's students teaching real world science and math using a custom built bus as a mobile science and technology platform. In the past, my students, teaching partner, and I would go camping or sailing on a 156 foot ship and study the world at large. I once had an RV which was purchase at my charter school for home schoolers for this very purpose but sadly that dream slipped away.
I look forward to completing the high school, college, and adult version of our project this summer and then begin developing the children's version soon after. I will also be developing a series of Logic lesson studies using Construct 2 gaming structure for students of all ages on how to think logically in every day life. If this, then that, else big mistake. OOPS!! <img src="smileys/smiley3.gif" border="0" align="middle" />