cjbruce First of all, it's a bit peculiar that you create a new thread titled "A Teacher's View", about a day after I created a thread titled "An Educator's Perspective" (). Was it too much to reply to my thread?
Secondly, I believe your thread is a tiny bit misleading. It's one thing to use Construct to develop material, and a different thing altogether to use Construct to teach material. I believe a more accurate title should have been "A Successful Developer's View: ..." MPPlantOfficial's point rings true here. Directly or not, he points out that you're a single person, so obviously it's easy to say it's a bargain.
For example, an entry-level electronics online class of ours successfully deployed a whole bunch of interactive circuit testing and building simulation apps developed using Construct 2. A C2 license was purchased for each developer, and it was a "bargain" because of how many students have successfully used the exported apps. No brainer. Not the same as teaching with Construct.
PS: our town passed a referendum that granted the public school corporation millions of additional dollars in property tax revenue. They used around $2 million of it to buy each student in each of the public high schools in the area iPads for use in the classroom and at home. After a couple years of unanimous animosity from the teachers and the students, they discarded all the iPads at a catastrophic loss. They then switched to paying huge amounts of money to buy each student 2-in-1 Windows laptops. I haven't heard how that is going.
CannedEssence,
First off, let me say I am a huge fan of your post. It was very carefully considered and thoughtfully written. It is what inspired me to write about my own story. I didn't want to post under you thread for two reasons:
1. I didn't want to steal your thunder. You did a very good job of explaining your point of view, and aside from a nod of agreement, there wasn't really anything I could say without detracting from your thread.
2. I wanted to add a slightly different story to the mix.
To say that I am a successful developer is a bit of an overstatement. For me, software development is a hobby, not a vocation - teaching pays all of the bills, and it is what I love to do. I spend 90% of my productive time throughout the week teaching/grading/planning/talking to parents, and the remaining 10% in Construct 2. My point is that Construct 2's greatest strength is that it enables someone like me to develop useful tools for the classroom at a rate that simply would not have been possible in any other way. Over the years I have seen teachers get creative with things like interactive PowerPoints ("Jeopardy") and really cool Excel spreadsheets (i.e. the "Professional Vector League Draft") for use with their students, but this is the first time in my career that I have been able to make full-up HTML5 simulations quickly enough to implement and deploy over the course of a high school unit (typically 2-3 weeks). Construct 2 is a fantastic enabling tool for the classroom, and nothing else comes close to its functionality. Sure, there might be other tools out there that are better for more traditional development purposes, but Construct 2 is the only one that does what it does so well.
I think it is awesome that you guys used a Construct 2-generated circuits simulator with your electronics class. In my opinion, that is a success for Scirra's product as much as any other. I am happy to tell other teachers about this amazing tool for the classroom.
Lastly, I would love to teach an entire class using Construct 2. I think you are absolutely right that we can and should be promoting computational literacy with all of our students. Computer game development happens to be an awesome way to do that. Unfortunately for me and my students, the financial trade-off for putting iPads in the hands of all of the students in our school district was that they removed all of our classroom computers. I love the things that the iPad does well -- the immediacy of filming an event in slow motion, taking a screenshot, and marking it up and doing calculations right on the screenshot, for example. I hate that my students have lost the ability to analyze that motion in Excel on a real computer, or make a computational model of that same motion in Construct 2. Losing our classroom computers is a political battle that I fought and lost, and it is still a pretty bitter pill for me to swallow.
The reason I posted this in the Construct 3 forum and not in "Open Topic" is that I believe that the legacy of Construct 2 is important enough to me that I don't want to see it die. Teachers have a long a history of paying to support things that they believe to make the world a better place. I am happy to pay for Construct 3 if it means that Construct 2 will continue to be supported by the developers, and that the legacy of Construct 2 will live on for as long as possible.