cjbruce's Forum Posts

  • Nicely done!

    I wanted to make an iPad app for my physics students to record an object in motion and then model it mathematically. I was about to write off video recording in Construct 2 until I saw that your solution (multiple snapshots, constant time intervals) is exactly what I was looking to do.

    Thank you for the great work!

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  • Its great to see so many people using Construct 2 in the classroom!

    I am a high school physics teacher in Illinois, USA. Until a few weeks ago when we discovered Construct 2, we had been using GameSalad as a modeling and simulation tool, which worked really well for our second-year physics students. A week and a half ago I gave Construct 2 to those students and tasked them with building a useful simulation for our iPad-based classes similar to those available at phet.colorado.edu. I will post the results of the challenge later this week.

    I am curious to see lesson plans. In particular I am looking to use Construct 2 in two ways:

    1. As a creative tool (e.g. create a short game to demonstrate an idea)

    2. As a modeling and simulation tool (e.g. create a system of planets, modify the rules of gravity and see what happens)

    My pipe dream is to use Construct 2 to develop a physics simulation creation tool that is simple enough for 10-year-olds with low math skills to use but is powerful enough to teach physics modeling to high school students. Maybe next summer. :)

  • I am a high school physics teacher in Illinois, USA. A little over a year ago, we learned that our school district would be buying iPads for use in the classroom, so my fellow physics teachers and I decided to learn to program so we could develop better tools for our students. After developing and releasing products in Objective C and php/HTML5, we discovered GameSalad, which I tried with my students and loved.

    We have just recently discovered Construct 2 and it has completely changed our workflow. Our team has gone from 1 developer and 3 designers to 4 developer/designers, and in just a few weeks we have tripled the number of cool tools for our students to use. We are looking forward to holding workshops for the other teachers in our district to show them how to use Construct 2 for their own classrooms.

    This school year I have used both Construct 2 and GameSalad with my AP Physics C students (2nd year, calculus-based physics). The results are as follows:

    GameSalad (5 days total):

    Day 1: I showed students the basics of making a platformer. Students loved the ease at which they could apply the physics engine.

    Days 2-5: Students made something that could be controlled without the use of the keyboard or mouse, as we would be designing tools for next year's iPad students.

    Construct 2 (two weeks):

    Students were tasked with recreating a physics simulation from the phet.colorado.edu website so that it could be used on the iPad (no keyboard or mouse controls). PhET simulations currently require Flash, Java, or both.

    After spending time with both, I can say that my students had an easier time picking up the workflow in GameSalad. Construct 2's event system is less intuitive for them, and many of them were frustrated because they couldn't figure out how to do simple things like they could in GameSalad. In particular, they have a lot of difficulty with the idea of "picking". On the other hand, the fact that Construct 2 has a built-in image editor means that my students could create something other than colored rectangles right in the program itself. I introduced Adobe Fireworks along with Construct 2, so many of the students have had a great time working in Fireworks and importing images.

    Bottom line: Construct 2 is THE BEST TOOL out there for teachers to make simulations for their students. The fact that Construct 2 creates HTML5 natively means that the output can be used anywhere on any device, including websites and iBooks Author Widgets.   However, before I try it with students again I need a pretty tight set of lesson plans in place so they don't get lost. GameSalad was easier for students to just pick up and use for my AP students. My regular students will definitely need a much tighter script to follow before they are comfortable creating with it.

    My Ultimate Dream: A Construct 2 iPad port. If there were a way to bring Construct 2 to the iPad in a student-friendly package, I would sell my left kidney. Construct 2 is an incredibly powerful tool, and if it were combined with the anytime, anywhere accessibility of the iPad we could create a generation of people who could think analytically and creatively.

    PS - We will be finishing up the PhET simulation project next week. As soon as we are done I will post a link to the website with student work.

  • That's great news, and thanks for the heads up!

  • Ashley,

    First of all, thank you for all that you do. You have enabled a small team of teachers to go from one developer and four designers to four developer/designers with Construct 2. We are very much looking forward to using it in the classroom.

    We are looking at rebuilding a 50 MB iPad app from the ground up in Construct 2 because of the portability of HTML5 versus Objective C. I am working through the first question layout (of approximately 40). I am not worried about download size, as I intend to PhoneGap the final product, but I am worried about overloading my phone's memory (a Samsung Galaxy S2 with a persistent memory leak). Objective C agressively handles memory so having 50 MB worth of resources isn't an issue. My first layout currently uses 1.5 MB of memory. If I extrapolate that out, the final product should require about 60 MB. Is it foolish to think that I will be able to load the app with all 40 question layouts built?

    Thanks for the help!

    -Chris