I am a science teacher by trade. My primary job is to teach science at a large public high school. About five years ago, my school district embraced the "1:1" concept, providing iPads to every student in the district. I got my hands on an iPad as soon as I could and started developing what I thought was going to be the "be all-end all" iPad physics app in Objective C. It launched and was successful. Apple flew me out to California and gave me a full-page spread on Apple's education website. The app was featured on all of the in-store iPads around the world.
It was great to have the recognition, but there was one fundamental problem: I couldn't iterate fast enough. From concept to release, it took 9 months and 1100 man-hours. Each update took several weeks of work, followed by at least a week of review by Apple. A week is an eternity in the classroom, and after three weeks, students have long forgotten what they struggled with a few weeks back. If I had an idea on a Tuesday at 3:30 pm, I needed a way to create interactive content and push it out to my students by Wednesday morning at 7:30 am.
My colleagues and I looked around for a long time for a way to do this. Initially we tried GameSalad, but found that it was too limiting, and the iPad app was too clunky to be used with students. When we found Construct 2, we were thrilled. We had it all in a single package:
• an easy-to-use interface so that all of the teachers could quickly learn how to make something useful
• native HTML5 development so that we could simply provide a link to our students, rather than going through a funky export process to deploy to something other than a ubiquitous web browser
• lightning-fast development time so that we could realize an idea for our students in a night, then improve upon it over the next few weeks to create something that was publishable for the world at large
Over the years, we have made simulations and tools that have been used by millions of students around the world. We don't really care about the money, just as long as we make enough to keep our websites going.
Construct 3 is a bargain if it allows us to continue to support development of the tool that has enabled us to be so creative for so many years. I haven't found anything else that comes close, and $150/year is a pittance to pay compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars textbooks publishers are paid every year by major school districts.