Stencyl crash course 2 not winning how to#

That differs for every programming language, which is why I think it's more important that they learn the 'logic' aspects of programming.Īs far as the Learning Stencyl 3.x book is concerned, it shows how to develop a single game (a platformer), but in the process of doing so, it teaches a lot of the practicalities of creating any game with Stencyl such as creating actors, scoring, countdown timer bar, managing game over, etc. Where Stencyl 'wins' (compared to 'traditional' coding) is that it relieves the student from the drudgery of technicalities such as how to make images appear on the screen.

I wish that Stencyl had been available when I was teaching, not only because I could have used it for free, but because it is far more closely aligned to the coding that most people know.Īs far as I am concerned, creating, for example, a repeat loop, or a while loop, requires exactly the same thought processes in Stencyl as it does in a 'traditional' programming language. Order, logic, planning, etc, are the skills that I was teaching. In my view, programming skills are based on principles, rather than specific coding knowledge. MMF2 does not use blocks but, rather, one places check marks in a grid to (using Stencyl terminology) assign 'behaviors' to actors, etc. I used to use ClickTeam's MultiMedia Fusion 2 (MMF2) to teach students aged 11-16 to develop games. Does this book have actually working game code? How many games are presented in the book? Now I'm looking to buy the book - Learning Stencyl 3.x. I'll have to experiment and see if I can adequately teach the programming concepts at the level I need. You have a wonderful product that I'm sure will be very engaging for students.

I've run through the first two Stencyl Crash courses. Will it really help them understand programming concepts well enough, so that we can eventually move on to AP CS Java? Is it too easy? But I have my concerns of using a drag & drop block style interface with high school students. I have experience using Scratch with middle school students. I am looking for a tool that will help me capture the interest of my students and a tool that will remove many of the common obstacles of learning programming. I have 12 years experience teaching programming in everything from VB.NET to C++ to Java and JavaScript. Also, there are better ways of aligning text so that it is automatically centered, but that is beyond the scope of this article.I am a high school computer science teacher in northwest Washington State. If you change the game window's (viewport's) size to something other than a Width of 640 and a Height of 480, you'll have to adjust the X and Y values shown so the text is located where desired. Keep in mind that we're setting exact coordinates for where the text should appear. You should end up with the following once you destroy your enemies. Keep in mind that text positioning is determined by the left-side of the text so we are beginning our text at the center of the screen, not centering the middle of the text. Notice that you can move your mouse cursor around in the Scene to find the best coordinates to choose - you can see the coordinates in the lower right of the Scene Editor (as shown below). Set the coordinates for X and Y to 300 and 240 for now. For the text to show, simply type in ' You Win!' Lastly, drag over a draw text at x, y block and place it inside the if block. In the Drawing category, grab the set current font to block under the Styles subcategory and place it inside the When Drawing block.ĭrag over an if block, and place the Win? Attribute block in it. This will let us actually draw the text onto the screen. Step 101: Lastly, we need to add a When Drawing Event (under Basics). Select the Setter block for this Attribute (under Attributes -> Setters) Step 100: Now we need to create another Attribute that we will use to “switch on” the text that will display when the player kills all the Enemy Ships.Ĭreate an Attribute of type Boolean called Win? NOTE: If you have fewer (or more) than 5 Enemies in the scene, be sure to set the number to that value, not 5!