Did Gamesalad officially declare their new goal of education?

OrvilFox

It looks like..Well, it is obvious to see that, Gamesalad recently are having apparent activities on education. (From main page, twitter, etc)
Will Gamesalad become an education-specific tool/software in the future? Or did I missed any announcement?
I'm sure Gamesalad will be a wonderful tool for students to learn programming in High School or college. (I myself as a high school indie developer proves that), but it is settled that Gamesalad will become more educational than productive for studios or companies?

pHghost

I don't think giving a bigger focus on education should affect other users in any way.

It is a good strategy to attract lots of new users to the software and grow their user base. GameSalad are working hard on adding new features to the software to make it better and better, which constantly makes it more productive for studios or companies with each new version.

Armelline

A surprisingly large proportion of my clients are educators, making games for their students. GameSalad is a great tool for both making games/apps quickly and cheaply that can be used in classrooms, and for teaching kids the fundamentals of logic and giving them a stepping stone towards "real" programming. It's a fantastic tool for education, and I hope this new strategy pays off for them!

adent42

We haven't made a big announcement, but we are directing more of our focus to education. Even with this new focus, GameSalad’s best selling point is that it’s a real tool used by real app developers.

So while our sales efforts and even our website will eventually reflect this new focus, we’re always going to improve the tool that you love in ways that will make game creation better.

dgackey

We have had an education line of business for many years, largely in response to customer demand -- folks coming to us and asking us to help them teach computer science and get kids coding. But it's never been a big priority in the past, so we haven't allocated as many resources to it.

As @adent42 said, we are finally moving more of our resources into education, but it's not really a new strategy or focus. When @CodeWizard took over as CEO, we made it clear that our focus was helping people learn how to make games -- hobbyists, students, anyone who was interested. There are a lot of other tools on the market, but almost nobody truly focused on helping new users learn how to become game developers.

That's why we put so much effort into improving the new user experience, our efforts with customer success and the Intercom system, creating the GameSalad Academy site and stocking it with tutorials, etc.

We know by now that GS is a tool that appeals to people who dream of making games but don't know where to start. And we've found out along the way that a lot of people cut their teeth using GS, then graduated to writing code on other platforms, which, as it turns out, is actually the ideal use case for education: students learn the fundamental concepts of computer science with GameSalad and it helps them be more successful when they move on to writing code in other environments.

If you follow current events, there are many, many initiatives underway at the state and federal level designed to get every student coding, movements to correct the gender imbalance in engineering programs, and just generally ensure that graduates are well-prepared to deal with 21st century employment challenges. We know GS is a great tool that can help, so to that end, we're absolutely committed to that market.

With that said, we have no intentions of "dumbing down" GS -- we believe the fact that we didn't build it expressly for children is one of its biggest strengths -- so I don't think there should be any apprehension on the part of anyone who is using GameSalad to follow their dreams and build great games.

If anything, I hope it inspires you, because you may inspire a slew of young game designers yourselves!

RThurman

@dgackey -- well said!

I just want to add that I find GameSalad the perfect tool for teaching teachers to teach with games.

Teachers can use GameSalad as a tool for them to make their own instructional games. And they can also use GameSalad in the classroom to teach students many STEM/STEAM topics (including fundamental concepts of computer science).

mhedges

I think it's great that young and new users be exposed to this software for educational and enjoyment purposes. I am willing to bet that most of you who actually know a programming language still remember the first one you learned. GS as a first "language" will probably be remembered by many young and new users some time from now.

Had I been exposed to this tool in my youth, as opposed to self-learning in an isolated environment (no Internet, no exposure to others with similar interests in programming), chances are that would've been the push to really go into Computer Science or a related field (as opposed to studying what I did, but I can't complain , but then again, I wouldn't have met my wife or anything like that - you know, the Butterfly Effect ).

What I would suggest to the team at GS is that you tell the staff at whatever educational institutions your software is used that students should complement their programming skills with some type of Logic Concepts class or material.

Gnarly

GS is the perfect educational tool. Quick and easy to learn and results are instant. Every high school should offer GS as a class!