Community reviews for GameMaker

I like that this program is very personalized to edit your game however you want. It has a lot of required information when you first start out with this program which can be tedious, especially taking up a lot of class time. Overall, I think it's a great program for students who are interested in this subject.

I love how you do not necessarily need to know "coding language" to use this program, but instead can first rely on the drag and drop options for your coding. This helps eliminate minor detail errors that students might not realize they are making when they first begin to learn code. The program also made it very easy to upload your own images and use them in your games. I would recommend this product to others who teach computer science.

I think it is very easy to teach coding of android apps. I put down my thoughts about teaching coding on my website http://rollke.biz/approedu/styled-6/styled-14/

Gamemaker Studio is an excellent tool to use for programming once students have moved past basics of Code and Kahn Academy, Scratch, or other basic programming tools. What's unique and wonderful about Gamemaker Studio is games can be designed at many different levels, and, that the action block programming can be used or GML (integrated scripting language) hand-coding to really tweak your games. Gamemaker meets the level of the student and provides the opportunity for students to challenge themselves and think at a higher level in terms of programming and design because with Gamemaker Studio the possibilities are near endless. It is a creativity creator and the creation is limited only by the limits of the imagination. The Official YoYo Games website will provide users with the basics for learning to use Gamemaker Studio as well as many game ideas. However, there is an abundance of tutorials online along with several channels that provide video series tutorials that walk users through the basics of getting started with Gamemaker Studio and setting up requirements in your game . As with all classroom programming curriculum, teacher established requirements and criteria for the finished product are necessary. Students must think through how they will meet those requirements and criteria and what they will create to do so.

I absolutely love GameMaker Studio. It is scalable as there is a drag n' drop approach to programming objects, as well as a built in programming language (GML - Game Maker Language) that students can learn and incorporate. This helps to make GameMaker a solid development tool for students as young as 5th or 6th grade (some may argue even younger) through high school and beyond. I like to teach the basics and encourage students to be resourceful beyond that. Students are motivated because they are engaged in the development process and are open to extending their learning by seeking out resources to help them accomplish what they want to see in their games. I am continually encouraging others to use GameMaker as an Introduction to Computer Science because of it's low barrier to entry. Students truly learn programming concepts in a visual way that makes a lot of sense and translates well to advancing to coding with any programming language.

The kids went home and worked on this for months! It was a great stepping stone to get them interested in computer programming and game design.