Create Games Using Stencyl

Stencyl is a free program for creating flash-based games on your Mac or Windows computer. Using Stencyl you can create a fairly complex game even if you don't have any coding skills at all. That is possible because Stencyl uses a drag and drop interface to enable game creation. Stencyl provides a huge selection of characters, settings, and elements to add to each scene of your games. To create and direct the actions within your games Stencyl gives you a block-snapping interface to construct actions and sequences. The block-snapping interface will look familiar to people who have used Scratch or Android App Inventor.

Watch the video below to learn more about Stencyl.


Applications for Education
I learned about Stencyl from an article on Read Write Web and thought to myself, "I can quickly make a game." I was wrong. Stencyl is not something that you or your students are likely to figure out in a class or two. That is because Stencyl offers so many options for creating and editing games. In fact, Stencyl recommends that you have at least an hour to work through the first game creation tutorial. That said, the process of figuring out the sequences that go into a game could be a great exercise in developing logical problem solving skills.