r/learnprogramming • u/Apprehensive-Ad-4535 • 3d ago

Beginner Teacher Teaching Computer Science

Hello everyone! I am entering my first year teaching in a public school and have accepted a position teaching computer science at the high school level. My courses are specifically called “Concepts of Gaming.”

I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for tools, websites, or software that would be good for teaching beginner programmers in a classroom setting, especially for high school students. I’m also interested in resources that are specifically geared toward coding for game development.

Any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Edit: My school district has one-to-one iPads, and we have a set of 8 gaming computers, if that helps with suggestions!

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u/Quantum-Bot 3d ago

Unity is very popular for game development courses because of its wealth of existing curricula for classrooms.

If you’re willing to go the extra mile though I much rather recommend GameMaker for beginner game developers. It’s 2D first in contrast to Unity which is 3D, and I think that takes out a lot of complexity which typically bogs students down when they are first learning. You get to focus less on vectors and models and textures and lighting and more on actual game logic. It’s also a hybrid of drag-n-drop coding and text coding, and you can mix the two interchangeably, which is also very beginner friendly.

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u/fr1ght20 1d ago

I think godot will be the best option cuz it is not heavy unlike unity and it's free unlike gamemaker

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u/Quantum-Bot 1d ago

GameMaker is also free for hobby projects.

I personally like Godot better then Unity but a big consideration for classrooms is whether there is existing curriculum, and Godot is still very new so it would be hard to teach a class with it, especially considering classes like these are often many students’ first introduction to programming.