I really like programming and my school is kind of dull. They teach us scratch, which in my opinion, isnt even a programming language at all…
I have been teaching Playcanvas in my after school coding club and am getting several other classmates to use Playcanvas and they are having quite a lot of fun. The problem with my school and coding is simply that we mostly have access to Chromebooks, which are only supported by a handful of coding softwares. Many of them quite tricky and hard to access.
My question is if a “PlayCanvas for education” program would be possible. It would be sort of like an org license allowing students to work in groups of 3s and 4s on projects and possibly getting 500 mb to 1 gb storage space per person. Not quite sure what the pricing would be, but I would definitely recommend it to our school. Playcanvas is a lot better than scratch!
That’s a cool idea. From student experience perspective, if PlayCanvas can provide customizable assets (such as sounds, models, effects) so that students can jump start their experiments, that will help students a lot.
From revenue perspective, steady revenue will come from schools and school districts rather than individual students. And I think schools and school district’s pain is that they don’t have capable teachers those can manage systems troubles, student accounts, and the teaching programming itself! In the past, I researched programming education market once and it seems U.S. is by far the best market.
True, however I do think that a lot of the teachers do not get a lot of training in terms of programming. That makes scratch an obvious candidate, but playcanvas already comes with tutorials and is relatively self explanatory. I believe schools could also invest in this because it would teach their students 3d modeling and animation.
Hi @DraceonWings! Thanks for the positive feedback. We totally recognize the value that PlayCanvas can play in education. Today, many schools and colleges are already using PlayCanvas (you may occasionally see dev logs in the global feed that are clearly school exercises being completed). Anyway, we really want to see this continue to grow. PlayCanvas has some great benefits for educational use:
It runs on any computer: Windows, Mac, Linux or even Chrome OS. You can even load the Editor on a table/phone!
It does not need to be installed. Everything runs in the browser so it’s easy for a school to manage.
Students can sit at any computer and continue from where they left off since it’s a cloud platform
It is realtime collaborative so students can team up on projects and work seamlessly together.
It is very accessible and easy to learn - it’s like a streamlined, simpler version of the Unity interface.
Students get to learn pure JavaScript, the most popular language on GitHub with real value in the workplace.
Tutors/teachers can log in from anywhere and offer assistance or mark projects.
And so on…
Today, we don’t have an official educational program. Currently, we’re dealing with this in a case by case basis. We’re very open to providing your (or any other) school with ORG style licenses but we’d need to discuss a pricing level that works for both of us. Feel free to get your school to email info ‘at’ playcanvas ‘dot’ com to discuss this.
In the meantime, have fun using PlayCanvas! Looking forward to seeing what you create.
