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Stagecast Creator is an easy-to-use, easy-to-learn object-oriented programming environment which enables kids of all ages to make their own interactive simulations completely visually.
Users program by demonstration. After creating their own characters, users teach the characters what to do by pointing and clicking. The Stagecast Creator system records what the users do and makes rules for the characters. As children design the interactions between their characters and create simulations with Stagecast Creator, they learn basic computer science concepts and develop algorithmic thinking skills.
Many educators advocate teaching foundations of computer science and algorithmic thinking to K-8 students using programs such as Stagecast Creator.
Dr. David D. Thornburg, Director Global Operations, Thornburg Center, Recife, Brazil and Chicago, USA, and former instructor at Stanford University and at the University of Sao Paulo shares his experience with Stagecast Creator:
Without question Stagecast Creator is a powerful programming tool that provides an excellent philosophical entry point for modern programming languages. For example, because rules are connected to individual "cast members" or their class, the elements of object-oriented programming are introduced in an intuitive, concrete manner. The ease with which programs can be tested and modified encourages the kind of creative thinking needed to be more than a purely mechanical programmer. Alternative languages (such as MIT's StarLogo, for example) provide these elements with the loss of intuitiveness. For beginning programmers, as well as those who want to explore new programming environments, visual programming environments like Stagecast Creator have much to recommend them. Debugging is far easier in Creator than in most other languages -- an important feature for a language used by students.
I have used Creator with college students, some of whom had never programmed in their life, and they found it a very positive experience both in the programming and in the ease with which they were able to create programs that worked in a timely fashion.
Dr. Gerald Balzano, Professor, University of California San Diego, USA asserts that Stagecast Creator is ideal for learning algorithmic thinking:
At first blush, Stagecast Creator looks like an engaging, fun environment for building simple simulations and games, but hardly one where a person could learn to do serious programming. This initial impression, however compelling, is profoundly mistaken. Stagecast Creator is both (a) a surprisingly powerful program, able to create simulations and games of much greater complexity than it would first appear, and (b) an ideal environment for learning to program.
To assert that Creator is an ideal way to learn programming may appear extreme. Why would I say such a thing?
When a person first learns to program, their first "programming environment" is generally a "programming language." Learning to program through learning a programming language entails two major steps: (1) learning the vocabulary of the language and the various syntactic forms with which one can construct expressions, commands, and the like; (2) learning to "think algorithmically", that is, learning how to think through a process or behavior and articulate how to break it down and describe the "steps" or "moves" through which the algorithm is carried out. Having to learn both (1) and (2) at the same time is very difficult! And the fact that both are necessarily entailed in learning one's first programming language may be a substantial part of why learning how to program is considered so hard.
With Stagecast Creator, we see clearly for the first time that it is possible to learn algorithmic thinking in a much purer form than would be possible with any programming language. Since Creator is, to the greatest degree possible, language-free and therefore language-independent, the student can focus completely on the algorithms, behaviors, and mechanisms needed to carry out the desired functions of the game or simulation s/he is designing.
More than this, Creator provides a rich set of concrete metaphors for thinking about sophisticated computational concepts. Its agent-orientation is nicely compatible with current trends in object-oriented programming. And the essentially parallel fashion with which agents carry out their different, distributed parts of the larger program the user is designing, is also the wave of the future, where programmers will need increasingly to think in terms of multiple simultaneous parallel processes as a basic kind of computational substrate. In fact, once we get to this point, even the word "algorithm", with its strictly sequential connotations, becomes too limited a term to describe the "break down" of a process wherein multiple agents interact with one another and (possibly) with a user.
It should also be said that Stagecast Creator, for as simple to learn and use as it is, possesses an incredibly powerful means for debugging programs, and the debugger is itself amazingly easy to use and works more or less seamlessly within the overall Creator environment. And there is even something to be said for the idea one's first programming environment having some kind of "ceiling", that is, a level of program complexity that it is insufficiently powerful to handle. Because as one becomes more and more skilled at Stagecast programming and approaches or reaches this ceiling, one has a direct appreciation of the kinds of qualities required of a more powerful, more general-purpose programming environment, and this provides essential motivation to learn that more powerful programming medium (probably "language") that might not be there otherwise.
According to the report A Model Curriculum for K-12 Computer Science: Final Report of the ACM K-12 Task Force Curriculum Committee :
- Level I [Foundations of Computer Science] (recommended for grades K-8) should provide elementary school students with foundational concepts in computer science by integrating basic skills in technology with simple ideas about algorithmic thinking. This can be best accomplished by adding short modules to existing science, mathematics, and social studies units.(pp.10-11)
- Children learn about algorithmic problem solving whenever they discover a collection of steps that can be carried out to accomplish a task. These steps should accommodate unusual contingencies (using conditional, or "if" statements) and repetitions (using loops, or "while" statements). (p. 12)
Michelle Friend Hutton, Computer Science teacher at the Girls' Middle School in Mountain View, California says:
"As a board member of the Computer Science Teachers Association and member of the curriculum committee, I am very interested in tools that support the K-12 Model Curriculum's emphasis on algorithmic thinking in Level 1 (Grades K-8). In my opinion, Stagecast Creator is one of the premier tools available for engaging students in algorithmic thinking. Students are completely engaged and enjoying themselves, but need to create algorithms in order to be successful at creating simulations. Because few K-8 schools have a computer science program, I am inevitably encouraged by the cross-curricular projects I see on the Stagecast website. As the co-chair of the equity committee in addition to working at a girls' school, I am also quite impressed by Stagecast Creator's appeal to girls. Girls enjoy the opportunity to create games and stories to match their imaginations. The open-ended nature of the software, along with the ability to easily import images from anywhere, allows them a measure of creativity I do not see in many programs."
Mahmoud, Qusay, "Revitalizing Computing Science Education," Computer Magazine, IEEE, May 2005, Vol. 38, No. 5.
In his article in Computer Magazine, Professor Qusay Mahmoud proposes some measures for computing science departments preparing CS students for the future. The last measure he lists is:
"Make CS courses fun. Design computer programming courses suitable for students in the arts.
This last measure - programming for poets - might eventually motivate such students to move into CS, or at least minor in the subject. But the core solution will involve getting students interested in CS at an early age. Ultimately, holding summer computing camps for children eight years and older might achieve this goal by, for example, teaching these students how to program video games using tools such as Stagecast Creator."
Lin, Janet Mei-Chuen, et al, "Teaching Computer Programming in Elementary Schools: A Pilot Study," Department of Information and Computer Education, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan, presented at NECC, 2005.
Professor Janet Lin and her colleagues taught 10-12 year old students to use Stagecast Creator, HANDS, and Visual Basic as part of a research study. They analyzed the students' attitudes and the difficulties they encountered in learning computer programming. Results of the study showed children can learn and enjoy computer programming, so why not teach them in elementary school?
"Stagecast Creator was considered the easiest to learn." (p.6)
Desh Bagley, CEO of TechPlayzone, Inc., Florida says:
"We've discovered that it's easier to teach programming skills to K-5th grade students using Stagecast first. The concepts of sprites, objects, variables, conditions, actions and stages are easier to teach with Stagecast because students don't necessarily need reading skills or strong logic skills.
When our students are making a game about Black History Month and the Underground Railroad, our K-4th graders prefer to make characters with rules, variables, and stages. Stagecast is a very intuitive software that students naturally understand.
I compare it to Computer Science 101 and Computer Science 201. We transition our students from Stagecast to Scratch. Many of the K-3rd graders prefer Stagecast because the interface is easy to remember and the concept of making rules keeps things simple.
From an educator's point of view, Stagecast is always my first introductory software. I love it. It helps make complex topics easier to understand. When I transition to Scratch, the students grasp the programming concepts because we've explored them in Stagecast first."
Computer Science Concepts in Stagecast Creator
Below is a list of computer science concepts and the corresponding features in Stagecast Creator.
| Concept |
Stagecast Creator |
| Objects and Inheritance |
Characters |
| Methods |
Rules |
| Control Structures |
"And-if Tests" and Actions, Rule Box choices (do first, do random, do all and continue, do in turn) |
| Variables |
Character Variables and Global Variables |
| Passing Parameters |
Using Global Variables |
| Abstraction |
Jars |
| Code Documentation |
Names for characters, variables, rules, etc., Rule Comments |
| Events |
Mouse Clicks, Key Input |
| Event Loops |
Clock |
| Debugging |
Testing rules, Examine tool, Rule Lights, Disabling rules, Break Point |
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