[OLPC-Games] High School Programming "Jam"

[jofate at jotaro.com]

Hi Clare,

> -- What's the best game programming environment for novices?  Python
with PyGame?  Most of these girls have no programming background, and
we're using this project to teach programming basics.

Python is an excellent beginner's language.  PyGame may be slightly more
complicated than necessary for beginners, as it is only a thin wrapper
around SDL.  With PyGame, beginners will have to learn a little bit about
event loops and resource allocation (e.g. why you don't want to load an
image every time you draw it).  While these are good things to know, they
aren't absolutely necessary for someone just starting out.  Some of these
details can be hidden by using an appropriate library on top of PyGame. 
Although I haven't used it myself, I've heard that Pygsear is one such
simplifying library:

http://www.nongnu.org/pygsear/

The author of Pygsear is in the process of writing a book on using Python
and PyGame to teach programming:

http://staff.easthighschool.net/lee/computers/book/

There are other useful libraries on the PyGame site, too, for things like
writing specific genres of games (e.g. tile-based) or features of games
(e.g. animation, GUIs):

http://www.pygame.org/projects/9

> -- Is there any existing OLPC curriculum similar to what we're doing
(teaching novice programming through creating games)?  I believe part of
the vision for the laptop is that children can create their own games.

The current builds of the laptops also have Etoys running inside of a
Squeak (Smalltalk) environment.  Squeak lets you examine and change the
code of any object in the system while it is running, which may lend
itself to a more exploratory approach than PyGame.  The material on the
Etoys website seems to emphasize science and math exploratory exercises
over more traditional forms of programming or computer games.  You can
download Etoys here:

http://www.squeakland.org/

There are also examples on the site of what other schools have done with
Etoys.

-- Joe