Suggestions for an education programming project

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Eric wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I've been trying to get my son interested in learning some simple
> programming for a while. While I understand that a structured tutorial
> is best, I think if we can write something cool at least once, it will
> encourage him to learn more. While I have a lot of experience with
> MATLAB, I've just started playing with Python. It seems to me to be a
> great language to learn with. My son has an idea for a program to
> write. Basically he would like to present a window with a small circle
> on it. The window title would have the instruction to click on the
> circle. As the mouse approaches the circle, it moves away from the
> spot. Being a kid, the visual and interactive aspect appeals. I think
> this will be nice as he can add complexity incrementally such as what
> direction to move, how to handle running into the edge of the window,
> etc.
> 
> What I'd like is a suggestion as to what GUI framework to use (Tk, wx
> or something else). I can add modules if necessary. I'd just as soon
> use something clean, understandable and not too complex. Certainly,
> what ever we use needs to have good documentation. No code please,
> that's for us to figure out. In case it matters, we are using are
> programming in OS X.

This sounds like the punching-monkey-example from pygame. While that won't
teach about gui-programming on a toolkit level, it is extremely well suited
to go about small games and such. Or even bigger ones, if the son grows
up :)

Diez