Homework help requested (not what you think!)

[alex23]

On 17/07/2013 8:43 AM, John Ladasky wrote:
> The kids all claim to be interested.  They all want to write the next great 3D video game.  Thus, I'm a little surprised that the kids don't actually try to sit down and code without me prompting them.  I think that they're disappointed when I show them how much they have to understand just to write a program that plays Tic Tac Toe.

One possible approach would be to pick existing games developed in 
PyGame and assist them to modify or extend them. This can be a lot less 
overwhelming than starting a game from scratch, and exposes them to the 
basic concepts such as the main event loop, separating out logic from 
display etc. Code reading is as valuable a skill as code writing.

Another possibility is using a more extensive framework like Unity, 
which provides a lot of the toolchain to simplify the development 
process. While Unity doesn't support Python by default, it does provide 
Boo, which is Python-inspired. It's also built on top of the Mono 
framework, and I believe people have had some success with using .NET's 
IronPython with it.