[Edu-sig] pyGame tutor for high school students wanted

[Kirby Urner]

Hi Dan --

I doubt it's practical to request any intensive hand-holding regarding a
for-school project, or rather, they'd be lucky to get that, especially for
free.  However, Pygamers tend to be friendly and the documentation is itself
something of a tutorial.  I managed to code up some presentation management
software simply by having the docs open, the API spelled out.  After that,
it's a lot trial and error and building on past experience.

Pygame is good for 2D games, especially puzzling strategy games, less so for
rapidly scrolling anything, and if you want to go 3D, I think you're talking
about just using Pygame as a front end for PyOpenGL.  That's something I'd
like to learn myself.  I'm envious of the very simple and effective OpenGL
examples Ruby ships with, and given how X is moving to that platform, in at
least one distro, I feel increasing pressure to figure a Python angle (from
a curriculum writer viewpoint), or to jump ship when it comes to OpenGL,
maybe just buckle down and learn the Ruby way.  

In the meantime, we have VPython, which in a lot of ways is better than
OpenGL, just because it's so simple.  I don't think the full potential of
VPython as a gaming engine, at least for small teams of coders, has been
tested.  It made my hypertoon dream come true, why not these others?

My recommendation:  have your students work through the Pygame tutorial on
their own, and see if it seems like the kind of thing they want to get into
more deeply (the tutorial I'm thinking of involves a monkey as I recall, or
maybe it's a rocket ship).  

I'd also recommend you work through it yourself at some point, just so
you'll have an approximate understanding of what they're encountering.
Pygame is pretty low level. Alternatives exist.  Have they looked at
GameMaker yet? 

http://www.gamemaker.nl/ 

You're the teacher -- doesn't mean you have to know everything (nobody
does), just that you demonstrate a strong willingness to learn (the key to
being an effective teacher in any field, I should think).  CS (including its
application in game making) is one of those "always a student" disciplines.

Kirby

> -----Original Message-----
> From: edu-sig-bounces at python.org [mailto:edu-sig-bounces at python.org] On
> Behalf Of edusig.20.schellenberg at spamgourmet.com
> Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2005 8:28 PM
> To: edu-sig at python.org
> Subject: [Edu-sig] pyGame tutor for high school students wanted
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> I am teaching an introduction to computer science at a high school
> level, and have given my students freedom to choose to create pretty
> much whatever they would like for a final project in the course.  A
> group of 3 of my obviously keen and talented programmers came up to
> me wondering whether they could create a simple RPG type game using
> Python, and I suggested they take a look into pyGame.  Now, I don't
> have any experience with pyGame myself, and so I am looking for
> someone who would be willing to tutor them via email as they
> undertake this project from now until the beginning of January.
> Anyone willing to help along some aspiring computer programmers?
> 
> Thanks,
> Dan
> 
> --
> Dan Schellenberg
> High school computer science/math teacher
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