Hello Guido and Vern- My Python students range from 11 to 16 years old. I agree that PyGame's setup is too long and laborious. So I use my own wrapper that reduces the setup code to two lines: import and create a Screen() object. I also wrote an IDLE replacement that runs the code in a separate process because PyGame was causing page faults if ran in a thread. You can get my PyGame wrapper (I call it moonunit) and IDE (I call it MakeBot), both available in one installer here: http://stratolab.com/misc/makebot/ and the source: http://stratolab.com/wiki/doku.php?id=Stratotools The Windows installer works fine on XP, I haven't tested on Vista. The Macintosh installer has not been updated to Leopard yet. I have it mostly running here, but there are some weird problems with OpenGL/ Numpy. -Winston On Feb 27, 2008, at 12:24 PM, Vern Ceder wrote:
It depends on how motivated the kids are and how much time you've got, but I would tend to agree with the teacher - in my experience that amount of setup is likely to lose a fair number of them. One option might be GASP, which puts a LiveWires wrapper around pygame.
Vern
Guido van Rossum wrote:
How old are your students? We are considering pygame, but the teacher is taken aback by the large amount of setup code needed. Also, running programs using pygame from IDLE on a Mac seems flaky. On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 7:28 AM, Winston Wolff <winstonw@stratolab.com
wrote: My students love anything to do with graphics. Even making a white rectangle on the screen and then redrawing it in red is cool. Also they love transparency--with PyGame, you can set the alpha and they love that.
-Winston
On Feb 26, 2008, at 9:09 PM, Brian Blais wrote:
On Feb 26, 2008, at Feb 26:8:22 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
PS. Just watched two groups of 8th grade middle school girls go through their first Python class. Cool! (That's what they said too. :-)
What did they cover in that class? I'd be curious to know what 8th graders consider "cool", after 1 class of programming.
bb
-- Brian Blais bblais@bryant.edu http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais
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Winston Wolff Stratolab - Kids exploring computers, comics, and robots (646) 827-2242 - http://stratolab.com
-- This time for sure! -Bullwinkle J. Moose ----------------------------- Vern Ceder, Director of Technology Canterbury School, 3210 Smith Road, Ft Wayne, IN 46804 vceder@canterburyschool.org; 260-436-0746; FAX: 260-436-5137
Winston Wolff Stratolab - Kids exploring computers, comics, and robots (646) 827-2242 - http://stratolab.com