[Edu-sig] Edu-sig Digest, Vol 59, Issue 6

Albert Sweigart asweigart at gmail.com
Tue Jun 17 02:39:57 CEST 2008


Hello all,

I've spent my spare time over the last few months writing a book aimed at
teaching Python to kids through game programming. It is freely available
under a Creative Commons license at http://pythonbook.coffeeghost.net I'd
like any feedback, especially since the approach I take is different to a
lot of the tutorials I see on the web aimed at teaching programming to kids.

I noticed that there was a large gap in this area, one that used to be
filled by BASIC books (the old BASIC games books like the ones at
atariarchives.org especially). It seems that many kids today learn
programming on their TI graphing calculators or learn HTML/Javascript, or
get one of the many game creation kits out there. While many of these kits
have nice drag-and-drop interfaces to tie together multimedia elements, they
are limited to a specific genre of games and the graphics hide a lot of what
line-by-line programming can teach.

Other books explain programming principles and concepts, but leave out
complete examples of programs that the student can follow along. They read
like a school textbook.

My book (Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python) focuses on complete
examples of games, and explain programming principles from them. The games
are simple (text-based ASCII art graphics, no GUIs or images) and complete
(the longest is about 400 lines, including whitespace). The book is designed
to be easy enough for 9 to 12 year olds to understand.

The book, in HTML and PDF format, and all the games are located here:
http://pythonbook.coffeeghost.net

I'm planning on doing more books at some point in the future after getting
feedback.

Thank you!
Al Sweigart
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