Catherine, > Adam > > I'm an old COBOL programmer/analyst that have moved on to other areas over > time. I'm trying to get my 12 year old interested in computers instead > of > just playing games. I've gone through a number of the tutorials available > on the internet but haven't come up with suitable examples that would be > suitable for a 12 year old to try. He can enter the instruction in some > of > the tutorials but he can't comprehend how he might use python. Have you > come across any simple exercises for kids. > > Catherine
The children started off interested in just playing games. I didn't think this would lead to a great learning experience, so I offered them the chance of making their own games. As I only have a very limited experience of Pygame, I thought we would look at the demos that come with Pygame (it's a separate download to Pygame, but requires Pygame). I had a hunch that if we changed some graphics and sounds, Pygame would cope pretty well with it, which it did. I took a photo of a boy's head and replaced that for the chimp. They thought this was hilarious. We started to look for other areas where we could 'adapt' the game. We replaced the one boy's head for the groups (in one long time) and then recorded them shouting "ouch!". This enthused them even more. We had to find out how to change the screen size and colour for these new graphics. From that, some want to write their own mini-game, which has meant we've needed to start learning Python. The children valued seeing the source code and being able to adapt it. They now want to add their own. This is just the experience we went through - it might work for your children, or might not. Apologies if this is a rambling post, but it is early here. Adam _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
