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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