On 17/07/2013 8:43 AM, John Ladasky wrote:
The kids all claim to be interested. They all want to write the next great 3D video game. Thus, I'm a little surprised that the kids don't actually try to sit down and code without me prompting them. I think that they're disappointed when I show them how much they have to understand just to write a program that plays Tic Tac Toe.
One possible approach would be to pick existing games developed in PyGame and assist them to modify or extend them. This can be a lot less overwhelming than starting a game from scratch, and exposes them to the basic concepts such as the main event loop, separating out logic from display etc. Code reading is as valuable a skill as code writing.
Another possibility is using a more extensive framework like Unity, which provides a lot of the toolchain to simplify the development process. While Unity doesn't support Python by default, it does provide Boo, which is Python-inspired. It's also built on top of the Mono framework, and I believe people have had some success with using .NET's IronPython with it.
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