Richard Jones' Log: PyCon sprinting ideas
I've got two ideas for the sprint time at PyCon. I'd like to do something fun this time, rather than Yet Another PyPI Sprint.
My choices:
- Do some work on pyglet.
- Write a game. This could be a collaboration or could be competitive. I'm not sure of the details yet.
I'm more interested in the second one - but it'd need participants to make it work. For pyglet I can just sit in the corner :)
I could run a pyglet tutorial as well.
You could help out on the convention software written in zope, django, DB/wX, and pyparse.
http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/PyConTechSprint
not that I am biased or anything.......
Sorry, writing conference software is my day job...
I am big fan of Game Maker (see link) as intro language for 9-12 years old to programming. You need to try it to believe it: totally GUI drag'n'drop interface to program real playable fun games within an hour - using very high level language oriented for games. 99% of the time you don't need to write any code - all is filling event slots for each object by lego-like constructs (with intuitive icons). Perfect for kids learning to create first programs, learning IF, LOOP, EVENT, CREATE/DELETE object, timers, status etc. All these are objects with intuitive icons, easy to understand.
Overmars has very intuitive GUI to do it, sry windows only. games for 2 players (using different parts of the keyboard to navigate) are possible too.
My experience tells me it is perfect tool to hook youngsters to programming - more fun than writing boring lines in python which only write text output. Seduce them on Linux and Python :-) I will be happy to give you more info about GM - email me if interested. Thanks.
I'd be interested in both a Pyglet tutorial and sprint.
Sprinting on PyPI-related projects at EuroPython 2006 was fun, though I'm not sure that the MoinMoin guys appreciated me doing that in their sprint! ;-)