Re: [pygame] teaching resources

[René Dudfield <renesd@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks everyone. To summarise...

- A teaching resources page, which has and links to resources that teachers can use.

    - Link to:
        - Paul's proven python pygame resource.

        - raspberrypi

        - microbit
        - community.computingatschool.org.uk/resources/4952

        - other human language/region specific resources

        - different use categories (eg, for teaching music, drawing, ...)

- updated newbie guide

    - reduced set of important fundamental concepts. Based on Ian's minimal examples.

- order docs top navigation into important concepts first.

    - Surface, Rect, ...

- monitor python for education for when if it is completed. Get in contact.

- improve sprite classes for areas people have found difficult.
    - built in rotation and scaling, automatic transparency handling for image loading.

    - primitives that handle drawing.

    - not sure how to handle coordinate reversal.

- the better sprite classes given more prominence (LayeredDirty works lots faster)

- tag for educational projects

- page showing off projects for different pygame uses

    - "What can pygame be used for?"

On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 2:26 PM, René Dudfield <renesd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Good point.

Ian Mallet has already made a whole bunch of little improvements to the docs.  https://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame/pull-requests/76

I'll leave this other suggestion for the docs here...

- Divide the docs top navigation up into two parts. 'core' important basics, and 'extras'. So things like mask, Overlay, cdrom, BufferProxy, and other non essential things are in 'extras'.

cheers,

On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 6:57 AM, Daniel Foerster <pydsigner@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In particular, "A Newbie Guide to pygame" is woefully outdated. Honestly, it was outdated enough back when I was reading it for the first time in 2011 that I made a version with a bunch of comments correcting its advice. I don't use Pygame much these days, but it'd be great if someone who is would make a replacement.

On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 5:46 AM, Ian Mallett <ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 4:20 AM, René Dudfield <renesd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Whilst there are now more than a dozen books, and video series in many languages for teaching pygame, I'd like to include a new section on the website for educational resources for teachers. Or even better, to be able to point to an existing resource.  Not particularly for 'pygame', but for digital education in general, or at least python related. I wonder if you have any thoughts on this?

​This sounds awfully non-orthogonal to various current movements to bring CS education to the masses (which typically means coding instead, alas, but yet). Honestly, I'm not sure how valuable a new resource here would be--surely, there are educational sites for teaching, and same but specific for Python?

What makes sense to me would be a section specifically on using pygame. We already have something of this sort (I know; I've been looking-at/sprucing-up the current tutorials), but these are largely dated, and don't span the whole of what pygame has to offer. They're also text-dense, which is apparently not a popular way to learn things anymore.

 

Anything else I should link to?

​What would have been most helpful for me when I learned pygame would have been some solid foundation to build on. I offer my pygame hello world and pygame-GL-2 hello world as minimal, best-practices, public-domain resources (links have been stable for years, but mirroring would be ideal).

Ian​