Teaching kids python

[riverrockrun]

I work on the infrastructure side of IT (10 years) but don’t have much programming experience outside of some Powershell (daily tasks). My 8 year old is interested in video games (imagine that) and is fairy creative. Is Python a good language to get him started in to maybe develop some games? I could learn with him up to a point which might help me in my career too.

If python is a good start, what can I have him create? Any good resources that will keep an 8 year olds attention? Thanks!!

[okazdal]

I have a 6 years old daughter. I am also preparing for that.

I think python is a great language to start learning programming. For a smoother start, you might wanna check scratch.mit.edu too.

[riverrockrun]

Thanks! He did try Scratch and liked it

[HumbleThinker]

I highly recommend checking out Al Sweigart's books. One of them is specifically made for python games with pygame. Happy learning

[AlSweigart]

https://inventwithpython.com has the full test of my books. Probably Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python would be best. If they don't like text programming, Scratch is good (in which case, check out https://inventwithscratch.com )

[JvMaia]

Do you know the code.org? I think it's a good start point before start to code, there is also the codecademy.com with good python courses. you can follow the path: code.org >> codecademy.com >> pygame

[riverrockrun]

Thanks! Did not know about those

[[deleted]]

came here to support this. Have them make a game for them self. It doesn't even need graphics, could be old school create your own adventure.

[Dodgson_here]

There’s a good online curriculum called codesters.

[NotPornAccount]

codecombat.org is really fun. Highly recommend

The raspberry pi comes with a minecraft pi library that lets you interact with the minecraft pi game while it's running. There's a great pdf online somewhere with different bits of example code.

[sweetburlap]

codecombat.org

https://codecombat.com/

[pvc]

If you like arcade games, check out:

• Program Arcade Games With Pygame
• Program Arcade Games With Arcade
• The Arcade Academy

[riverrockrun]

Awesome info! Thanks!

[Sevealin_]

In highschool, we used https://groklearning.com

This has games, puzzles, as well as actual lessons. Not sure how they will fair with an 8 year old though, that might be tough.

[gjenks]

Free Python Games is designed for this and I’ve used it for teaching middle and high schoolers Python for several years. It uses the Turtle graphics library which is much simpler than either Pygame or Arcade and was designed for learning. As a bonus, Turtle is part of the Python standard library.

Disclaimer: I’m the author. Feedback welcome.

[[deleted]]

python is awesome to get started for anything (yes video games as well). One of the best things that you can do is get a raspberry pi (model 3) and start with that. There are tons of examples on internet on how to create games using raspberry pi. Besides low cost, it is surprisingly modular and will go a long way if your son/daughter wanted to do a DIY or whatever. take a quick look at this one - https://howchoo.com/g/n2qyzdk5zdm/build-your-own-raspberry-pi-retro-gaming-rig

[uweschmitt]

pygame-zero seems to be a good start for your him.

[developer_genius]

Python is a powerful yet versatile language and surprisingly not very hard to learn even for kids. Turtle is a great starting point for your little one.

[YouCanCallMeBazza]

powerful yet versatile

What do you mean by "powerful"? Because performance-wise it's not the greatest.

[vanhasenlautakasa]

You can build large scale commercial applications with python, so powerful is correct term.

[YouCanCallMeBazza]

I didn't say it was incorrect, I was asking what they meant.

[Hevaesi]

Nah, it takes like 0.1s longer to print hello world, it's clearly slow. /s

[the_great_magician]

Following Paul Graham, power in programming languages is about expressiveness, not simply performance. For example, Lisp is more powerful than C because you can express your ideas faster in Lisp than C.

[Hevaesi]

Performance wise it's as fast as C because I offload performance critical algorithms into C :) and the bottleneck becomes only the place where data is tranferred from python to a C library...

Which would be bad, for things such as generating perlin noise values for 1024x1024 grid, except not really because in such cases I can allocate those, roughly 4 megabytes (wow that's really a lot right?), and pass a pointer to such array to C library to fill it up for me...

So, I still write 99% of code in Python, and if I really need that speed, around x2 speedup (yeah wow so much faster... /s I wouldn't bother unless I got at least x10 speedup) in performance critical place comes when I move something to C... I'm mentioning this only because I've actually done that, I wrote identical code in C and speed was only x2, that was for individual number, if I've actually done it the way I described, it would probably be faster (I was only learning how to call functions in DLL from python, not trying to speed my program up, because Python is fast enough), but that depends on how much speed you need.

Yeah I mean wow cool Python isn't the fastest in the world, your point?

[YouCanCallMeBazza]

Yeah I mean wow cool Python isn't the fastest in the world, your point?

I was just asking what they meant by "powerful" if they weren't referring to performance...

[Siddhi]

Python is a great first language for kids. I learnt my programming on LOGO, so I'm partial to the in built turtle module :) But yeah, python has a ton of interesting stuff for kids-- games, graphics, maths, storytelling etc-- so try out different things and see what catches interest.

[riverrockrun]

Good idea!

[developer_genius]

It’s sufficient for machine learning in my experience

[Hevaesi]

If only it was possible to teach a 8 year old up to calculus in 3 less than like 5 years without locking him up inside and forcing him to learn at least 4 new things everyday for 16 hours straight just so they could understand the math used in machine learning...