coderdojosv / beginner-python Goto Github PK

The Day 5 material is how to create animations in PyGame. It would be better if each challenge problem had a finished video (in the form of an embedded animated gif) to show the expected result.

Here is the format for embedding in markdown:
![alt text](http://www.gifanimations.com/thumbs/NjI1MWZjNWY0OGIzN2E=/NTJmYzVmNDhiMzdh/cartoon.jpg "Logo Title Text 1")

Initial research shows this might be a tool to help: http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

We need new materials to cover next week. I was originally planning on doing a growing Snake game (https://github.com/BreakoutMentors/GrowingSnake), but realize this will be too hard. After doing well on animations (day 5), many struggled with the paddle game (day 6). So we definitely don't want to do a huge jump into more difficult arrays and functions.

I'm proposing making a non-growing version of snake: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/2627038/. They would start with a "blank" pygame project (https://github.com/CoderDojoSV/beginner-python/blob/master/Day-7/blank%20pygame%20project.py) and be responsible for creating everything. So it would not be a more difficult project than pong, but they would start with less. Add on features for the advanced kids can be space to replay, high score, etc.

What do you guys think? Does this sound like the right approach?

I need to know if there is anything the participants need to have loaded on their computers before arriving to the first session.

Also, if there are any computer versions or configurations that would not be compatible with the development environment.

Please tell me by Saturday, so I can inform the participants.

Thanks,

Marcy

What do you guys think about adding extensions or take home problems? Any ideas?

One would be to add a timer to the multiplication game:

import time, datetime, random
start_time = datetime.datetime.now()
typing = raw_input('>')
end_time = datetime.datetime.now()
difference = end_time - start_time
print difference.seconds

What about whole take home projects? The CoderDojoSF has a tic-tac-toe walk through: https://github.com/CoderDojoSF/tic-tac-toe. Maybe we could point them to this after Day 3?

From a parent that went through the install:

Hi, I just wanted to note that the instructions have us download the installer from the Hello World! book, but are missing an important step which may affect some users: On OSX 10.9.1 Mavericks, with Apple's version of Python 2.7.5 pre-installed, the 'Hello World!' installer appears to install python.org's version of Python 2.7.5 into the 'Applications' directory. However, the installer does not automatically run '/Applications/Python 2.7/Update Shell Profile.command'. This leaves Apple's python2.7 (/usr/bin/python2.7) as the default rather than python.org's python2.7 (/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python2.7). As a result, the necessary site-packages such as 'pygame' and 'PyQt4' cannot be found: $ which python /usr/bin/python $ python -c 'import site; print site.getsitepackages()' ['/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python', '/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages'] $ python -c 'import pygame; import PyQt4' Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ImportError: No module named pygame The solution is to manually run 'Update Shell Profile.command', after which things will work as expected: $ which python /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python $ python -c 'import site; print site.getsitepackages()' ['/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/site-python', '/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages'] $ python -c 'import pygame; import PyQt4'