I’ve been really impressed with @lordmauve’s PyGameZero module that makes it fun and easy to create games with Python.
This post contains three example python games that you can edit and play online as a showcase of growing PyGameZero support for create.withcode.uk.
Many students love creating and playing games and most of them have made some really creative animations and projects using Scratch’s graphical programming tools.
One of the big challenges for students is to make the transition from graphical block based programming to text based programming.
It’s harder to make mistakes with blocks but it can also be frustratingly slow if you want to make more advanced projects.
One thing that really helps is creating visual projects rather than just messing with text and numbers, although this often adds extra layers of complexity and confusion.
PyGame is a really powerful python module for creating games but it’s not ideal for beginner programmers as there are all sorts of things you have to understand and write before you can get anything worthwhile up and running.
PyGameZero is a fabulous module which is an abstraction of PyGame to make it simpler to create games and animations with code.
Abstraction means removing necessary detail in order to focus on the most important things.
PyGame is very powerful and feature rich but complex to use. PyGameZero is a simplified version that is ideal for creating working games with minimal code
I’ve been working through some of the great PyGameZero examples online and thought it’d be really good if students could try the code out online without having to download anything.
So, I’m working on PyGameZero support for create.withcode.uk so that students and teachers can write, run, debug and share python games online on any device.
It’s a work in progress, which means that there are some features that don’t quite work as they should yet but it’s at the stage where it works enough for you to be able to create games with python on chromebooks / laptops / desktops / tablets.
The next page has a python Space Invaders game that you can adapt and run in your browser.
