Google has recently announced a programming contest called Google Highly Open Participation Contest a contest aimed at high school students. See GHOP for more info. The Python Software Foundation has been selected as participant Python GHOP, and I got involved in the contest as a mentor. (In a nutshell mentors suggest and advise on tasks that students solve within the contest)
Among other tasks I thought it would be fun to introduce students to the marvels of the Panda engine. At the same time I felt it would most helpful if there was a website to collect the code snippets that students create.
I’m looking for further suggestions for fun tasks with Panda (most tasks are voted on so tasks may or may not make it in)
I’m also thinking of making this site an open repository for simple example scripts (beyond the GHOP competition that runs until Februrary), because in my experience it is not easy to find working code snippets. I believe that the Google Project hosting will be appropriate for this sort of collaborative work. If you have small code snippets demonstrating certain often used behaviours you can:
send them to me or even better,
ask for svn access and add them to the code and to the wiki
1 for IDE, though I wonder if that’s beyond the abilities of high school students.
Something more simple but still useful then? I’d also like to see a kind of menu-driven game “skeleton.”
It would have a fullscreen introductory “root” or “title” menu with “options”, “new game”, and “exit” buttons.
The “exit” button would of course close the program, maybe with a splash screen saying thanks for playing first.
The “options” button would lead to a menu with widgets to adjust, say, the volume of the background music and some graphics settings, as well as a button to return to the root menu.
The “new game” button would begin something simple to take the place of a game, like an animation with a skybox background and a “pause” button
The “pause button” would suspend any running game tasks and bring back the menu, but this time in place of the “new game” button the menu would have a button to “resume game” and a button “quit game”, which would of course either unpause the game or discard the game and go back to the root menu, respectively.
The implementation should, of course, be robust and modular enough to easily build off of, preferably with a good object-oriented design.
What meant is that one’s best bet is to copy-paste from forum posts (that in subsequent followups may be revised or changed) or follow links that are often dead. Forum posts are a suboptimal way to share/update and maintain code.
As for P3D that you mention, is that this http://www.p3dp.com/? I knew about this site but I don’t really understand what this is supposed to be, is it some sort of internal site? I can’t see any examples, only a link to request space.
As for project ideas, we’re looking for simple self contained projects that demonstrate/document concepts rather then implement a much needed functionality. The target audience are high school students, and they have 5 days to finish it. Some of these students are very good and could do many things, but it is a contest after all (and they usually solve multiple tasks) so we need to keep the task difficulty in mind.
P3D has an own forum section dedicated to code snipplets. The forum is lacking Python coding highlighting, but as far as I can see it does quite well (since its in the hands of the p3d maintainers) and could be changed easily if needed.
P3DP is a projects page that isn’t directly P3D internal. But it is very close linked since we do want to empower P3D “users” to show and share their P3D stuff with others.
You can use p3dp.com -> Index or follow the following link: p3dp.com/doku.php?id=start&do=index&idx=start
But since not everyone wants to use the portal (only the webspace connected with it), the link mentioned above isn’t at the first page.
