Teaching children to program Python with the Pyland game
Alex Bradbury presented the current status of the Pyland game project (http://pyland.org). This is a project run over summer 2014 for 10 weeks to provide a fun and creative environment on Raspberry Pi to aid children learning programming and more general computer science. It should act as a bridge from Scratch to Python which is the focus of attention right now: http://teachprimarycomputing.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/pycon-uk-2014/. It is possible to give a crib sheet to compare the ideas in both languages: http://rpikitchen.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/python-scratch-conversion1.pdf
Pyland is a 2d game which contains a number of “challenges” which are given to players by characters in the game. These are tasks which can only be solved by writing small Python programs, e.g. clear a field of grass by cutting in a particular way, so the grass doesn’t grow back.
<figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Pyland</figcaption></figure>