I was out of LD23, but now I’m back and I’m IN!

…FOR SCIENCE!

So, quick story:  I’m now a high school teacher! Today was my first class ever!  Hooray!  What am I teaching, you may ask? Why Game Design, of course!  Now, my class will only have met two times come this weekend, so I doubt any of my students will be able to participate, but I wanted to use LD24 as an opportunity to show that how much you can do even with only the TINIEST amount of programming know-how and time.  That being said; here’s the tools I’ll be using this weekend:

Python 2.7

NOTHING ELSE WHATSOEVER!

That’s right!  No external libraries, not even PyGame.  No Sound.  No graphics.  I’ll also ONLY use the most basic techniques in programming; those I expect to cover in the first two weeks of class.  This means the only programming constructs I’ll use are:

Basic text/number I/O, basic math and conditional structures, basic if/else, simple variables types (INT/STRING/maybe FLOAT), basic looping structures (For… maybe WHILE).  I may through in an “import random”… and then two 2nd-week concepts I may use for sanity’s sake; simple function declarations and lists.
My goal is to create a fun, text-based game in 48 that can show my students what sorts of power is at your fingertips even with only a few hours of programming experience if you are creative about it.  Once they’ve covered all the topics I mentioned above, I’ll give them 2 weeks to create a game of their own, and we’ll see what they can come up with :)

 

Tags: awesome, ld24, python, school, teacher, text-based