On 10/3/07, Marcus von Appen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Just to get it right: you want the girls to create games by not > programming them, because they do not have any interest in programming. > Wouldn't it be better to change the orientation of the project then? > > Encouraging people for something by avoiding stuff they apparently never > have done before (such as programming) - that just sounds silly to me > and will mostly cause a negative result in the end, like "you never told > us that in reality it has to be done _that_ way".
I think Marcus is right on track here. For anyone who has not expressed an interest in programming, exposing them to python and pygame, as nice as it all is, will probably not help much. You might want to look at Alice instead: http://www.alice.org/ And you also might want to take a look at Caitlin Kelleher's thesis about her derivative project, "Storytelling Alice": http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~caitlin/ These are probably more in line with the sort of programming that you can get non-programmer teenagers to get into. These environments provide more immediate feedback, which gives people quick, tangible incentives to continue. They *may* be a little too simplistic for high school students, I'm not quite sure. Probably worth looking into anyway! -- // jack // http://www.nuthole.com
