I remember once running into my 7th grade math teacher. She asked me what I was doing these days, and I told her about my game-programming hobby, and I went on to explain how I often used things I learned in Jr High math class in game making. I told her how I used the pythagorean theorum all the time for calculating the distance between a character and an enemy in a 2D game, and she got really excited about it, confessing that she had been discouraged when kids asked her when they were going to actually use these math concepts she was teaching, and she didn't have good examples to tell them.
I remember all through school, math concepts were always explained in terms of fruit-counting, carpentry, and train schedules, and none of that ever made even the tiniest emotional impact on me. That contrasts strongly to how excited I got about math AFTER I learned to program. --- James Paige On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 07:34:44AM -0400, Joe Ranalli wrote: > Besides the programming aspects, one of the great things is that it > teaches about the sciences as well. Even the most trivial games require > use of basic physics concepts like vector math and the laws of motion, and > require mathematical integration for the time stepping. Game programming > is a great educational vehicle for lots of reasons. > > On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 1:54 AM, Ian Mallett <geometr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > I find simple games are helpful in teaching students. With practice, > one can hack up a very simple game in Python/PyGame in a matter of a few > minutes. At the end, people have a product to show for it. > I often find students have a good time making games too, because it's > surprisingly open-ended. It also works at many levels of programming > expertise, because games can vary in complexity. > Ian
