Learning To Program Python By Building Video Games With Arcade

Summary

Video games have been a vehicle for learning to program since the early days of computing. Continuing in that tradition, Paul Craven created the Arcade library as a modern alternative to PyGame for use in his classroom. In this episode he explains his motivations for starting a new framework for video game development, his view on the benefits of games in computer education, and how his students and the broader community are using it to build interesting and creative projects. If you are looking for a way to get new programmers engaged, or just want to experiment with building your own games, then this is the conversation for you. Give it a listen and then give Arcade a try for yourself.

Announcements

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• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Paul Craven about Arcade, an easy-to-learn Python library for creating 2D video games

Interview

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• Can you start by describing what Arcade is?
  • What inspired you to begin working on it?
• Who is your primary audience?
• As an educator, what have you found to be most effective about using games as a vehicle for teaching programming?
  • What elements of programming or computer science do you have difficulty in addressing within the context of a video game?
  • For someone who wants to move on from working on games to something like web development or data analytics, what elements of software design and structure are easily translated to other domains?
• Can you describe how Arcade is implemented and how the architecture has evolved since you first began working on it?
  • If you were to start over today, what would you do differently?
• What have you found to be the most interesting/unexpected/challenging aspects of building and maintaining Arcade?
• What are some of the most interesting/innovative/unexpected ways that you have seen Arcade used?
• When is Arcade the wrong platform, or at what point does someone need to move on from Arcade?
• What do you have planned for the future of Arcade?

Keep In Touch

• @professorcraven on Twitter
• pvcraven on GitHub
• Faculty Page

Picks

• Tobias
  • Ori And The Blind Forest
• Paul
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
    • “Mistakes can be profited by Man, when i was young I showed my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”

Closing Announcements

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Links

• Arcade
• Simpson College
• PyGame
• SDL
• OpenGL
• Unity
• Unreal Engine
• GoDot
• Automate The Boring Stuff With Python
• Minesweeper
• Pyglet
• Spatial Hashing
• Tiled Map Editor
• Python Type Hints
• F Strings
• Data Classes
• PyMunk
• FFMPEG
• PyWeek
  • Podcast Episode
• Python Discord
• Arcade Enhancement Requests

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA