Pygame Zero

Pygame Zero is a new game engine for education, built on top of Pygame. It makes writing your first games extremely simple, while saving beginners from certain potential pitfalls. This talk will introduce Pygame Zero, walk through creating a simple game, and discuss the background for Python in education and the design philosophy behind Pygame Zero.

Pygame is a powerful set of libraries for graphics, sound, input and more. But it is just a library: each program needs to import and set up the libraries, implement a game loop and load resources among numerous other concerns. While seasoned Pythonistas have no trouble with this, teachers told us that they found it difficult to teach with Pygame. There is simply too much boilerplate involved, and getting students to reproduce the boilerplate perfectly before useful lessons can begin takes too much time out of a 40-minute lesson.

Pygame Zero is simple enough that a lesson can be broken down into bitesize steps where meaningful progress can be made with just a couple of lines of code at a time.