High School Students Program Robots with Python

Vern Ceder's Canterbury High School students are learning to program in Python by making robots play music, find objects in the room, and perform other challenging tasks. The local paper, The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, wrote a story about the class earlier this month, and Vern blogs about how he arranged that on the Learn Python blog for the benefit of other members of the community with similar projects.

Congratulations to the students at Canterbury High, and keep up the good work!

For more information about how you can use Python in educational settings, join the edu-sig mailing list.

Summer pyGames

Their motto is "Learning should be fun", and with Python and PyGame, it sure is. The Summer pyGames project, organized by Elizabeth Barndollar of BAE Systems, Travis Axtel of SPAWAR, and Zenko Klapko of the Charleston Linux Users Group, is a six-week long competition during which high school students develop open-source educational software and games to be used and distributed to 3000 schools in South Carolina.

According to Elizabeth Barndollar, in two years the project has grown from seven students to include seven teams in SC, FL, NJ, VA and Canada. The Summer pyGames is helping to inspire students, teach them the value of open-source software, and (even better) learn Python. in the first two editions, XO laptops and netbooks were distributed to the wining teams. This year the organizers are planning to have even more great prizes.

Registration to the 2011 contest is on "Pi day", 03/14/2011. All students are challenged to participate and create games that make Math, Language and Science fun.

To learn more about the Summer pyGames project please visit their website.

UPDATE: Recently, the PSF awarded a US$ 1,000 grant to help in the organization of the upcoming edition.