Python exercises for ages 10+

Overview

This repository contains a set of Python exercises that I use for teaching. The exercises are designed in such a way that they can be broken down into smaller steps for students who struggle. Most of these have a section called “extra” which is intended for students who are further along. If you’re looking for my Scratch material for ages 5+, you’re in the wrong place, see here instead.

Summary

Exercise	Libraries	Description
Basics	-	Some basic exercises for familiarising with IDLE, variables, I/O, data types, and operators
Password checker	-	A program for checking the strength of an input password using conditional statements and relational operators
Calculator	-	A simple calculator that applies a chosen mathematical operator to two given numbers
Grid	turtle	Using imperative programming, the turtle library, and nested loops, we draw a grid
Polygons	turtle	Using simple geometry and loops, we draw regular polygons
Checkers	tkinter	Using the graphical library Tkinter, functions, and modular arithmetic, we render a checkerboard
Paint	tkinter	A simple paint program that introduces event-driven programming using mouse and keyboard events, and a precursor to axis-aligned bounding box collision detection (by checking if a coordinate is contained in a rectangle)
Animation	tkinter, (random)	Using given code of a render loop, make a square bounce off the corner of the window and change colour
Snow	tkinter	An animated scene of a parallax snowfall using the random library, lists, and a render loop. Advanced students who have been introduced to object-oriented programming should create a Snow class from the start, otherwise take a data-oriented approach.
Recursion	-	An introduction to recursion by creating a recursive factorial function
Name search	-	Read a list of names from a given file into a list and performing a recursive binary search on them
Binary trees	turtle, (random)	Using recursive functions we draw binary trees with the turtle package
Card shuffle	-	An introduction into object-oriented programming and algorithm design. Implementing shuffles and sorts with lower computational complexity (linear or logarithmic) is only a requirement for advanced students.
Card game	tkinter	A simple, mouse-operated card game where you can drag and flip cards
Ice dodger	tkinter	Combining a range of past skills to create a game where the player must dodge falling objects
Ball pit	tkinter	Putting Entity-Component Systems into practice and creating a physics engine. OOP is a requirement and students must understand class diagrams
Waypoints	tkinter, threading	An introduction to parallel programming through multithreading. We separate rendering and logic and have entities follow a random waypoint model of mobility.
Multiplayer	tkinter, threading, socket	We expand our game engine to communicate with a server that synchronises the positions of all user avatars in the class
Game.io	tkinter, threading, socket	Using everything we have learned so far, students can recreate the *.io game of their choosing, or invent their own

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License