Creative Coding in Python: 30+ Programming Projects in Art, Games, and More

As a computer science teacher, I have found that many of the coding books available for tweens and teens do not lead to long term learning of a programming language. These books typically have lots and lots of code that the reader uses to create projects, but the reader is often not learning the concepts behind the code and they are not able to transfer anything they have done to a new programming project.Creative Coding in Python is the answer to this problem and a fun and engaging way to learn to program in Python.Each chapter of Creative Coding in Python allows the reader to create a programming project like a chatbot or geometric art or interactive fiction or a game. The Big Ideas in each chapter provide foundational knowledge about programming concepts like variables, loops, lists, conditionals, functions, and more with short explanatory text and code that readers can try themselves. In addition to the explanatory text and code examples, readers are also presented with flowcharts or pseudocode of what they will be creating. This helps readers to build the good programming habits of thinking about the project they are creating and planning before programming. Once the Big Ideas are introduced, readers then create the main project for the chapter. While code is provided for the basic project, readers are also asked to improve the basic project in some way. Each chapter also has an Experiment and Extend section with more programming project ideas that can be created with the knowledge from the Big Ideas. Completing the projects in this section of each chapter reinforces the learning and provides the needed transfer of the concepts to new programming challenges.Parents: If you are looking for a book for your budding programmer who wants to truly learn an industry standard language, this would be a great book for your child. By reading, understanding, and completing the programming projects, your child will have a solid foundational knowledge of Python and some creative programming projects to show off, as well.Teachers: Do you have students that are ready to move on to text-based programming but the rest of your class isn’t ready yet? Creative Coding in Python would be a great addition to your classroom for those students. It is the latest addition to my classroom library. Beyond adding the book to your classroom library, this book and the companion website could be a great primer for you, as a teacher, if you would like to teach an introductory Python class to your students.

What I like best about this book is that the approach is to build a useful project, and use it to introduce programming concepts. Starting in chapter 1, we build a simple chatbot, and use it to introduce important concepts such as variables, input, printing and commenting the code. All the other introductory material I’ve come across starts with abstract programming concepts, without providing a framework of how to assemble the concepts into a program. This book’s approach is much easier to grasp.Another important aspect are frequent sidebars to explain how to deal with the “overhead” of coding: how to create and save a new program file, how to interpret errors to debug the program, and that choosing good names for variables and functions is helpful in the long run.I can see this being a valuable textbook for computer classes as early as middle-school. In addition to providing a shallow learning curve, each chapter ends with “Experiment and Extend” with some engaging programming project suggestions that could be homework or in-class assignments. By the end of the book, we’ve progressed to writing interactive graphic games.I was inspired to create a turtle-graphic photo of a random walk, attached.

Learning to code is like learning a new language and this book is a great resource for learning Python. It is a wonderfully written book that is easy to follow for any age. It gets you starting to code right away as you learn relevant terms and how to apply them. The author makes you aware of errors that can occur and how to address them. The book inspires you to be creative as you are building different projects. It is very descriptive and goes in-depth enough to design your own game and create the art that goes along with it. I love how the book takes you a step further and introduces how to connect the code to physical computing. As more school districts are adding computer programming into their curriculum Creative Coding in Python is a must-have for any classroom or for those of you who want to learn at home.

This is not great to give a kid with zero coding experience. It is not full of step-by-step activities to make a game. There are other books with that feature that gives kids instant gratification and success.This book is fantastic for a tween or teen who is motivated to learn coding by reading and doing activities suggested by the book. If never tells a person "do this, now do that". It is designed like a textbook. It gives an example, suggests the reader tries it, then assumes the person will experiment on their own to see what else they can do with the new knowledge.What would I like to see? After each example, it should give a mini challenge. "Now that you've done that practice, modify the example to make it do ______ instead." Perhaps put a series of hints on a section at the back of the book, "go to page X to get a hint." Then a solution section, "if you need to see one way to do it, go to page X".If I was teaching a middle school class with this book, I would give them a practice challenge after each book example.