Workshops ended today! It wasn’t the most satisfying of classes that I’ve had, mostly due to amount of time we lost due to the bandhs and holidays in Bangalore. All of us were left a bit unsatisfied but we covered a lot of ground and did a lot of work, for a group of people who didn’t know much python 🙂

My forte is not python and this probably was the first time I’m using python this extensively (the last time I used it was to work with arduinos and twitter and what not back in NID). I am not new to it, but I rarely use it for any production work. Most of my work now-a-days revolve around GML(Game Maker Studio), Haxe(HaxeFlixel), C++(Cocos2d-x, SFML) and some bits of C#(Unity3D) and so I can safely say that I am not new to programming. The main reason why I picked Python was that it was very easy to learn even if you don’t know much about programming. It was verbose enough, syntax was not hard to pick up and it offered a large amount of handy modules. I also hoped that that the students would find it useful later – in Blender/Max/Maya or if they did web and related work or if they ever wanted to make applications or automate things.

The core idea behind the workshop was to get the students acquainted with programming and also creating game like virtual words(with/without user interactions). Since the class was new to programming, a large chunk of the workshop was spent in learning the ropes. Thankfully, I had a very small group of students to start with, which meant that there was a lot of back and forth and one on one time. It was great to see this tiny group of people move along with gusto even after a whole day of programming 🙂

Again, if you feel like taking a look at what happened in the workshop, all of code that was done during the workshop can be found here on github. I’ll hopefully be cleaning some of it up and also adding in the submissions made by the students. Most of all the work was done in class itself on a projector.

This year seems to be the year of collaborations. Since I am not teaching the rest of the semester, I’ve some pretty cool projects lined up! More on this later 🙂