Book Image

Python Projects for Kids

By : Jessica Ingrassellino
Book Image

Python Projects for Kids

By: Jessica Ingrassellino

Overview of this book

Kids are always the most fast-paced and enthusiastic learners, and are naturally willing to build stuff that looks like magic at the end (when it works!). Programming can be one such magic. Being able to write a program that works helps them feel they've really achieved something. Kids today are very tech-savvy and cannot wait to enter the fast-paced digital world. Because Python is one of the most popular languages and has a syntax that is quite simple to understand, even kids are eager to use it as a stepping stone to learning programming languages. This book will cover projects that are simple and fun, and teach kids how to write Python code that works. The book will teach the basics of Python programming, installation, and so on and then will move on to projects. A total of three projects, with each and every step explained carefully, without any assumption of previous experience.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Python Projects for Kids
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Section 3 – moving the ball


Now that we have written and tested the code for the paddles, we need to write code to move the ball. We will be changing the location of the ball with some of our code, and we will create something called collision detection.

Moving the ball – updating the location

First, we need to be constantly calculating the x and y coordinates of the ball based on the velocity of the ball that we set in the global variables. This allows us to make constant updates as long as we are playing the game. To make sure that the x and y coordinates of the ball update as the ball moves, you will type the following lines of code, starting from line 74:

    # location of ball is updated
    ball_x += ball_xv
    ball_y += ball_yv

Collision detection

Our next job is to code something called collision detection. This means that we can program the computer to know when two objects are hitting one another. We can also tell the computer what we want it to do when the objects collide. In Tiny...