When I was learning programming in my bedroom as a kid, games and animations were the key - just far and away the most interesting and engaging things you could

When I was learning programming in my bedroom as a kid, games and animations were the key - just far and away the most interesting and engaging things you could do. And while it was impossible in BASIC to get anything approaching commercially-produced games, it was possible to easily knock up something that was playable and fun, especially if you salted it with a bit of machine code; I fondly remember my PacMan (very slow), ET (ripoff of the infamous Atari 2600 klunker) and Minesweeper-like thing that was deceptively addictive, all done for yuks in a few hundred lines. But for kids today, I see these problems: - Haven't seen anything that gives the simplicity and ease of use for graphics that my old Spectrum had. This is what pygame should be providing, but I agree with you that it is actually pretty disappointing in this regard; I find its API a bit cumbersome and nonintuitive, although others' mileage may vary. - Modern 3D games set the bar very high, and it's difficult to get kids to understand that they need to aim much lower to get going. And whereas the maths required to write a 2D game is pretty basic first principles stuff, 3D is a whole discipline that needs to be learned. - Scratch is fun, but very limiting and, if you have a lot of stuff going on, really unplayably slow. My daughter has fun doing little animations in it, but it needs a better object system IMO in order to be able to allow users to push on with it.