| One thing I loved about the default BASIC on the computers of the 70s and 80s was the ease of doing graphics and easily seeing something tangible on the screen. What is the equivalent of that today? For instance, is there an easy-to-use Python library that lets kids do simple drawing with ease? Ie, on the TRS-80's Level II BASIC, just doing SET(X,Y) coloured a white pixel at that coordinate, and RESET(X,Y) turned it black. And you could see immediately the utility of applying FOR loops to make horizontal and vertical lines, etc. I don't remember QBASIC, but the customized BASIC on my Tandy 1000 In the late 80's had graphics modes with I think PSET(X,Y,C) to light pixel with color C, and even had some built-in commands for making line, rectangles, circles, and ellipses. So it was very easy to type a few lines and get something cool on the screen, but still required a bit of thought on x,y coordinages and some programming constructs to do anything complex. I only dabble a bit in Python, but what's the best way to do something like that today? I think there's much more of a feeling of "Wow, look what I made!" after drawing something this way than just using the painting mode for sprites in Scratch. |
For Python, matplotlib(1) will let you generate plots and graphs, including simple x/y graphs, or you could use the built-in TkInter(2) library to do a simple GUI with a drawing canvas.
(1)http://www.labri.fr/perso/nrougier/teaching/matplotlib/ (2) http://www.python-course.eu/tkinter_canvas.php