[herodotus]

I successfully used Tetris to teach a first course in programming. What I did was provide a module I called "Gridworld". This provided a simple way for the students to create an N * N grid of cells where the cell size was fixed. The only other thing that could be done with Gridworld was to fill or clear the cells. After presenting Gridworld, I then asked the students how we might make an animation of a single square moving down the screen. This was in the very first class!

So instead of talking about semi-colons, syntax, types and so on, we thought about timing, animation, and how to make the animation uniform regardless of the speed of the computer.

After that, the students were given a series of staged assignments, finally ending up with the complete game by the end of the term.

[herodotus]

Sorry that should of course been N by M