In these posts I outline the contents of each project in my book Python For Kids For Dummies.  If you have questions or comments about the project listed in the title post them here. Any improvements will also be listed here.

What’s in Project 2

Project 2 is a Hello World project that covers some important basics, including what literals are, how you name a literal in order to store it (ie variables). It shows the different ways to make a string literal.If you’re going to name a value you need to know about Python’s naming rules (and PEP8 naming conventions – yah but I don’t actually mention PEP8). Those naming rules themselves rely on you not using a keyword as a name, so you also get a list of Python keywords in this project.

It also covers Python’s print statement, looping with while (including the notion of a conditional and a code block). looping with for and counting with range. By the end of the Project you can fill the screen with “Hello World!”.  To do so you repeat something 300 times. I introduce the concept of magic numbers and explain why they should be avoided. I offer the use of variables in ALL_CAPS to use as constants.

Update March 2016: The book is designed to teach you Python 2.7. However, Python 3 is on the way, and if you’d like to see what’d be different in this project if you use Python 3 see this post.