• Recent Tutorials

  • Pascal Programming For Schools (pp4s.co.uk)

    The Pascal Programming for Schools project has been mentioned previously here on PGD, but given the renewed interest in getting school children programming it's time for another mention. The site is run by brothers Doug and Norman Morrison and contains a wealth of information for beginners.

    The site itself provides tutorials, a pretty comprehensive reference section, a challenges section containing small programming challenges designed to help users improve and a pretty big (and growing) collection of programs written by students.

    One such program is RandomPlatformScroller written by a young man named George, who was in year 9 when he wrote it (that's about 14 years old for those of you, who like me, may not be familiar with the current year definitions - I knew it as the 3rd year I think). Built with Smart Mobile Studio it's available to play here.

    The aim is simple, to navigate a collection of platforms and walls that all have different properties as defined by their colours. You can jump through some but not others, some collapse when you walk on them and some allow you to perform wall jumps to climb upwards. It even includes a simple physics model to provide the player sprite with momentum. Whilst the hardware I had access to wasn't up to much when I was 14, neither was my skill set. George's efforts are really quite impressive and I can only hope he develops his skills further.

    If you want more information about the site or would like to contribute tutorials and/or demonstrations, you can get in touch with Doug and Norman using the contact details available on their site.