Taking my first steps - and nearly drowning!

[Deg]

Well I spent a fun morning wrestling with the snake. Thought I had
better write some stuff down while I remembered it. At my age these
memories fade quickly :-(

Downloaded and installed Python, pygame and pgsear (thanks for all
those links Nick).

As I am not an admin on my laptop the environment variables were not
set for me so this made life slightly more difficult. The reason I
mention this is because if we do some staff training and then
enthusiastic staff rush of to eagerly install on their laptops they
may have similar problems.

Perhaps we could use something like portable python (http://
www.portablepython.com) to build a package that people could use.
Might make it simpler for kids to use at home as well.

Could not get the test.py in pygsear to work. Firstly it seemed to
have trouble finding the graphics to load. Secondly it would fail
when it came across thumbs.db which had very kindly been created in
all the graphics folders for me by Bill.

Failing caused the app to lock up in a Task Manager - End Task kind of
a way.

If I ignored all this then the rest of it seemed to work but IDLE is
not a very attractive or friendly place and I worry that some will
think that the journey to get there was not worthwhile.

How have others found this? Is it just me being a useless old git?

Deg.