Yellow Dog Linux

I gave my 14 year old son a project to learn some C programming over the summer. He has YDL 6.1 installed on his PS3, and he has been viewing youtube C programming lectures by University of New South Wales professor Richard Buckland. While my son has been successful with writing text manipulation programs and the like, I can tell that his interest in writing such programs is dwindling. I think that he is ready to move on to some simple low level graphics programming, such as changing background colors, drawing lines and circles and setting pixels, etc. I could write C programs to do such things a long time ago in the DOS era, but I don't know where to start with YDL and the PS3. Are there any low level graphics libraries available that would work with the C compiler that comes with YDL?

Thank you for any help and/or suggestions,

BDF

I think SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer) is the sort of thing you're looking for:

http://www.libsdl.org/

It's in the repos so it's a yum install away.

Ron Rogers Jr. (CronoCloud)

Thank you for your suggestion to use SDL. My son and I will read the SDL tutorials and see what we can do.

Best Regards,

Ben Frink (bdf)

My son (also 14) is doing a lot with Scratch and Alice this summer. They make working with graphics a bunch easier, and introduce OO pretty well, too.

I don't know if he's into robotics, but if he is, then the Bricx extensions to the Lego robotics kit programming are great too.

Art,

Thanks for the great suggestion. I also have a daughter that is 9 years old. The age difference between her and my son is a little over 5 years, so there is not much negative competition between them. In fact, they enjoy creating things together. Therefore, Scratch and Alice may be a wonderful way for then to learn together.

Best regards,

Ben Frink