As something for beginners, this would be great. When you start learning a new skill, it's important to have that feeling of tangible achievement to keep students motivated. Anyone interested enough to pursue a career in game dev will dig into pyglet to understand what's happening, as they start to push the limits of the knowledge gained from this kind of exercise.

And then here's the other nice lesson: students can learn that they don't need to know everything before they start making cool and useful stuff. The confidence that comes from knowing that is just as important (more so?) as being able to implement pyglet from scratch if necessary. The former is a skill used daily, whereas the latter -- well, consider how often in your engineering career you casually rely on the work of others to power your creation. Has anyone ever required you to write a WSGI implementation, or a framework?

That's been my experience, at least.

Totally agree.

I remember writing this:

10 PRINT "LESSNONYMOUS"

20 GOTO 10

Seeing actual things happen was awesome. Now we have 3D games, seeing your name over and over wont enthrall, so being able to mod and extend a basic Minecraft world would be an incredible gateway.

The way to hook people is exactly like you say. Make a small change, see a huge difference. Suddenly ... YOU HAVE THE POWER!!!

10 PRINT "LESSNONYMOUS";

20 GOTO 10

Wow, that just brought back a massive flash from the past. I actually remembered how I felt then I wrote those lines (or something very similar) for the first time. It's a powerful feeling. Thanks for that.

I remember typing something similar (but probably more seditious) on the computers at every store I came across and watching the staff not know how to turn it off.

Probably a jerk move in retrospect, but how can you work in a computer store and not play around with the computers?!

10 PRINT "LESSNONYMOUS";

20 GOTO 10

There was an awful lot happening behind my very first program too. And that was the available level of abstraction. Why start kids coding something so simple when they can mess with something so powerful?

I definitely agree, I graduated with BS in Computer Science but never touched 3D (only 2D game design). Although if I had, I probably would be a lot further than I am now. High expectations, but the results could be amazing.

Don't worry, it is a good thing. The ones who want to take it further will naturally start digging into what's going on behind the scenes.

Where would games be if we didn't have abstraction?

As a country the USA needs much more top down (you can do this now! don't you wanna learn how?) rather than bottom up (learn all this math, all these concepts, all this stuff over here, then do it all again for in college, then gradschool and maybe you'll make more money in 20years) education.