Idioms for Composing Games with Etoys

Creating ones own games has been the main motiva- tion for many people to learn programming. But the barrier to learn a general purpose programming language is very high, especially if some positive results can only be expected after having manually written more than 100 lines of code. With this paper we first motivate potential users by showing that one can create classic board- and arcade games like Lights Out, TicTacToe, or Pacman within the playful and constructivist visual learning environment Etoys dragging together only a few lines of code. Then we present recurring idioms which helped to develop these games with only a few lines of code.