Alpha-py was developed by Petria Cameron, with assistance from James Cameron and Stephen Thorne. It was first released on June 15, 2007.
Alpha-py is derived from The Livewires Course by Gareth McCaughan, Rhodri James, Paul Wright.
Alpha-py uses programs written by the Livewires team. It is also derived from the original tutorial written by them.
Gareth McCaughan and Richard Crook both specified and wrote the LiveWires package, with the assistance of Neil Turton and Matthew Newton. Paul Wright ported the games library to use pygame. Gareth wrote most of the Beginners' worksheets. Rhodri James, Neil and Paul wrote various combinations of Beginners' and Games sheets. Mark White wrote the wsheet LaTeX class which enabled us to produce the Postscript and PDF versions of the sheets.
The rest of the team kept us sane on the LiveWires holiday itself. On the LiveWires 2001 holiday, the rest of the computing team was Rob Pearce and Colin Bell.
The maintainers of the course can be reached at python@livewires.org.uk.
Stephen Thorne (stephen@thorne.id.au) converted the LiveWires course to the Lore format for use at the ComputerCamp 2003 holiday, run by Scripture Union Queensland.
LiveWires is a Scripture Union holiday for 12 to 15 year olds, which takes place in the UK every summer. The young people on the holiday have the chance to take part in a variety of computing, electronics and multimedia activities. The LiveWires Python Course was written to help us to teach Python to the young people. We're making it available to everyone else as a way of giving something back to the Python community.
The LiveWires web site is at http://www.livewires.org.uk/
Scripture Union is an organisation whose aim is to make Jesus known to children, young people and families. SU staff and volunteers work in more than 130 countries; in the UK its work includes schools work, missions, family ministry, helping Christians to read the Bible and supporting the church through training and resources. Scripture Union holidays have been happening for more than 100 years.
For more information on SU, see http://www.scriptureunion.org.uk/.
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