kudzayibam

Object-oriented programming can be a tricky topic, often feeling too abstract for beginners or those diving into more advanced programming concepts for the first time. This talk brings the four pillars of OOP, Encapsulation, Abstraction, Inheritance, and Polymorphism, to life using Pokémon as a point of reference to flesh out these concepts.

The audience will be briefly introduced to the world of Pokémon, with special attention paid to "Charmander", "Squirtle", and "Bulbasaur", and to how they operate in Pokémon battles in a video game. Using these systems and Python's documentation, we'll explore Python class hierarchy and make sense of it one pillar at a time. The audience will discover how encapsulation lets a Pokémon manage its own HP, how abstraction lets a trainer call attack() without knowing the damage math underneath, how inheritance lets three very different elemental types share a common Pokémon base class, and how polymorphism lets us loop over a team of mixed types and watch each one behave differently when we call the same method.

Whether you're new to Python, a teacher, a Pokémon fan, or all of the above, by the end, you will walk away with a mental model of OOP rooted in a fun and familiar property.

Level: Beginner–Intermediate