The main purpose of the lesson is to learn more about JSON data structures and Python dictionaries.
I can also see this used as part of a lesson to teach students to make software components and reusable software.
It would be great to modify the loader to be usable for scroller games as well as 2D tile map games.
I've included a scroller example. Run it with
$ python scroller_example.py
It would be a cool project to make something like a simplified Lode Runner or Canabalt.
For ideas, see:
Prior to doing this, I would like to create a layer on the 2D tile map to find things like treasure, monsters, and bombs.