Yes a premade engine is ALWAYS a good idea for your first project. You should not use an engine that makes half the game for you, but unless you are very interested in low level stuff, you don't want to be messing with how to display an image or animation to the screen.
Use some thing like PyGame, Slick or SDL, depending on what language you are writing in.
What language are you using? and how well do you know it?
I use C# (w/ XNA) And I know it well enough to make Pong in it. Outside of that, I experiment with the various examples on the XNA/App Hub site.
Then it looks like you found out which engine/framework you should use 
