SO:  Any recommendations as to course textbooks?  Or just go with Zelle
and/or O'Reilly's latest wood rat book?
-   The students presumably have had programming courses already.
-   I would think that K-12 students would be happier if they could
generate some graphics.
-   This is a 6-weeks course.  Little leisure time.

Appreciate any advice.

Peter Chase
Sul Ross State University

I still like Zelle's best and includes some graphics (Tk-based, using his own graphics.py).

Some of the online tutorials are quite worthwhile as well:
http://diveintopython.org/ is freely downloadable.

Or roll your own (that's what I've been doing).

Another way to get graphics is to write scene description language (POV-Ray) or even VRML from Python. I've used this approach successfully, but only because I give students access to prewritten modules. Like, we might build our own vector class, with a module that already expects to use vectors.

VPython is still more graphically exciting.

If you're teaching people who're going to be in turn teaching Python, then I think the job is more to showcase what's possible, often in demo mode. Give a sense of the possibilities. Mastery of all these options needn't be the goal of the course. I'd focus on enough mastery of basic core Python to leave students with a sense of "hey, this ain't so hard, I could really be productive with this!"

Kirby