Yup, I'm a student at the Erasmus High School in Brussels. In about 1 year I'm going to graduate as a teacher in mathematics, history and informatics. I 'll give math and history to children between 12 and 15 years old and informatics to those between 14 and 18(+) years old. This is the Belgian model ... informatics just starts in the third year of secondary schools. It's a course of 1 or 2 hours (~50 minutes) a week. The emphasis is on Microsoft office packets Word, some Excel and a little Access, ... programming happens in Pascal (most of the times), a language I personally despise, and the pupils need to know a little about networking, the www (some html), new thingy 's, ... and some other bits. #Q1: What model does your country use? Before I graduate, I, of course, have to write a graduation paper (~correct term?). Now, I fell madly in love with Python. So I want to write my paper about teaching Python in secondary schools ... I'm thinking about a textbook from the third year up until the last year, teaching basic concepts using this beautiful language. On top of that I'm also a great fan of Free Software and Open Source ... My favorite sources for Python are: * How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, Learning in Python * Dive Into Python * The Livewires Python Course #Q2: What should a graduated student (18y) need to know or, perhaps better, where should I stop? Which books are recommended? --- Values, Types, Expressions, Statements, Operations, Procedures, Functions --- Strings, Lists, Dictionaries, Tuples --- Logics and Conditionals --- Loops, Recursion, Iteration --- Classes and Objects, methods and attributes, Inheritance, Overloading --- ADT: Stacks and Queues, Trees, Linked lists Getting blurry now ... --- Files, Pickle, Error Handling --- Sockets, Server, Client --- ??? --- Using a database --- CGI --- HTTP, html, xml handling --- GUI programming --- ??? #Q3: If I copy-paste the GPL and GFDL into (respectively) the examples and my textbook, is that enough to make it Free (as in Freedom)? Or do I have to register somewhere? Motivation is important. The students need to see and feel the use of programming. For instance, making a pacman-game (Livewires) will give students enough motivation. Or making a little script to rename all photos from some holiday ... Or making a small and raw server-client chat program ... Or a simple webserver in Python and then go from there to set up your own WAMP/LAMP. #Q4: What little chores did you solve using Python? What would interest you as a 14-18 year old? When did you think like "Man, if I only knew how to start solving this problem... how does this works?" I know these are some big questions, but I hope you can help me out of your own experiences ... Regards, Sven