in fact, I feel there may be a risk of the students developing an idea of OOP and graphical programming being two different things if they are introduced separately.
In my book, OOP and graphical programming *are* two different things. To introduce OOP is to introduce the syntax for classes and forming objects from them e.g. class Foo: pass myobj = Foo() OOP includes ideas of methods & attributes, inheritance, dot notation, operator overloading, method overriding, constructors, static and class methods, various design patterns. You can do all that (or a subset of that) in IDLE if you like. My approach when introducing classes and objects is to emphasize we've been using objects all along, e.g. every list object has all these useful methods by virtue of being of the list type. I do stuff like:
dir([]) # spill the guts of an empty list
or even
dir(1) # spill the guts of the number 1
to show all the "hidden knowledge" any Python object has, owing to the apparatus of built-in types behind it. Then the idea is: as the programmer, you're free to *extend* the tool box with new types (i.e. classes) of your own design. These might have to do with GUI programming in some way, but they certainly don't have to. The first classes I introduce look like this: import random from random import randint class Animal: def __init__(self, name): self.name = name self.state = 'Awake' def sleep(self): print "Zzzzzzz..." self.state = 'Sleeping' def eat(self, food): print "I am eating %s" % (food) def wakeup(self): self.state = 'Awake' def pain(self, location, amount): # <-- student contribution print "My %s hurts!" % (location) self.state = 'In pain' print "It hurts %s!" % (amount) class Dog(Animal): def bark(self, times): print "Woof woof! " * times def jump(self, object): # <-- one of my students wrote this method fallchance = randint(1,10) if fallchance == 10: print "I tripped over a %s!" % (object) self.pain('head', 'a lot') if fallchance != 10: print "I jumped over a %s." % (object) The fact that OOP has proved especially useful when it comes to GUI programming is very true, but then that's all the more reason to not confuse the two. In my high school level Python classes, I've done quite a bit with OOP, and with graphics (POV-Ray especially, with a Python front end for generating scene description language), but to date I have never yet taught any GUI or widget programming. John Zelle's Tkinter-based graphics.py is an attractive option, if I *do* start getting into teaching that stuff. It's easy to use and gives the right idea, but without getting too complicated too quickly. Kirby