I recently completed the 2nd day of this summer camp blitz for TAG (talented and gifted) students, a category invented by the district, and I'm not sure how it applies, i.e. this private NGO has no obligation to check a district database for a tag flag or anything, praise Allah. Anyway, all the students are bright, astute, engaged and interested. Programming is hard fun and takes concentration. One is lucky if able to muster it. Takes a safe environment and calories to burn. We're in a campus of the highly privilege where no expense is spared, and every kid has access to a state of the art Apple. I've got a projector and screen. We all have Internet. This is my first time to teach an all-Apple class and I have to confirm Chairman Steve's impressing the IDLE is languishing here. Guido gave Python a tremendous boost, propelled it into high visibility with an interactive Tk shell and editor, but that infrastructure has not kept pace. The scroll bar tends to not work. Resizing windows as they'll get to large to fit the screen, so grabbing the lower right resize control requires changing screen resolution through the Finder control panel. That being said, it's pretty amazing to have such a smooth language co-functioning with VPython, such that we're immediately able to get colorfun.py going, which the students then tweak. I'm using the 'heads first' or 'dive into' approach of supplying plenty of scaffolding, getting the results first, then going back over the syntax and structure of the language with an eye towards making small modifications. We've spent a large percentage of the last few hours tweaking color, learning about what's canned (pre-named) and how to define your own RGB values. Today, using the projector, I introduced the random module, which I think is one of the first to be useful after visual itself. random's randint and choice are two of the most practical. Our code looks like this: from visual import * from random import randint def galaxy( n ): for i in range(n): x = randint(-100, 100) y = randint(-100, 100) z = randint(-100, 100) r = randint(10) sphere( pos = (x, y, z), radius = r, color = color.red ) return Then a next modification, after playing with choice and randint in the shell a little more, and talking about lists, would be: from visual import * from random import randint, choice colors = [ color.red, color.green, color.blue, color.yellow, color.orange ] def galaxy( n ): for i in range(n): x = randint(-100, 100) y = randint(-100, 100) z = randint(-100, 100) r = randint(10) c = choice( colors ) sphere( pos = (x, y, z), radius = r, color = c ) return Once this code is working on each workstation (I go around to help catch syntax errors, usually a missing comma or paren), then students might vary the parameters, add more colors for example. Earlier, when introducing functions more generally, I told the story of the guy who impressed the king for a modest favor, were he successful in a mission (the King put out an RFP and this looked like the lowest bide): put a grain of rice on the first square of the chess board, double it for the next, and the next, and so forth. "Can't be that much rice" thought the King. def reward( ): therice = 0 for x in range(64): therice = therice + 2**x return therice Wow, all the rice in the world and then some, right? Note that 2**0 == 1 and that's what goes on the first square, so we only get up to 2**63 on the last square (with the rice being cumulative). I continue to introduce ( ): in the function def as almost like an emoticon, like two eyes with an open mouth. Turn that mouth sideways to make it look more like a mouth, and remember that's where to put your arguments. This is easy to remember, as people use their mouths for arguing all the time. My students range in age from roughly 14-17. My Photostream has a few pictures from the current venue, mixed in with other topical photos (a Flickr set): http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/sets/72157622961425831/ Kirby