I think graphics is a great way to teach programming, because it gives such strong feedback to the students.
So do I. The students seemed rather happy with the text-based programming in the introductory course... And why shouldn't they? There are so many things to learn about programming itself before one even knows how to realizes if something is missing :) However, as we got closer to the end of the course, comments such as "Could this program be done with graphics?" started to occur. Not often, but still. The post-course survey showed that most students had not missed anything during the course, but some stated that "Graphics would have been fun". So, now I have decided to introduce graphics in one way or another in the continuation course.
How about making a small graphics library that has Shape objects. You create a shape object and manipulate it's attributes such as position, color, size, numOfVertices (triangle, square, pentagram), etc. Then you can teach subclassing a shape object, and finally making your own from scratch. PyGame of course is a great environment to build such a thing.
This sounds like a good idea. I was thinking about using the pygsear package first, mainly because I then would have ready-made material and examples to start from. The course starts in three weeks, so I am not really spoiled with time here. However, your suggestion should not take that long to implement. I will put it on my list of possible alternatives. /Linda