Will you be doing this in English, French, or both? However, make sure that what you use has adequate online documentation in both English and French (and ideally many more) so that people who mostly cannot learn from lectures, but badly need _something to read while they are working things out_ can find all the stuff they require. Ahead of time it is hard to know how the numbers break down but if you expect to get a large number of self-motivated 12 and 14 year olds, then you are also expecting to get a large number of people who pick things up by reading the book and for whom lectures are either a) painful or b) a pleasant way to socialise with others who are trying to learn the same things. It is more or less impossible to teach many of these people by making lectures and having them listen to them because they have almost no experience of learning by being talked to. Their entire educational experience is one where they read the textbook, first, and thus come to class more or less already knowing what the teacher is going to teach and looking to the teacher for some clarification on corner cases, and the like. The smarter they are, the less they need to be taught, having already taught themselves ... Thus they have almost no experience in learning by being talked to, even by the teachers who are the very best at lecturing. Higher education can be excruciatingly hard for these students if the teacher hasn't made his own textbook yet, and expects the students to learn from the lectures. It doesn't help matters that such teachers are notoriously bad lecturers. Naturally, the teachers expect the students to be already well trained in learning by 'being talked to' -- their expectation is that this is how the students have been learning their whole lives. And the students, generally don't understand what the problem is. They know they are smart, and they know that they are floundering in class, but they don't know that their problem is that they aren't very good at learning from lectures, and badly need some texts to read if they are ever to make sense of things ... If you can get these people to recognise themselves then, no matter how they end up doing in this particular course, you will do them a priceless service. The problem gets exponentially worse if the language the teacher is talking in isn't your preferred language for learning in. It's late here. I will write more later. Good luck. Laura ps would go with IDLE myself. Now that tkinter is shipped with modern Mac distros, there hasn't been much of a problem any more here. But make sure that absolutely everybody knows what a PYTHONPATH is, can find their own, and can check that their PYTHONPATH is what it should be.