Hi Joe et al, I've been reading this list for a month or so now, and was about to write my own introductory email, when your message came along, giving me a good opportunity to throw in my 2 cents. My background: I was an engineer in the telecomm and computer industries for over 20 years, including the last 5 or so programming in Java. My previous employer, an optical switch vendor called Tellium, closed its doors last year, and I made a long-contemplated move into teaching high school. I now teach a course called Computer Applications II to 10th graders at a "career academy" in Monmouth County, NJ. It's like a magnet school, for kids who are interested in careers in the health occupations. The school is competitive to get into, and the kids are generally bright, with no real discipline issues at all. I'm -very- fortunate to be starting my teaching career there. I was given carte blanche to make my own curriculum, and I chose to make it a sort of "serious computer literacy" course, basically teaching stuff I think is interesting and/or important. We learn some things about hardware and operating systems, some history of computers and the Internet, a fair bit of HTML and CSS (actually writing the tags, not using a WYSIWYG tool), a tiny bit of PHP, a bit of database and SQL . . . and some Python. The course is a 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week, for the semester. It's a required course, not an elective, so there's no self-selection of the students. Some are naturally enthusiastic about the subject, but many are not. I had no previous Python experience, and I'm not sure when or how I stumbled on it on the web -- but I read a bit and it seemed like a good fit. This past fall was the first time this course was offered. As things worked out, we had about 3 1/2 weeks for Python. I tried to give the kids at least a taste of it, and was only partially successful. I got some of my ideas and approaches from the Dawson book, and I liked it a lot. If I was going to teach an entire Python course in high school, I would be happy to use it. The most important thing is that it's -fun-. I got a desk copy of the Zelle book partway through the semester, and it looks to be more appropriate than Dawson for building the intellectual base for further work in the field -- certainly a worthy goal, but maybe better for college. You could do a lot worse than to start off with the Dawson approach and mix in material from Zelle once the fun factor has been clearly established. Another interesting book to look at is "Introduction to Computing and Programming in Python: A Multimedia Approach" by Mark Guzdial, which looks like it might split the difference somewhat -- more visual than Zelle, more intellectual than Dawson. It teaches Python (actually Jython. . . ) by using it to manipulate images and sounds, in a programming environment called JES. My original plan for our Python unit was to base it on the Livewires materials, but that immediately proved to be unworkable. It seemed to presume a level of willingness to dig in and figure things out that I just couldn't get from them -- and I think my kids are a bit above average in that area. Maybe the kids who sign up for the Livewires camp are already well-inclined towards programming? Maybe there's a lot more to the course than what's in the handouts on the web? I'd be interested to know more about how it's run, if anybody can tell me more. What I ended up doing for the unit was to use the "guessing game" problem, much as it was in the Livewires course, to get some of the basics of variables, looping, and branching down -- but I had to walk the kids through it, repeating things many times. We also used the Livewires module to do a little bit of very primitive graphics and animation. And that's all we got through. No lists, no dictionaries, no file I/O, no objects. . . And even then, a substantial minority of the kids (maybe 20%) still didn't really "get it" very well. A handful of kids totally got it and loved it, and I practically begged them to get the Dawson book and go on on their own. Obviously, your mileage will vary. I'd be interested to know a little more -- is your class an elective? What grade level? Best wishes, Andy Judkis ajudkis@verizon.net