Hi Jeffry -- I'm curious what platform your students will have, the ratio of students to computers, the presence or absence of a network, connection to the internet etc. I reason I ask is that I think it'd be nifty to demonstrate object-oriented thinking using very simple classes and subclasses, just to give the idea of what it means to inherit functionality by subclassing, then turn to something more complicated like others here have posted about: e.g. maybe subclass FancyURLopener in urllib:

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import urllib class Pyorg(urllib.FancyURLopener): """ Does little except demonstrate inheritance with overriding, invoking parent class methods """ def __init__(self): self.parent = self.__class__.__bases__[0] self.parent.__init__(self) self.geturl = "http://www.python.org/" self.getfile = "index.html"

def retrieve(self): """invoke parent version with preset args""" return self.parent.retrieve(self, self.geturl,self.getfile)

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myopener = Pyorg() local = myopener.retrieve() local[1].dict # local[1] is a mimetools.Message instance {'last-modified': 'Fri, 03 Aug 2001 21:08:05 GMT', 'content-length': '12098', 'etag': '"5a7510-2f42-3b6b12b5"', 'date': 'Mon, 06 Aug 2001 19:33:53 GMT', 'accept-ranges': 'bytes', 'content-type': 'text/html', 'connection': 'close', 'server': 'Apache/1.3.20 (Unix)'} myopener.close()

By going back and forth between simple abstractions (yet hands-on), and stuff with a "real world" feel, I bet you can refine student understanding without dampening their initial enthusiasm. Given how much Python source is included in the Standard Library, I think just popping some of the modules and eyeballing them, to get a feel for what full-blown Python really looks like, would be helpful, as a kind of before/after test (do it towards the beginning of the course, then again towards the end -- students should feel a difference, in the sense of increased readability, more comprehension on the 2nd or 3rd pass). I think a key question facing any teacher of the topic is how much coding she or he might want to do ahead of time, and make available in module form. Just having student names in a dictionary, or a Student class with students instantiating personal objects, filling in various fields (e.g. fill in birth date, use object.age() function to get back current age to the day), might help personalize the experience. In addition, there's a question of whether you'll want to be doing stuff on the web, i.e. doing exercises or background readings/links in HTML in support of this class. In my ideal classroom, there's a computer projector, so the teacher can show (a) web pages (b) Python in interactive shell mode (c) Python code in IDLE's or some other text editor etc. Another question is how to balance using power tools as black boxes (e.g. pre-written modules, perhaps with subclassable classes) and how much basic background material to explore. Learning about bits and bytes, variable types, the built-in data structures, and looking at a few algorithms in detail, is certainly one way to go. Math-heavy and math- lite also mark two ends of a spectrum. Do your students need background in hexadecimal numbers? Probably, as K-12 often fails to cover this highly relevant topic nowadays. Just thinking out loud here, and not claiming to have the answers. Like you, I'm curious about what results teachers in the field are getting. Most of my teaching has been over the internet with unseen others -- when I do one on one stuff, it's usually not around using Python directly. Kirby