I like the command line and a text editor myself. Just set the file properties to executable and add the #!/usr/bin/python path to the top of each executable. Idle and VIdle are very usable too. Of course, I'm using Linux. HTH, A. Jorge Garcia http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com  Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone -------- Original message -------- From: roberto <roberto03@gmail.com> Date: 12/10/2014 1:14 PM (GMT-05:00) To: "edu-sig@python.org" <Edu-sig@python.org> Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Recommendation for editor+console or IDE for teaching beginners Why don't you try cloud.sagemath.com? or https://trinket.io/ They both let your students work at a distance and collaborate with you. Hope this helps. On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 4:47 PM, Christian Mascher <christian.mascher@gmx.de> wrote: Hi Andre, I would really like some advice based on practical experience teaching beginners. I personally would stick with Idle. There was a time, when it was problematic under MacOS because tkinter was missing there - but those days are over. As an all-platform, _already (battery-) included_ editor, Idle is simple but pretty good. There is not much you have to explain which concerns the ide. Most of the problems of beginners in Idle (and I always use idle in class, apart from reeborg) are not very idle-specific (indentation, copy and paste in console-mode, miximg tabs and spaces, saving, importing). You will have to explain the difference between programming at the prompt or in a file, but you would have to explain similar things in other ide's as well. If you want to keep it safe and simple, write programs with Idle only in files (File->New File, and run them with F5). Most technical problems arise when using the live-prompt (session-saving is useless). Some students used idle and pygame together some years ago with no problems. 1. Use IDLE. Free, part of the standard distribution. I never used it very much myself and I keep reading about how tricky it can be to set up properly for beginners - mostly, I gathered, due to path problems on Windows. There is a proposal to make it better ( https://github.com/asweigart/idle-reimagined/wiki) but it is doubtful it will be realized soon enough (or at all) to make it worthwhile waiting for it. I haven't encountered path problems with idle recently (about since the introduction of Windows XP and python msi-installers ...) When Pygame is installed Python has got to find it, but that shouldn't be a concern of Idle. Having to install only two things (check for the python dependency of the pygame-version first!) would be my choice. Cheers, Christian _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig -- Roberto