What's the course's angle? If it's an intro course like it sounds, you're probably going to have a hard time. Like it or not, an intro course is for teaching

What's the course's angle? If it's an intro course like it sounds, you're probably going to have a hard time. Like it or not, an intro course is for teaching basics that are shared across all languages, with an added goal of inspiring students to want to learn more. My high school programming course started with "Karel the Robot." (http://karel.sourceforge.net/ http://karel.sourceforge.net/). It's not even a "real" programming language, but it worked quite well to teach the basics of state, control flow, functions, etc. My "Aha!" moment was shortly after that when I pointed and clicked my way to a not-horrible PacMan game in VB.NET. Then I was sold. I'd made something fun that I could put on a floppy and show off to my friends; All without knowing the first thing about pixels, graphics contexts, layouts, or (heaven forbid) html and css. I just had a timer, some images, and a big switch statement for keyboard input. If your teacher is trying to ignite his students' interest in the same way mine was, you're going to need to convince him that accomplishing the same thing is as easily done in python. From what I've seen it's not -- UI libraries are hard. (His choice of VB.NET almost certainly implies there will be some simple WinForms drag and drop UI work happening) I guess what I'm trying to say is that while python is a great language, it may not be the best tool for this job. I can't tell without seeing his lesson plan, but based on my experience learning to program, python wouldn't have left me feeling as empowered (at the start). Intro to programming isn't about languages, it's about showing people that they can make the computer do their bidding, so that they can work less and/or have more fun.