I have only quickly dabbled with Racket, but it's Dr.Racket programming environment was pretty nice and it's geared for student/beginner use: http://racket-lang

I have only quickly dabbled with Racket, but it's Dr.Racket programming environment was pretty nice and it's geared for student/beginner use: http://racket-lang.org/ http://racket-lang.org/ Very nice feature in Racket: it ships with the Lisp subsets used in the book "How to Design Programs". It introduces new language features bit by bit. Using Dr.Racket this can be enforced upon the student in order to avoid/prevent cargo cult programming by using a feature they don't yet understand (perhaps from a piece of code that's copy&pasted from somewhere) in order to solve a problem in the earlier chapters.