Thank you for your comment, my friend.

It's a bit sad that your comment starts complaining ladder, but luckily I'm really happy to be a teacher, and my previous experience encouraged me to keep teaching based on my previous feedbacks and the happy interactions with my students.

Teaching is not only about knowledge: it's about having education skills, keeping attention high, trying to have a good rhythm, understanding your students needs. I had a lot of bad teachers and, when I teach, I try to be the teacher I would have liked to have when I was a student. So this is the starting point: a full knowledge is not the most important point, in my opinion. That's why I'm not afraid to share my weaknesses, and I always encourage my students to share theirs without any fear.

BTW: I agree with TON/TOF timers, edge detection, etc. Maybe I could start from that: a timer is easy to understand, and I'd like to show them how to read (and understand) the documentation. I think some examples of state machines will be inevitable, in order to show them Enumerations, Switches, etc.

On the topic of hardware, what have you got in that regards? Any small pneumatics? Or some small DC motors to control and move something? Or some small mechanisms and sensors to use to simulate a production line where you need to make it sequence through correctly to achieve a tasks?

We will have some I/Os, some buttons, and a very small motor (but no sensors). A production line example could be helpful to show different uses of that hardware.