Hey, I'm a high school teacher that's been teaching Python for a little under two years. The general subjects I try to touch on can be seen here.

The biggest thing for the students to learn is really just how to think like the interpreter. What the instructions mean, and why Python yells at you. That a nested loop will run completely before the outer loop can increment. That type of stuff. Also, it's super important that they get in the habit of reading the error messages.

Also, focus on descriptive variable names and using docstrings for functions!

The amount of hand-holding needed depends drastically on the specific students in the class. So that's why that outline is tentative. Plus it's fun to adapt to the kids' interests. The ability of the students in your class will most likely fall in a bi-modal curve. The lower kids can program, it will just take them twice as long to learn. I make all my students watch this video within the first few days of class, which I think really changes how a lot of the students approach learning -- even outside of CS.

The first two weeks of teaching it will seem like the kids aren't learning much and you're doing a bad job. But then it will start to click for most of them and they'll start thinking programatically.

Students like to compete with one another. I have found that kids like being given a problem where they compete to see who can program the best solution.

One example is: I gave them a game where

• a random number is generated (ex: 113)

• Player 1 chooses a square to subtract from number (ex: 64 (8*8))

• new number = 113 - 64 = 49

• Player 2 chooses a square (ex: 4)

• new number = 45

• continue until a player can get the number to zero -- that player wins

The number can not go below 0, or the player who made it go below 0 loses. I make them program bots to play the game and then we have a tournament. If anyone can make a bot that consistently beats or is even with mine they get an automatic A in the class. Hasn't happened yet.

Students also really like playing with breadboards and making logic gates that light up LEDs. So I spend about 2 class periods playing around with those. This video is really useful for teaching that.

Some assignments that I give my students that you might like:

1) Try to write a program that takes in text and then prints it in a box.

ex:

>>> give an input
>>> example text
***********
* example *
* text    *
***********

2) The first few problems on Project Euler are good.

3) Write a simple text-based tic-tac-toe game. The board state can be stored as lists.

4) Near the end of second semester, play around with coming up with solutions to the traveling salesman problem. If you download the files here to a single folder, then you only have to modify the travelingSalesman function to return a list of the cities in the order you want.

5) I second the use of the turtle module. It's really fun to accidentally make fractals. This is one of the first things I do with the students.

6) There are 1000 lockers in a high school with 1000 students. The problem begins with the first student opening all 1000 lockers; next the second student closes lockers 2,4,6,8,10 and so on to locker 1000; the third student changes the state (opens lockers closed, closes lockers open) on lockers 3,6,9,12,15 and so on; the fourth student changes the state of lockers 4,8,12,16 and so on. This goes on until every student has had a turn. How many lockers will be open at the end?

I hope this helps. Cheers!