I suggest Tcl/Tk over VB. It's easy to learn and use, and powerful. You can quickly make impressive GUI's. Because it is interpreted, you can make changes to your program on the fly and immediately see the results. It has its roots in C, rather than BASIC, so it provides a good lead in to systems languages. It's cross platform. There are several good books about it, including "Effective Tcl/Tk Programming" (Harrison/McLennan) and "Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk" (Welch). I think it has everything you need to be a good instructional language. Visit: http://dev.scriptics.com for more information about Tcl/Tk. - eric
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I suggest Tcl/Tk over VB. It's easy to learn and use, and powerful. You can quickly make impressive GUI's. Because it is interpreted, you can make changes to your program on the fly and immediately see the results. It has its roots in C, rather than BASIC, so it provides a good lead in to systems languages. It's cross platform. There are several good books about it, including "Effective Tcl/Tk Programming" (Harrison/McLennan) and "Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk" (Welch). I think it has everything you need to be a good instructional language. Visit: http://dev.scriptics.com for more information about Tcl/Tk. - eric