Recently I've been fantasizing about a processing-like environment, but built on top of Python instead of Java. Frederik De Bleser's NodeBox fits the bill. Mac OS only though. The NodeBox gallery has some pretty impressive stuff.
I've had a front row seat for the collapse of CS enrollment through five straight years of teaching the second quarter of our intro sequence. Now I'm thinking about alternative intro curricula that really get away from the command line/console straightjacket. I don't claim to be particularly original, but it seems to me you could carefully craft a set of courses that did the following:
- Completely covers a standard ACM/IEEE CS Curriculum
- Frames assignments in terms of interactive visual artifacts or media manipulation
- Touches on the simple, but mind-blowing, concepts of CS, e.g: automata, complex networks, iterated function systems, multi-agent systems, etc.