Pedagogic advice needed

[Jerzy Karczmarczuk]

Dear Snake Charmers,

I am going to teach to some biology students (a branch called here
"neurosciences"; you may speculate yourself what kind of computation
proficiency they need...) - 

- a comp. sci. course under a buzzword title "Scientific programming".
The plan was to use Matlab as the main vehicle.
Then after a while it was clear that in order to give to *all* students
the possibility to work at home, we need a free programming package, so
the idea was to use SciLab.

Then I began to digest all that, and the obvious question was: why not
Python?

==

My questions are:

1. Does anybody here have some teaching experience in a similar context?
2. Assuming that the visualisation issues, all kind of plots, graphs 
   *and animations* are very important, how would you organize with
   Python such a work?

Of course I know Numeric Python, Scientific Python modules, and other
standard stuff permitting to do all kind of graphic exercices and
demonstrations (eg., all the wx bazar).

But I *must* avoid the low-level programming, we won't have time for that.
We will need a reasonable complete scientific 3D plotting package usable
by people without too much experience. I plan to do some non-trivial prog-
ramming with rich data structures (otherwise I would stick to Scilab), but
a decent *integrated* scientific library, I mean: a framework, not just a 
set of - powerful but rather atomic - procedures, would be quite useful.

(I checked the Obvious Suspects, the Vault of Parnassus, etc., I am veryfing
all that stuff, but perhaps some of you know something really succulent and
full of vitamines. I need *your experience*, NOT just standard Web links.)

Thank you in advance.

Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France