Comment IT literacy for general audience - SCALC (Score 1) 462
Since the course is for a general student, I don't see a focus on programming or computer hardware as most appropriate.
As an alternate, I would suggest SCALC, the open office spreadsheet program, as a good platform for several activities:
1. Learning to compute numerically - calculate sales tax, etc.
2. Learning how algoritum work - sort, binary search can be visually illustrated beautifully within a spreadsheet
3. Real life program solving tool - Post a real life problem to the student; have them analyze it; rephrase it to put in a spreadsheet; check the answers.
4. Graphs and formulae - links direclty to analytic geometry classes
5. Macro - automation which starts to provide motivation into programming for those interested.
6. Statistics - for advanced students
This is much for useful for the avearge student than any narrowly focused programming course.