I'm about to give it a shot, and I'll let you know how it goes. :) Joking aside, I think the first chapter of SICP is the most useful, straightforward, and gentle (yes, gentle!) introduction to programming in existence.
While it obviously sucks that your students can't figure out text editors and scripts, I hope to alleviate some of the pain by using Racket, its integrated editor, and the "Run" button on the toolbar.
If you wanted to write a blog post about SICP and beginning programming students, that would be great. I think after one has successfully programmed a moderate sized project (a text based game of life, for example, or a simple cgi+session+database app), SICP would be great... but not till then...
(But then I am the type who very early learned to avoid what the best professors thought was a good intro text and only trust my fellow students. Because once you see the field as a whole, you have VERY different taste in introductory texts, and more seem to prefer terse and comprehensive overviews which start from first principles, which are also the VERY WORST sort of introductory text possible.)
While it obviously sucks that your students can't figure out text editors and scripts, I hope to alleviate some of the pain by using Racket, its integrated editor, and the "Run" button on the toolbar.