Poll: how to teach course in scientific computing?

This fall I am teaching a graduate level course in scientific computing to non-CS graduate students. I will be teaching them in the unix tradition, using C, Python, R, and I will teach them about tools like emacs, LaTeX, etc. They will come in with a laptop but I suspect with mixed OS's including Mac, Windows, and perhaps even someone using linux (prob Ubuntu). I plan to demo everything using Debian Wheezy.

How should I approach this? What should I suggest and/or require students to do?