I agree. Skip the "build a real foundation" and go directly to "minimal development environment".

I used a lot of Classic Visual Basic 6, and it's very easy to make a nice form with a few buttons and text fields, and perform simple calculations. It looks ideal for this, but it's proprietary, quite outdated, each year more difficult to install, and people make fun of you if you say "Basic".

Is there a nice library to build forms in Python? Something simple where he can build the logic behind a nice bunch of buttons.

(Another option is JavaScript, browsers are everywhere, but I don't like that "3"+7 is not an error.)