I'd like to create some sort of script that will create a particular shortcut on the desktop of any Windows computer. The idea is to make the script available (to students in a course) so that they can download it to their computer and run it just by clicking it (i.e. not running it at the command-line). The script will have to check for some particular folders and files, and, if they exist, create the shortcut.

I'm a Linux guy and know very little about Windows, and so I am not even sure where to start to looking. I considered into using a Python script to do this, but that apparently requires installing some Windows-specific extensions, which I don't want to insist that that users do.