teaching programming to beginners

On Jan 3, 2012, at 3:44 PM, Richard wrote: At my university, we used to have CS 201 in C. CS 201 was intended to be the intro to CS for students who already had *some* programming experience (C, Javascript, BASIC, whatever), whereas 104 was intended to be the "remedial" course where folks with zero experience would learn the basics. Unfortunately, the advisors responsible for incoming student authorizations gave into the impatient students and started letting just anyone take CS 201. By the time I was a TA (13 years after the paradigm had been established), probably only about 20% of the class had had any programming experience (and were quite bored) while we struggled to guide the rest of them through first UNIX shells and then the code-compile-run-swear-repeat sequence. We switched to Python a few years ago, and the difference has been amazing. At least compared to C, it just gets out of the way of learning the principles of programming pretty well. I think what caused the most trouble was the bit about meaningful indentation, which is something I've never really been a fan of; I like my braces (or at least some form of explicit block boundary)! Of course, the students who never learned to pay attention to their indentation level were generally the sort that wound up as IT or English majors anyway. If nothing else, Python taught the students that neatness counts. :-) I, myself, learned BASIC first on my elementary school's Apple IIs. For a kid, it's a pretty good language. I transitioned to C when I discovered that I couldn't do much interesting with what BASICs were available to me, but I never understood pointers until I learned assembly (it was a major epiphany, especially since I learned on PowerPC, where pointer dereferencing was an entire different instruction, not just a different addressing mode). Currently, our students learn C concurrently with assembly further on in the program (it's a 300-level course), which I think is a great idea. All of the web designers who just want to learn Java and get a job are already shunted away on a different track at that point. I shudder at the fact that many of our high schools use Java as an introductory language. I really can't see the point of starting someone out saying, "Your program runs from a special method in a special class (we'll teach you what both of those are later) labelled 'public static void main()'. Just wave the chicken correctly, and maybe if you stick with it long enough, you'll find out what that magic incantation means." - Dave