Hi all, I work in a University Engineering faculty teaching, among other things, programming. In our last meeting about improving our teaching syllabus and delivery we've identified the first year programming courses as an area where there is room for improvement and we're considering (mainly on my suggestion) switching to using Python as the first programming language that we use to introduce our students to programming. I'm interested to know if anyone can share experience of a similar situation or can point to any case studies about this.
The course is for ~100 1st year students with half studying Engineering Mathematics and the other half Electrical Engineering. Currently we introduce programming with C for the 1st semester and then C++ for the 2nd semester. In the 3rd semester they learn Matlab and following on from that they can take optional units run by the CS department in Java, Haskell and many more. Our faculty does not currently offer any Python courses for students at any level in CS or Engineering. Many of the students complain that the C course is too hard and my experience is that it doesn't equip them with the general understanding of programming that we really want them to get from the first programming course. I'm not sure about the Electrical Engineering students but the Engineering Mathematics students tend not to use C/C++ once they have covered Matlab and just use Matlab for all future projects, including in situations where it is highly inappropriate. In our recent meeting I proposed that Python should be the first programming language, and others proposed that Java should be the second. So we're currently evaluating the option of having Python in the first semester followed by Java in the second. Both courses would have to be created from scratch meaning that we would need to draw a complete outline and syllabus by mid-January in order to roll this out for the next academic year. I think that the benefits of this would be that using an "easy" language would be less distracting while we introduce the general concepts of programming. What we really want is for the students to focus on things like "why would I write a program?", "what kind of things can I do with a program?" and "how would I go about writing a program that does X?". Ideally by the end of the course we want that, given a description of a simple command line program that would perhaps calculate something or do some simple data processing, then the students would feel confident that they could do that. I think that using C distracts them from learning these more important general lessons as they struggle with simple things like how to print output, or avoid segmentation faults. Also ideally they would continue to use the language, where appropriate, for subsequent project work (which is when they would *really* learn the language). Some of the objections to the idea that were voiced in the meeting were that: 1) Some people felt that Python is not an "industry standard" unlike C/C++/Java and that it is not as good for employability. 2) Students should learn to program in a statically typed language because it leads to good programming discipline. 3) Python is too close to Matlab (which is considered essential for some industries our students often go in to). 4) It is better for students to be introduced to programming with a low-level language so that they gain a better understanding of how computers "really work". 5) Learning to program "should be painful" and we should expect the students to complain about it (someone actually said that!) but the pain makes them better programmers in the end. I'm particularly interested to know if anyone can share experience of switching to teaching Python as a first programming language in a similar context. A written up case study that I could circulate among the relevant staff would be especially useful. Thanks in advance, Oscar -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
