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Re: Experiences/guidance on teaching Python as a first programming language

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  Re: Experiences/guidance on teaching Python as a first programming language Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> - 2013-12-09 14:57 -0500
    Re: Experiences/guidance on teaching Python as a first programming language Conor Hughes <conorh@conorh.net> - 2013-12-09 15:25 -0800

#61407 — Re: Experiences/guidance on teaching Python as a first programming language

On 12/9/2013 7:23 AM, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
> 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.

A few years ago, MIT switched from Scheme (which I believe originated at 
MIT) to Python for its first course. There might faculty blogs 
discussing the reasons. In any case, the course is one of MIT's free 
online offerings. There is a draft of a syllabus for your school. 
Certainly, most of the concept taught in the current C course could be 
taught with Python instead.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy

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#61420

Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> writes:

> A few years ago, MIT switched from Scheme (which I believe originated
> at MIT) to Python for its first course. There might faculty blogs
> discussing the reasons. In any case, the course is one of MIT's free
> online offerings.

Berkeley recently made the same transition. They had been mirroring the
MIT Scheme-based 6.001 quite closely; I believe the Python-based
replacement at Berkeley doesn't concern itself with tracking the new
6.001 at MIT. In any case, much (read: some) ink was spilled and
consternation felt about the transition, but all in all my impression
was that it went OK. IMHO, if you're going to switch from Scheme to
something else for first-time programmers, Python is quite nice, as it
reads exceptionally well and is very close to pseudocode in
appearance sometimes. Of course, given that I didn't learn on Python,
my opinions may be colored by prior experience.

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