[Edu-sig] High School Programming for Newbies

[Jeffrey Elkner]

Dear Mr. Ehlers,

It was the College Board's decision to switch from Pascal to C++ that
lead me to Python in the first place, since I found C++ to be an
absolutely awful first language (the College Board eventually agreed,
and C++ was soon replaced by Java as the language for the AP exam).

Since you say that "My high school is not turning out programmers; we
are just trying to expose students to computer science and programming
and to help them think logically through problems..."  there is no good
reason to be using C++ in your curriculum.  C/C++ will be part of a
college CS program, but it need not and should not be part of a high
school one, particularly one with the goals you describe.

It would be interesting to find out why those that are telling you that
you "need to offer C++" think this is the case.  My guess is they are
motivated by some idea of the "prevalence of C++ in the market" and are
completely ignoring any pedagogical issues involved.

I would suggest you reconsider the decision to use VB before Python.
Python is a better language for learning programming ideas than VB is,
and most high school VB courses I have seen really are just
introductions to the Visual Studio environment and have *very* little to
do with programming.

Alan Gauld has an on-line web tutorial, "Learning to
Program" (http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld/) which makes some
use of Basic as well as Python.  If you have an instructor who is really
interested in doing so, I think a parallel approach (looking at
solutions to problems in both Python and VB and comparing and
contrasting the language features) would be more fruitful than a VB
first approach.

Hope this helps.


On Thu, 2005-02-24 at 20:39 -0600, Joseph Ehlers wrote:
> Now some people are telling me that we need to offer C++.  Help! I
> don’t think I can fit more into the curriculum and do justice to any
> one language.  One of our goals is to offer AP Computer Science Java
> in the future and we want the students adequately prepared for that
> language.  What is the opinion of the Python Edu-Sig community?
> Should we offer C++?  And if so, where would it fit into the
> curriculum?
>  
> 
> Joe Ehlers

-- 
Jeffrey Elkner <jeff at elkner.net>
Open Book Project <http://ibiblio.org/obp>