[Edu-sig] Sage, SciPy or continue with MatLab ???

[David MacQuigg]

Hi Bill,

Yes, I am interested.  Please send copies or links of your papers and 
anecdotal evidence.  Comments from former students would be especially 
interesting.  It might be nice to compare the reactions of CS majors to 
majors in other departments.

I'm a little surprised the Python students didn't actually do *better* 
than the C++ students.  I guess it all depends on the way these courses 
are taught.  I can imagine a CS2 class in C++ where anyone who isn't 
fluent on day one gets slammed.  A more cooperative environment, in 
which CS1 students get an introduction to C++, and CS2 students get a 
little time to get fluent in the new language, might be just the 
opposite.  In that situation, I would think the Python students might 
have an advantage because they spent more time on fundamentals. 

The transition from Python to Java seems especially easy.  Students 
could just spend a few hours with JavaBat.  Maybe we need a C++Whip 
website (or C++Bat if Nick Parlante does it first.)

At UofA, our CS2-level is Java, and CS3 (at least in engineering) is 
C++.   The choice of language at level 3 is entirely up to the 
professor, and can change each year.  Most recently this has been 
Smalltalk, Java, now C++.

-- Dave


Bill Punch wrote:
> Regarding conformity. When we moved the introductory course (used by
> both CS majors and non-majors) to Python, one of the criteria was to
> ensure as little changes to the subsequent curricula as possible. This
> obviously made the change much more palatable to the faculty. Thus the
> following course, CS2, remained in C++.
>
> What was the effect of throwing Python students into a C++ class? My
> colleague Rich Enbody and I studied that question and reported on it
> last year at SIGCSE and Pycon. Bottom line, those that took a CS1 course
> in C++ and those that took a CS1 course in Python performed equally well
> in a CS2 course in C++. Furthermore, very little (if any) changes were
> required in topic coverage for the CS2 course.
>
> Basically, we assume that learning the concepts in Python translated
> well to C++, enabling those that carry on to learn C++ fairly easily.
> For those that quit at the CS1 stage, they were taught a language that
> was practical, useful, in their subsequent careers. We have ample
> anecdotal evidence to that.  I can provide the paper(s) to those
> interested.
>
>         >>>bill<<<
> 	"The Practice of Computing Using Python", available 3/1/10, 
>
>