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Resources for Teaching C to High School Students?
mctk asks: "I'm a high school teacher who, disappointed with the lack of computer science in school, has promised to teach a few motivated students programming after school. As an enthusiastic novice with three semesters of C under my belt and a few side projects worth of experience, I feel competent yet ignorant. I would really appreciate suggestions for resources on C that are written to be accessible to high school students and contain lots of ideas for activities. Perhaps you've had success with a series of books that spans beginner to advanced? Do you have any activities you would recommend? How would you map a student's first year of coding? I welcome any and all suggestions. While we're on the subject, is there a brace style that is most standard in the industry?"
Don't try to teach the language, any more than you teach someone how to use a pen when writing.
Teach the mentality, the methodology of problem solving.
Teach basic algorithms, data structures and coding theory - give them an understanding of where the libraries they are suing will come from.
More importantly for modern world working teach colaberation, give them a real group project to do, each of them writing different interfaces or different parts of an interface for a whole program (something like a simple game such as tron is ideal for this)
By doing all of this the language becomes almost incidental - which is really what you want, who knows what the demand for C, C++, javam C# will be in a few years time, but learning the right methodology and colaberative practices will stand them in good stead for years to come.
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I disagree, I think Python is a spectacular first language. When you're teaching kids to program it helps to keep them away from the nitty gritty at first to keep their interest. Having to learn a lot of foreign concepts before being able to program something fun is what turns a lot of people off to programming, python gives the instant gratification but is also powerful and flexible enough to teach the concepts of programming. Once a student is in the programming mindset you can move them on to more complex/powerful languages like C/C++ and Java.