How Should I Teach a Basic Programming Course?

riverman writes "I have been 'provisioned' at the school where I work to teach a new Computer Science/Programming course. I'm supposed to be teaching everything from the very-very basics (i.e. where that myspace thing is in your computer monitor, and how it knows who your friends are) to the easy-advanced (i.e. PHP classes and Python/Google App Engine). I'm an experienced programmer, but I'm not sure where to start — I could easily assume that my students know something basic they don't. Are there any resources on the internet that could help me find a solid curriculum? What are your suggestions?" I'm sure many of us have gone through intro-level programming courses of some sort; what are some things your teacher or professor did that worked well, and what didn't work at all?

Comments

Re:Task based learning

[Brian Gordon]

And don't forget- DON'T TEACH IN JAVA. It's a very powerful platform that is perfect for education, but it's slow, bloated, and unusable in the Real World. Teach your students something they can actually use and they'll be thankful, even if it's a little harder to learn pointer arithmetic, etc. Also Java doesn't do brutally elegant algorithms like C does, and when students get to an algorithms class they're going to be weirded out

Re:Task based learning

[Blakey Rat]

I'm not going to bother making all the same points I've made in other posts on this thread. Click my username and read them if you like, but please, please if you're going to reply to something I've written, please bother to check the other things I've written so you don't waste your (and my) time.

Or, in short: you've utterly missed the point.