One thing that seems to miss in this discussion, is the fact that programming languages are just a means to create software that actually does something. Assuming that you would like your students to find some practical value from you lessons, I would suggest trying to come up with a curriculum that supports just that. In my opinion, that would mean setting up a number of relevant excercises that create a challenging environment four your students to find out why and when Java and Python are good solutions for software development. These exercises could be used as a means to have your students discuss their various approaches to solving the given problems, so that they become aware of the pros and cons of their own solutions and those of others.
In my opinion, learning a programming language means learning the concepts behind them - not just the syntax. For that, we have IDEs. The computer is your friend when it comes to following APIs, creating loop constructions and all that. However, how we choose to use the language to solve our software development challenges is up to us software developers. I suggest you focus your curriculum on supporting just that, and use every tool you can to help your students focusing on the actual concepts of software development and take the trivial, boring stuff out of their hands. If they choose to be professional software developers after they graduate, they will use IDEs anyway (or get fired;) so they might as well do so from the start.
I wouldn't really worry if your students get to understand all about compilers, Java byte code, etc. I don't even know myself if the Java Virtual Machine I am currently using is an interpreter or a Just-In-Time compiler - and I have 10 years of Java software development experience. If my code is too slow I make it faster, that's all there is to it.
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One thing that seems to miss in this discussion, is the fact that programming languages are just a means to create software that actually does something. Assuming that you would like your students to find some practical value from you lessons, I would suggest trying to come up with a curriculum that supports just that. In my opinion, that would mean setting up a number of relevant excercises that create a challenging environment four your students to find out why and when Java and Python are good solutions for software development. These exercises could be used as a means to have your students discuss their various approaches to solving the given problems, so that they become aware of the pros and cons of their own solutions and those of others. In my opinion, learning a programming language means learning the concepts behind them - not just the syntax. For that, we have IDEs. The computer is your friend when it comes to following APIs, creating loop constructions and all that. However, how we choose to use the language to solve our software development challenges is up to us software developers. I suggest you focus your curriculum on supporting just that, and use every tool you can to help your students focusing on the actual concepts of software development and take the trivial, boring stuff out of their hands. If they choose to be professional software developers after they graduate, they will use IDEs anyway (or get fired ;) so they might as well do so from the start.
I wouldn't really worry if your students get to understand all about compilers, Java byte code, etc. I don't even know myself if the Java Virtual Machine I am currently using is an interpreter or a Just-In-Time compiler - and I have 10 years of Java software development experience. If my code is too slow I make it faster, that's all there is to it.