Teaching programming to beginners - choosing the language is just the first step

A Brief History of Choosing First Programming Languages

“…Choosing the best computer language for introducing students to programming is often an emotional issue, leading to protracted debates over the years [2][3][4][5][6], e.g. 1976: "The selection of languages for use as pedagogical aids in the teaching of computer science is still a big issue at most universities."…”

Strategies for improving a Java-based, first year programming course

“…Students would therefore be "obliged" to, at the very least, attempt the weekly exercises and could work at a constant pace throughout the semester. This is supported by Duke et al [3] who agree that "…it is only through practice that a computer language, like any language, can be mastered". As may be seen in Table 1, the use of these exercises seemed to have a positive affect on student performance in Semesters 1 & 2, 2001.…”

“…In the last few years, the literature has been inundated with papers describing the difficult transition from the use of procedural to object-oriented languages in the teaching curriculum [3]. Many institutions have favoured the adoption of Java as their language of choice for their first year programming course.…”

ANNANN - Next Steps for Scaffolding Learning About Programs

“…[11,12]) the enormous cognitive leaps that we are asking our students to take. In the past when students were presented with a Basic Interpreter and experimented initially at the command line they slowly built up a model of what the computer was doing, whereas when we teach programming in Java, they have an enormous number of new concepts to understand within typically a few weeks.…”