Learning to Program: What Makes it Difficult?

Course Description

In this seminar we explore the past and current research into teaching computer programming.  Students review past approaches for the introduction of programming, as well as explore and experiment with a wide variety of current learning environments such as Alice, Scratch, and others. Designed for students with no programming background, the course introduces various programming paradigms, the notion of algorithms, algorithmic efficiency, culminating with an introduction to programming in Java.