Dear Mr. Ehlers, It was the College Board's decision to switch from Pascal to C++ that lead me to Python in the first place, since I found C++ to be an absolutely awful first language (the College Board eventually agreed, and C++ was soon replaced by Java as the language for the AP exam).
Since you say that "My high school is not turning out programmers; we are just trying to expose students to computer science and programming and to help them think logically through problems..." there is no good reason to be using C++ in your curriculum. C/C++ will be part of a college CS program, but it need not and should not be part of a high school one, particularly one with the goals you describe. It would be interesting to find out why those that are telling you that you "need to offer C++" think this is the case. My guess is they are motivated by some idea of the "prevalence of C++ in the market" and are completely ignoring any pedagogical issues involved. I would suggest you reconsider the decision to use VB before Python. Python is a better language for learning programming ideas than VB is, and most high school VB courses I have seen really are just introductions to the Visual Studio environment and have *very* little to do with programming. Alan Gauld has an on-line web tutorial, "Learning to Program" (http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld/) which makes some use of Basic as well as Python. If you have an instructor who is really interested in doing so, I think a parallel approach (looking at solutions to problems in both Python and VB and comparing and contrasting the language features) would be more fruitful than a VB first approach. Hope this helps. On Thu, 2005-02-24 at 20:39 -0600, Joseph Ehlers wrote: > Now some people are telling me that we need to offer C++. Help! I > donât think I can fit more into the curriculum and do justice to any > one language. One of our goals is to offer AP Computer Science Java > in the future and we want the students adequately prepared for that > language. What is the opinion of the Python Edu-Sig community? > Should we offer C++? And if so, where would it fit into the > curriculum? > > > Joe Ehlers -- Jeffrey Elkner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Open Book Project <http://ibiblio.org/obp> _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
