In my opinion this comes down to what you want to accomplish. If you let people play with web applications they will most likely get more stuck with html and CSS (and maybe even Javascript) than actually learning how to program. I think that most universities want students to teach students how to code - learning how to do web programming can come later. (doing web development well with CSS/Javascript/HTML isn't a simple task, I'd say that it takes a couple of years to become good at it if you do it full time)
This was at least how my first programming course was trying to do at the University of Oslo. In later courses programming concepts was teached - data structures and algorithms. Some other course tought us functional programming (we started with OO) and even glanced at Prolog and some later courses tought us about complexity of algorithms (things like traveling salesman problem, O notation, NPC aso). We didn't really focus on any framework or any other techniques. Sure we knew about the web and in some courses we were encouraged to write our own home pages even though it was not required. ...now though if you want to go down the route with developing for the web, why not teach students Javascript? In this way you can still learn programming techniques (using functional programming) and you also teach them a useful skill in process. KEB -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
