NDLI: Students' perceptions of python as a first programming language at wits

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Langford, Sasha Sanders, Ian D.
Abstract	The first year curriculum at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) is a breadth-first curriculum where students are introduced to a variety of topics in Computer Science (see Sanders and Mueller [5] for details). As part of the course the students are expected to come to terms with a number of basic algorithms and data structures which they are required to implement. When the curriculum was designed we chose Scheme as the implementation language. One reason for doing so was because the main entrance requirement for our course is a solid mathematics background as evidenced by good marks at school level. Our students thus have a good understanding of functions and we felt that Scheme?s functional style would make it accessible to all of our students. Another reason for choosing Scheme was because it is a language which would be new to all of our students. Scheme was well received by those students who had never programmed before and proved to be a good language for meeting our teaching objectives but there was resistance to the language from the students who could already program as they considered it a waste of time to learn a language which was not (as they believed) used in the real world [3]. In addition, the use of Scheme did not really reduce the performance gap between the students with and without prior programming experience [2]. Python has been found to be a good first language for both experienced and inexperienced users [4] and its simple syntax and support of different programming paradigms seemed to make it an attractive option for our first year course. We believed that using Python would still allow us to meet our educational objectives ? it would be easily accessible to those students who had never programmed before and would support our approach of formulating algorithms Python has been found to be a good first language for both experienced and inexperienced users [4] and its simple syntax and support of different programming paradigms seemed to make it an attractive option for our first year course. We believed that using Python would still allow us to meet our educational objectives ? it would be easily accessible to those students who had never programmed before and would support our approach of formulating algorithms In late 2007 we did a survey to assess the first year students? impressions of Python. The students were asked to indicate agreement, disagreement or neutrality to a number of questions about the use of Python. 55 students completed the survey ? 27 of these had no prior programming experience and 28 had programmed before. The Wilcoxon signed rank test was used to test the hypotheses that both groups believed that Python was a good first year language. The results show strong evidence that the students feel that Python is a suitable language. There are. however, still some students with prior programming experience who are resistant to new languages.
Starting Page	365
Ending Page	365
Page Count	1
File Format	PDF
ISSN	00978418
DOI	10.1145/1597849.1384407
Journal	ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (SGCS)
Volume Number	40
Issue Number	3
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	1978-02-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	First programming language Student perceptions
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
6	Contents and Copyright Issues	Queries related to content curation and copyright issues	content@ndl.gov.in
7	National Digital Library of India Club (NDLI Club)	Queries related to NDLI Club formation, support, user awareness program, seminar/symposium, collaboration, social media, promotion, and outreach	clubsupport@ndl.gov.in
8	Digital Preservation Centre (DPC)	Assistance with digitizing and archiving copyright-free printed books	dpc@ndl.gov.in
9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in

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