I'm am getting ready to complete the final revisions to our High School's career technical majors and I am currently researching for a potential computer science / programming major at our school.

The local colleges/universities are suggesting that I use Alice, since they are using Alice and Java. Most of my students have played some with Alice and are not impressed and I was thinking of teaching XNA or Python.

In college I was introduced to C++, then Assembly, and lastly Java.

Any suggestions on what I could teach to give them some logic and syntax experience but at the same time have some fun?

python.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Assembly! Get a PIC or MSP430 development kit and they can program robotics as a lab. It's much easier to understand things like pointers with an assembly background.

I agree with Vana. Python is easy to learn and is object oriented, not to mention open source so it will be cheap.

Java, the basics are pretty easy and you can do some simple stuff that would look good in a website.

I don't know much about Python, been programming for 25 years and never really run across it.

heh, lots of people use python almost exclusively.

the problem a lot of programmers have with python is that it enforces whitespace at compile time, so your code has to be properly indented.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Another interesting thing came up and was suggested that we apply for iPhone app programming.

So it seems most people like Python. Thanks for the replies... anyone have much experience or have any suggestions on materials you have used that have been easy to understand. (Keep in mind, this would be High School classroom with Juniors and Seniors)

Using this in my Web Design class in conjunction of teaching a little Dreamweaver and Photoshop.

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Web-Desi ... 186&sr=8-1

Thanks again all!

The oreilly book "learning python"

If you decide to go iphone app development, keep in mind the SDK only works on a mac.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Youtube, CERN, NASA, and Google all use python for a lot of their programming.

My classroom has 25 new iMac's with Bootcamp XP for other classes.

So, that wouldn't be a problem. However, i'm just not sure how well I could teach it due to lack of experience. Not sure what kind of training is available for the SDK.

Not very much -- you have to be a pretty experienced Mac programmer to code for the iphone. The SDK also costs to get access to, IIRC.

With the rising popularity of Android devices (G1, MyTouch 3g, Droid) you could always use that as a mobile development platform if you want to go that way, but the coding techniques are a bit more indepth.

Python is a good beginner language, as it makes syntactic sense.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Python it is!

Anyone have any experience with XNA or developing small games for XBOX?

Was thinking about doing this....

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/

/shrug, I wasn't belittling python, just never saw it where I was.
I've only had time to program in 8 or 9 languages, mostly C/C++ and Java proffesionally with a tad of HTML and XML

html and xml aren't programming, they're markup.

</pedantic>

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

That's an important distinction though. You can't issue commands with HTML. It has much more limited usefulness.

iPhone SDK IS 100% free, to put apps on your phone and to put apps on the store that costs 100 bucks. Also the simulator won't allow you to turn the phone sideways so if you have a program in landscape it probably won't turn out well.(Wow no pun intended)

You can teach them Objective-C (what iPhone uses) and make OSX Programs the difference is OSX allows a garbage collector and the iPhone doesn't.

If I remember right python is also a dynamically typed language which might confuse your students later when they move to a statically typed language. C++ is sort of a rough language to learn because the pointers and reference types can be confusing at first.

I always thought Java was easy to learn but wished I had learned C++ first. I am glad though because I knew Java so well, I programmed for the BlackBerry(J2ME which is almost the same thing as java) and that's what got me my job offers.

XNA is also free and fun, I play with it a little and you can download Visual Studio Express for free with XNA. The only reason I wouldn't do XNA is because there isn't as many good resources out there as with the other languages.

Google Open Source for Android Software? Used on more planforms than the iphone easier to attain I would think aswell.

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"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

I mentioned that cak -- android isn't exactly easy to program ;p

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]