Students' perceptions of python as a first programming language at wits
Ian Douglas Sanders, Sasha Langford · 2008
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.