Students' Perceptions of Python as a First Programming Language at Wits

摘要

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 in a functional style. In addition, Python is a "real-world language" - it is acknowledged as a good language for scientific applications - and we thought this might result in the students being more positive about the language they were using. We thus made a partial move to Python in 2005 and used only Python in 2006 [1] and 2007. 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.