Teaching an Introductory Programming Language in a General Education Course

A department of computer science (CS) has faced a peculiar situation regarding their selection of introductory programming course. This course is a required course for the students enrolled in the CS program and is a prerequisite to their other advanced programming courses. At the same time, the course can be considered a general education course and may be taken by students from other majors as well. Both student populations require the department to teach the course at different levels of depth. CS students need it be covered in more depth to prepare them for their upper level programming courses. At the same time, students from other majors who are taking it as part of their general education course will not be interested in this level of depth. Added to this is the fact that taking a first programming course is considered difficult to most students. Thus many factors are considered for the selection of a programming language for this course. After further experience and additional technological development, the department redesigned their course and curriculum in order to provide most effective solution to this dilemma. The experience of this department in reaching this solution along with the relevant literature reviews are discussed in this paper.