Introduction to programming part 1 of ?

Are you teaching an introduction to programming class? One of the main goals should not be to teach how to create a computer program, you should teach students basic skills that, once built on top of each other, will allow a student to create programs in the future. Your main goal should be to gain a students interest, and to make them see how easy it is to accomplish something, even if it is not especially useful.

For example:

First class: Create an HTML document that has the students name

This involves no more than opening a text editor, such as notified, having the student type their name, and saving it as an .html document.

Now that the students have built something the first day, and they see how easy it is to create a webpage (although a very basic one) you can build on this.

In the following classes, add to the original webpage. You can: Create a link to their favorite website, change the background color, make bold, italicized, and different sizes of font, create a numbered and unordered list, center, and right justify your text. Most of the above commands only require one opening and one closing tag.

If the students are ambitious, you could lead them down the road of creating tables.

If you took the advice from my previous article, and have access to a networked classroom of Linux computers, you can create a webserver on one of the central computers, which will become a part of the instruction later in this blog, or perhaps in another blog, depending on how much I feel like typing tonight.

I will leave the next programming language up to you. I am partial to php and Perl, but you could also teach a flurry of other languages, such as python or basic. The one thing I would stress is to stay away from a visual programming tool, so that the students will focus more on the programming than making nice gui's.

The idea of this second programming language is to create a smart program, that can handle conditional statements, and loops.