Quote:
Originally Posted by criogod
The issue I am having in deciding which language or team should use this year is which is the most useful to learn. Many of the rookies are completely new to programming in general and for that reason I thought python is the easiest to get started with; however, I am not a huge fan of Java even though we have used it for the past few years. What are the general opinions on C?
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I have found that it's really easy to teach students python, certainly easier than C/C++.
However, the thing that is argubly most important is teaching your students how to properly think about problems, and break them down and solve them. Once they know how to think about the problems, the rest is "just syntax"*.
Another possibility is to write the code in multiple languages. Python and java aren't that dissimilar*, and once you figure out the hard part -- eg, how the robot code needs to interact with the hardware -- making it work in multiple languages is a pretty easy exercise IMHO. Seeing the same thing expressed in two different ways may help the student's comprehension.
* Ok, ok, I'm oversimplifying here..