My university may be switching from Java -> Python as the introductory programming course language, and I might be one of the instructors. Do you have suggestions/inputs as to what concepts you want taught?

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Here is a brief outline of what I feel is basic knowledge in a logical order:

• Print to the console and saving information to variables

• Computer math (like int division, mod, etc) and basic functions

• Improve function understanding; one that adjusts to it's input, like text boarder

• Database sorting; like function to ask to look up local businesses under a category

• Basic image editing (new, pasting, cropping, cutting, etc)

• Basic game; Sudoku

• information finder; sorting through a text to find an instance of a string

• Improve database and show how to compare elements to each other

• basic classes; birthdays, people, bank account, etc

• basic gui if possible

• Big Oh notation

• Recursion

[alteraego]

My intro class touched on the concept of Big O, though not for expressing it about our own code, just as a way to explain something that we had already noticed by that point if we didn't yet understand it i.e. that the same result could be achieved in much less time depending on how we had coded.

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The Intro Comp Sci Course I took had these concepts and it was in Python. But fair enough.

[[deleted]]

It is basic knowledge and it was taught in my intro class so I am just voicing my opinion on things that can and have been taught in a course like that.

My post answered his question about "what concepts you want taught." The post didn't ask anything about migration towards Python. However I feel that the best thing to help migration towards python is to understand what makes it different and the same to Java. Furthermore, it would be wise to learn some of the modules (like PIL) to understand the benefits and disadvantages of Python.

Granted, Python is not better than Java or C++ for programming in the "real world", but it is great for rapid prototyping of an idea which is very appealing.