Using HTML and JavaScript in introductory programming courses

Abstract

Students with little or no computer programming experience prior to entering college often have difficulty keeping up with the fast pace of college-level programming courses, even at the introductory level. For the past several years we have developed a curriculum for teaching fundamental language concepts to this population of individuals using the programmable features of a variety of software packages - thus giving students nontrivial results with relatively little syntactic "overhead." These "pre-programming" courses prepare students to succeed in subsequent language sequences, or they can serve to provide computer literacy credits for non-technical majors. Here we report on a course designed to exploit students' burgeoning interest in the World Wide Web (WWW), where we used HTML and JavaScript to teach programming concepts. These languages allow students at different skill levels to work side by side, learning common abstract ideas while implementing them at different levels of complexity, motivated by the rewarding and exciting interactive environment of the WWW.