Three Propositions on the Education in Programming Languages

Abstract

In the age of Big Data and artificial intelligence, programming languages are important for college students because the knowledge of programming can help them understand the modern technologies and make better decisions about the technologies. Nonetheless, programming language courses are not popular among college students. To attract more students, several suggestions have been made such as computational thinking (Wing, 2006) or application of the concept with easy programming approaches(Lye & Koh, 2014). These approaches, however, overlook the nature of programming (e.g., programming is about understanding computers). In this paper, a straight approach with three propositions on the education in programming languages is suggested. It is also proposed that a student's awareness of the propositions is related to the student's successful completion of computer programs (i.e., coding).