[hamolton]

I don't know of any of my peers that took a course that heavily relied on a textbook; it feels like most university intro CS courses spend most of the time commitment in lectures and problem sets. I think many would agree that you learn the most doing homework.

It's been common for a decade now to recommend beginners on the internet looking for an intro to CS the course Harvard CS50. The course has attracted criticism for be overwhelming for a single semester, as it requires submitting assignments in Scratch, C, Python, SQL, and HTML/JS. However, I think it, like other well-acclaimed intro to CS courses do teach problem solving in via hand-held labs and problem sets. Perhaps its prevalence suggests the course is influential in the way CS is taught, but outside of Yale copying the course, I'm not sure.

I think the problem sets in CS 50 are effective for teaching problem solving. Looking at examples of problem sets for the most recent semester (I did the Fall 2012, so it's changed a bit) there is...

- making an animation or game in Scratch which must have have a loop, condition, and variable - printing pyramids of # characters - caesar encryption - ballot counting - implementing bitmap image filters - a spell checker - writing SQL queries against a database of movies - writing the frontend of a website - writing a basic full-stack web app

I guess the main difference between the course and the post's proposal is that it doesn't follow a single narrative, so when you apply concepts in your head is only after the first introduction.

Looking on other resources I encountered at Georgia Tech, I remember both the intro to CS class I saw others take and the cool, interactive intro to CS textbook Mark Guzdial showed my class How to Think Like a Computer Scientist [1]. They both start with python turtle graphics towards the beginning to teach variables and loops before venturing off into other concepts. I think the first half of Automate the Boring stuff with Python actually faces the issues the author cites before diving into common applications in the second half; I do wonder now many working professionals learned from this text which I've generally liked at a glance. I suppose the most influential intro to CS materials are for AP CS A, although I'm not familiar with the course.

[1] https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published//thinkcspy/inde...