Making computer programming fun and accessible

Learning to program requires much hard work and dedication. Most students in introductory programming courses struggle to grasp programming concepts in general. Universities in the US, Canada, and elsewhere have reported withdrawal, failure, and D-grade rates approaching 50 percent in introductory computer programming courses. To address these problems, we recently designed and successfully offered a revolutionary one-semester course that integrates the use of HTML, JavaScript, and Java. This approach departs markedly from using a single general-purpose programming language such as Java or C++.