Introduction to algorithms and problem solving

Language and paradigm choice for teaching computer programming is an on-going debate. We have been using Visual Basic for the introductory course and C++ for the advanced course. Unfortunately, many of our students struggle in the introductory course. We are currently re-engineering our degree. While our introductory course should ideally be language-independent, we feel that students will gain a better understanding if their algorithms are executable. Therefore, we have decided to use the procedural paradigm, with C++ as the implementation language for this course.