Introductory programming languages in higher education

A growing number of students enrolled in introductory programming courses is experiencing difficulties grasping the basic concepts and algorithms, which in turn manifest themselves in their poor exam results. While determining the cause of these difficulties, we found that they are not unique to Croatian universities, but rather a worldwide phenomenon. Focusing on, in our findings the leading cause: the choice of the introductory programming language, we have perceived that today's students require constant motivation which tends to be absent in languages having a complex syntax. In this paper we describe our experiences in using the C, QBasic and Python programming languages in introductory programming courses. In order to better examine the problems, we conducted a two part research with the students. The first part focused on group work with programming assignments using the three aforementioned languages, and the second part was a follow up research where we examined students' experiences and knowledge retainment after a relatively short period of time.