Does Scheme enhance an introductory programming course?

Abstract

There is no consensus within the Computer Science community as to which programming language or languages ought to be used in introductory courses. In recent years a substantial contingent has proposed the use of Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, as a candidate for "Best First Language"; however, despite the articles touting success with this approach, there have been no empirical studies comparing the results of using Scheme versus other languages. This paper is a first step towards collecting data that might answer this question. We compare two pre-major courses at a four-year college, one taught using a structured version of Basic, the other taught using Scheme. A survey was used to compare student attitudes towards computer science and programming at the end of the course. While the survey was too small to provide statistically significant answers, there were indications that Scheme may in fact do a better job of capturing and holding students' interest in Computer Science.