When students are not programmers

We present our experience from using Python to teach programming to high school students (aged 15). We selected Python as it is regarded to be a language suitable for teaching, while at the same time it has the advantage of being a production language, widely used around the world. Our experience shows that the success of a language in a professional setting does not predict success as a teaching tool. Based on our observations we offer some general conclusions on programming languages for teaching.

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