[burfog]

Scheme is deadly boring. You'd lose a lot of students that way. Starting with bits and bytes and hardware would be pretty goddamn fun, I think.

I first really got into things with assembly language for DOS. It was interesting to directly control the IRQ controller, real-time clock, interval timer, and keyboard interface. These were all motherboard chips that could be messed with.

Years later I passed a mandatory Scheme class. I tolerated it to get my degree, but I was furious. I handed in just enough assignments to pass the class. If the degree had started with Scheme or required very much of it, I would have found something less miserable to do with my life.

[henrikschroder]

Another positive aspect of starting off with Scheme was that it leveled the class out, it removed the edge that all the self-taught programmers thought they would have over the people who hadn't really done much programming. Everyone was pretty much equally clueless. Very refreshing.

[lbatx]

You make an interesting (unsupported) assertion here. You, who find talking to an IRQ controller, real-time clock, etc. interesting, find Scheme boring, therefore others (who may not share your interests in such details) will also find it boring. Bit of a logical fallacy there...

[acbart]

I've run a lot of surveys of introductory students trying to find what topics are more or less interesting to them. A part of my dissertation was committed to it, actually.

At this point, I'm more or less certain you'll rarely find situations where you have a mass-appealing context. One students' dream context is another students Most Boring Possible. You're probably better off having many diverse contexts and hit all the MUSIC guidelines (eMpower students, Useful to their long/short term goals, make students Successful, make it situationally and domain-based Interesting, and give people opportunities to demonstrate that they Care about each other).

[aldanor]

Agreed.

I recall, in high school, we were writing a disassembler for a custom weird assembly language which was written by one of the school's graduates a few years prior to that... and we had to use this assembler as a language of choice :) That's high school! And it was quite fun. These days, many CS grads/post-grads know tensorflow and other flashy high level stuff while having very vague understanding of how things actually work at the lowest level (source: interviews).