Teaching programming by immersion, reading and writing

In the introductory programming course at UMass Boston we teach Java™ by immersion. Instead of starting with the traditional "Hello, world", students read, modify and write about a 200 line bank ATM simulation program consisting of two cooperating classes. By the end of the semester they are working with a 3500-line application that models a command line shell and a hierarchical file system. Our students learn programming the same way one best learns a spoken language: by immersion. We focus immediately on questions of interfaces, architecture and design. We spend little time on syntactic details, which students simply absorb as they need them. So in this first course, students get a taste of and an appreciation for what real programming is all about.