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Much debate surrounds the choice of programming language for teaching computer science. Our institution's replacement of a visual programming language (RAPTOR) with a textual programming language (Python) provided a novel opportunity to explore the impacts of the programming language on students' learning and perception of programming. We conducted a randomized comparative study that involved 1083 students who took our introductory computing course in the 2019-2020 academic year. A unique aspect of our work stems from our course being a general education requirement; thus, our study includes students with a wide variety of backgrounds and majors. This report presents a comparison of student performance in each version of the course, including the impact of the programming language on underrepresented groups, and provides a summary of student feedback. Our results show that students in our introductory course performed similarly overall, but overwhelmingly perceived Python to be more valuable.
Coffman et al. (Thu,) studied this question.