MY FIRST PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE

It was year 2014, sometime in the month of November. I had just moved successfully to 200 level and I was ecstatic; well its not easy to be out of the list of students tagged ‘freshers’ in the great University of Benin. That morning my friends and I had decided to go do our manual course registration as this would serve as a guideline for the online registration. And so, we headed to see our course adviser, fast forward to 20mins later we were out. The courses on the list were mostly borrowed courses and few departmental courses, no big deal we all thought, little did we know that one of those courses was out for us; Introduction to Pascal Programming, what we all knew as the almighty CSC 211.
From day one everybody agreed there was something wrong with that course, it was all theoretical, nothing practical, but it was a course we needed to pass in order to move on, so like sheep’s being led to its slaughter we all followed blindly. Each class was preceded by a long session of cramming. We had to put all the lines of code we saw in our textbook into our heads. I still remember the code for ‘Hello World’

program HelloWorld(output):
begin
write (‘Hello, World!’)
end.

The annoying thing was we had lots of senior colleagues who were having that course as a carryover, and to think it was not in any way related to Animal and Environmental Biology yet we had to pass it to graduate. Long story short, my class found a way of getting the knowledge we needed to pass, and we did pass, had a lot of A’s compared to other set, just few persons had to retake that exam from my set.
Pascal is said to be a procedural programming language designed originally for teaching programming languages. But it has since been replaced by the likes of C++ and Java, yet its still being taught in our tertiary institutions without a practical back up, I must say.
This was my first experience with programming and for me, it was not a pleasant one, I wouldn’t be wrong if I went further to say, “it was not a pleasant experience for every student who took that course”.