>>Actually, after further thought, I wouldn't even suggest a language right away. I'd teach them the concepts of logic, breaking down a problem to simper ones, then putting the solutions at work individually and then making these individual solutions work together.
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>I partly agree, at least. I think would-be CS students should get theur hands dirty right away with coding & interface (with maybe BASIC & HTML good for newbies, as I said elsewhere). But simultaneously, some more theoretical course work is good, also.
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>I was once a CIS major, before I moved to math & statistics, and our first year we had a 2-semester required course called 'Discrete Structures', kind of a meaningless name, but it was full of Logic, Number Theory, Algorithmic Theory, Design Theory, and other goodies that were extremely useful in both CS and math...maybe the best course I ever had in my educational process...

One of my favorite courses in school was the advanced philosophy course called simply "Logic". It broke down what many take for granted, and forced you to think about the realtionship of different truths- and how you could or could not derive one truth from another. Many times what I learned in that class helped me to greatly simplify an overly complex IF/THEN/ELSE structure.