As a high school student (with programming experience outside of CS), I can tell that this doesn't change much. It took me about 20minutes to realize that every

As a high school student (with programming experience outside of CS), I can tell that this doesn't change much. It took me about 20minutes to realize that everything in scheme is just a list, literally everything. Using recursion everywhere seemed absurd to me but I wrapped my head around that pretty quickly while the others were still struggling with the basic syntax. List manipulation seemed hard to everybody but it quickly made sense to after understanding how lists are structured and what car and cdr actually do (read the value of the first pointer vs second). The good thing about scheme is that, after understanding the basics, it seems more natural to most students. I help one of my class study for his final exams and he understands recursion way better then for loops and iterators in Java. The syntax is also more minimalistic compared to Java which helps a lot (I did not think the syntax would be the hard part in Java). I don't even bother teaching him when to use private, public and protected. I just tell him to use protected for the variables (because it is often used in the final exams despite the fact that l variables should always be private in Java) and public for the methods