I'd wager that most of the students you went to school with didn't self teach themselves programming before they went to University and probably didn't have a C

I'd wager that most of the students you went to school with didn't self teach themselves programming before they went to University and probably didn't have a Computer Science class in high school. It is difficult to understand the usefulness of a VCS when the longest project you have worked on amounted to 5 lines of code and you can't produce a fizzbuzz program, let alone understand the difference between a class and an object. If you were self taught, or have been away from the newbies for too long, you don't always remember what it was like when everything was new. Wrapping your head around how to construct a program that does what you want it to do (or even figuring out what you want a program to do in the first place) is a difficult hurdle to jump. The more extra hurdles you throw in front of them (git, debuggers, and even the compile step) make it harder. The earlier you require those hurdles to be jumped, the earlier you will filter out students. I believe most people can wrap their head around computational thinking and computer science and I would hate to lose them because of the tools. You don't need a VCS to understand classes & objects. You don't need a VCS to understand Big-O, you don't need a VCS to understand Trees or Graphs or Maps or Stacks or Queues. You don't need a VCS to understand Computer Science. And once you know what a Tree is... then I can explain to you how git works.