I guess I have no idea what I'm talking about here as I honestly don't know anything about teaching and my own experience is atypical (around 8 years programmin

I guess I have no idea what I'm talking about here as I honestly don't know anything about teaching and my own experience is atypical (around 8 years programming by the time I started college). So my comment is basically noise I guess. As long as you eventually require them to understand how things actually work and that code execution, memory management, etc isn't black magic, they should be fine.