Ah, I encountered this coming up when various friends were enrolling in computer science courses at Universities. Curriculum either followed an 'engineering' fo

Ah, I encountered this coming up when various friends were enrolling in computer science courses at Universities. Curriculum either followed an 'engineering' format, a more EE to CS bottom-up methodology, or they followed a top-down thought process. The reasoning for bottom-up is that there are fundamental aspects of the bottom up approach that truly teach the fundamentals that are necessary to become a great computer scientist/engineer/developer that I don't think any other method provides. But the top-down approach is appealing for one reason it seems: It's friendly. I would not be surprised if the retention rate for top-down was greater than the bottom-up. Using something like Python, Java, or whatever other conventional blackbox language is easy, comfortable, and immediately demonstrates to a student the power of programming. The practicality of what they learn is evident. Ideally, interest in this would continue down the line. 'This is really cool, but how does Python actually work?'. Unfortunately, it seems that most people, when presented with a working blackbox, don't care to see how it actually ticks. It takes a certain special someone to open up a watch, disassemble and reassemble it. So who knows how well the top-down carries over into learning the fundamentals. The bottom-up has the drawback of intimidating the meek. I certainly was one. I would have benefited from a top-down approach, as I am one of the types who like to see how something ’ticks’. So therein lies a trade off, would you sacrifice the known quality of your curriculum for better retention? Having someone learn something, is better than nothing, but that’s up to people like Prof. Dijkstra to decide. EDIT: spelling/coherency