> This was not always the case for our participants, who wrote queries with synonyms of the correct words, leading to queries that will not be executed.
This shows that those participants lack very basic foundational knowledge. It doesn't surprise me, because in my experience all programming courses that taught SQL early have been terrible.
Nobody who already has a basic understanding of computer science would make this mistake.
On the flipside there's really no point of devoting much time to teaching SQL later, because once you have a good understanding of data structures and algorithms, it is rather easy to make educated guesses of what is happening behind the scenes in a database - and you would have no trouble of teaching yourself SQL if necessary at some point.
Not to mention that teaching databases before what makes up their implementation is teaching software development in precisely the opposite way it is practiced: the composition of lower level concepts into higher level abstractions.
Last but not least, when you're teaching future software engineers, at the end you don't want them to just say "I can use this", you want them to say "I could build this". Teaching SQL early smells like surrender.
This shows that those participants lack very basic foundational knowledge. It doesn't surprise me, because in my experience all programming courses that taught SQL early have been terrible.
Nobody who already has a basic understanding of computer science would make this mistake.
On the flipside there's really no point of devoting much time to teaching SQL later, because once you have a good understanding of data structures and algorithms, it is rather easy to make educated guesses of what is happening behind the scenes in a database - and you would have no trouble of teaching yourself SQL if necessary at some point.
Not to mention that teaching databases before what makes up their implementation is teaching software development in precisely the opposite way it is practiced: the composition of lower level concepts into higher level abstractions.
Last but not least, when you're teaching future software engineers, at the end you don't want them to just say "I can use this", you want them to say "I could build this". Teaching SQL early smells like surrender.