Usually, students don't really need IDEs or source control in order to learn the basics. They write short programs that require more thinking than typing/editing.
It's only for bigger projects that they start to be useful, and when students reach that stage, they don't have any problem to use them. Actually, IDEs can be problematic for beginners as they may hide things you'd like the students to learn (e.g. compiling from the command line).
> Usually, students don't really need IDEs or source control in order to learn the basics. They write short programs that require more thinking than typing/editing.
Only at the very beginning where answers are less than 10 lines.
After that, it's surprisingly useful.
> It's only for bigger projects that they start to be useful, and when students reach that stage, they don't have any problem to use them.
Oh, your naivety is touching. In my senior level class, I expected that the program would end up being about 2000 lines of code by the end. I still needed to give the IDE lecture as people were struggling with editing (foolishly, I didn't give it immediately because I thought like you did).
> Actually, IDEs can be problematic for beginners as they may hide things you'd like the students to learn (e.g. compiling from the command line).
So wrong. The command line is the LAST place I want a beginner. I don't even want most intermediate students at the command line. The "UNIX lectures" were one of the most hated things in the CS department.
In fact, quite a few of the students never compiled anything themselves. They submitted it to my automated tester via source control which would compile and test it immediately.
Would I have liked them to compile and test themselves? Absolutely. However, I'm not there to teach infrastructure so I'll take whatever works and lets me get on with teaching the actual information from class.
It's only for bigger projects that they start to be useful, and when students reach that stage, they don't have any problem to use them. Actually, IDEs can be problematic for beginners as they may hide things you'd like the students to learn (e.g. compiling from the command line).