When teaching C, is it better to teach arrays befo

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For those of you with curriculum development experience: what is the best strategy regarding arrays?

I have seen some schools that teach arrays after variables and control structures, often before even teaching functions. This allows teaching of some rudimentary algorithms, etc. However, it then brings the problem of how to pass arrays to functions, so it is necessary to go back to arrays pointers are taught and patch things up.

Another option is to go from variables and control structures to functions, and then teach pointers, and once you have pointers, teach arrays from scratch, and then use that to get to dynamic memory allocation.

To me the second option makes more sense, because unlike simple variables, with arrays it is easy to "go out of bounds", but students who did not yet learn about memory and pointers may not understand what lies outside these bounds.

However, I'm interested to know what others think.

Answer 1

You should teach arrays first, because they exist in almost any other language, and are easier to understand. Pointers, or some aspects of pointers, build on what was learned about arrays. This is the organic order, imho, and how I learned it way back when.

Answer 2

I teach pointers before I worry about arrays. However, typically, the students I see, they have already been exposed to arrays in their first CS class in some other language. However, even I were teaching C in the first CS class, I'd do pointers before arrays and describe arrays in terms of pointers. Just because it is fashionable these days to think "no one will ever need or want to know how computers actually work" doesn't mean it's true.